Neskantaga First Nation's only health-care space is flooded, prompting calls for quick help from Ottawa

Sarah Law · CBC News

· Posted: Apr 15, 2025 4:36 PM EDT | Last Updated: 4 minutes ago

The main of Neskantaga First Nation is calling connected the national authorities to rapidly assistance acceptable up a mobile wellness centre successful the distant assemblage owed to flooding that has closed its nursing station.

Chief Gary Quisses and the northwestern Ontario community's assembly declared a authorities of exigency connected Sunday aft health-care unit noticed water seeping from the walls and a beardown odor of fuel.

The First Nation, wherever less than 400 radical unrecorded astir 450 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay, has besides been under Canada's longest boil-water advisory for 30 years.

"It's our lifeline, our nursing station," Quisses said during a virtual quality league connected Tuesday. "I don't person [a] due aesculapian installation successful the assemblage close now. We person a tiny interim place, but that's not bully enough."

The impermanent solution is offering health-care assessments successful an 8-by-10-foot room, said Neskantaga's wellness director, Sharon Sakanee.

"They're not getting the afloat entree of the services that they request each day," Sakanee said of her patients. "That's causing a batch of intelligence wellness issues."

Providing constricted services successful a tiny abstraction means nurses are incapable to entree indispensable equipment, specified arsenic the X-ray instrumentality oregon oxygen tanks, she said. It's besides causing concerns astir diligent confidentiality.

CBC News reached retired to Indigenous Services Canada and volition update this communicative erstwhile there's a response.

Neskantaga is not the lone assemblage successful the portion facing flooding issues.

Community evacuations are taking spot in Kashechewan First Nation further east.

Flooding is an ongoing situation successful Kashechewan owed to crystal breakup connected the Albany River. The national authorities has promised to determination the full assemblage of 2,000 radical to a caller determination by 2029.

'It's precise hard for america to unrecorded similar this'

Neskantaga's nursing presumption was built successful 1994, said assemblage subordinate and advisor Roy Moonias. Spring flooding often impacts the building, but not to this extent.

The precise crushed for the substance odor hasn't been determined.

But Carla Chisel of Matawa Technical Services said substance spills are an ongoing contented successful the community, and the odour astatine the nursing presumption is presently being attributed to mechanical issues bringing fumes wrong the building.

There are precocious rates of diabetes and different chronic wellness conditions successful Neskantaga, resulting successful galore assemblage members requiring regular care, Quisses said.

If the authorities fails to supply an contiguous solution, helium said, the assemblage would see arranging evacuations for its astir susceptible members.

Wayne Moonias, erstwhile main of Neskantaga, said the community's needs volition go much terrible the longer it takes to get a mobile health-care centre successful place.

"[It is] a precise susceptible concern close present successful the community," Wayne Moonias said. "It's precise scary to deliberation that if idiosyncratic is successful distress that requires, for example, resuscitation, that that whitethorn not beryllium available."

But with the lasting bequest of the boil-water advisory successful place, Roy Moonias said, the assemblage lacks religion successful the government's committedness to Neskantaga.

"The authorities doesn't attraction astir autochthonal people," Roy Moonias said. 

"If this was to hap successful an municipality mounting oregon municipality, contiguous actions, contiguous measures [would beryllium taken]."

Quisses besides echoed the frustrations shared by Roy Moonias, saying helium hopes the national authorities provides a quicker effect to the nursing presumption situation than it has to the boil-water advisory.

"It's precise hard for america to unrecorded similar this," Quisses said.