Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I just enjoyed a nice glass of water before me here and I know many Members did the same thing. The reason why I felt comfortable drinking this water is I know it was tested. I knew there was some decorum in the water. I knew there was some scientific value in the water that I drank. Unfortunately, upon review of MACA’s 2010 GNWT Report on Drinking Water, which I made reference to today in my Member’s statement, my spidey sense in terms of my chemistry background, a lot of warning bells went off. I was very much alarmed to know that we weren’t, as a government, enforcing the very set of guidelines and standards for our testing.
As I mentioned in my Member’s statement, many communities, upon forensic review, haven’t been tested, some of them since 2009 and some of them haven’t been tested since 2011. That said, I have a question for the MACA Minister in terms of what happened to these missing test results. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. The Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs, Mr. McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m not sure if there are missing test results. If there are no test results there, these may not have been done to begin with and that’s something we will work with the communities on.
There are four departments involved in this and we do try to work with the communities very closely to ensure that they do the testing. Under the terms of the water licence that they apply for, they do have to send a yearly sample to the federal government for the lab testing. If they fail to do that, then the environmental health officer would issue a boil water advisory; not because the water is unsafe to drink, because he doesn’t know what’s in it, but because it hasn’t been tested. So we continue to try to work with the communities to ensure they have quality drinking water in the communities and we work with the other departments to ensure this happens. Thank you.
I appreciate the Minister’s response. However, I guess the question is: Can we really expect these testing results to occur? I’m not hearing a timeline so that the residents of the Northwest Territories feel assured that their water is at least being tested for chemicals.
As I said in my response before, communities are required to send annual testing samples to the federal lab. I’m assuming that most communities are doing this. There are probably a few where that needs to be picked up on a bit.
Like I said, we are working with the communities. It’s a lot of responsibility that the communities have now to ensure that there is safe drinking water. For the most part all communities are doing a pretty good job. I mean, we have to obviously monitor the situation, make sure the proper testing is done so residents feel that their water is of good quality. We’ll continue to follow up on that and work with communities. Thank you.
I thank the Minister for his response. Earlier today we heard from the Premier about his working towards a transboundary water management agreement for the Mackenzie River Basin, an initiative I know that everyone in this room would agree as something important. That said, without the proper chemical testing, what is the government using as a baseline for moving forward?
The communities do treat the water that comes through, for those with water treatment plants. They do treat the water. Travelling to all communities in the Northwest Territories and having drank the water in pretty well every community, I know the water quality is pretty good, because if it’s not good, then obviously we would have more pressing issues to deal with. So the testing is there, for the most part. There may have been some slippage in some parts, but we are working with the communities to try to rectify that. We have training programs for water plant operators that MACA runs through the School of Community Government and we’ve had good uptake in that. So we are working.
The quality of water in the Northwest Territories is obviously a concern, but as far as we’re concerned, the water quality in the communities is pretty good and is being monitored. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Dolynny.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Again, thank you to the Minister. As I said earlier, there are four territorial departments involved with the quality of testing of our water: Health and Social Services, ENR, MACA and Public Works. So the question to the Minister is: Who out of these four will be reporting back to this House in terms of the quality of water testing that is missing in this report? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
I will follow up with the other departments and see what we can come up with and see who’s responsible at the end of the day to report the findings to this House. I can assure the Member again that we are working with the communities to improve the quality of water and make sure all the water is treated regularly and sampled regularly. If it’s not sampled, we do try to work with the communities to ensure they get their samples out for testing for chemicals to the federal lab. Again, I will commit to the Member that I will follow up with my colleagues and we’ll find out who would be reporting results back to this House. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The honourable Member for Frame Lake, Ms. Bisaro.
