The Council’s Water and Climate Campaigner, Jessica Cheung, appeared yesterday at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs. She shared the Council’s views on Bill C-37, the First Nations Clean Water Act.
You can view the full session here, and read her remarks below.
Thank you, Chair, and members of the committee.
My name is Jessica Cheung. I am the Water and Climate Campaigner with the Council of Canadians. I am speaking from Guelph, on the territory of the Attawandaron, Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples.
The Council of Canadians has worked for four decades to keep water public: a human right, a public trust, and never a commodity. I am not a rights-holder. Much of what I say echoes First Nations who are, including the Assembly of First Nations, the Anishinabek Nation, and many Chiefs.
I am here on behalf of our 150,000 supporters, and the many non-Indigenous people who want water protected and Indigenous rights honoured. Canadians are not asking you to weaken this bill. Many of us are asking you to strengthen it.
Many treaties were understood by First Nations as agreements to share the land, not surrender it, and many waters were never ceded at all. As the daughter of immigrant settlers, I know we are all treaty people, and we want those agreements honoured.
That is the truth this bill sits on. Water does not stop at a reserve boundary or a survey line. Yet clause 6 of Bill C-37 limits First Nations jurisdiction to protection zones “adjacent” to their lands, and only where provinces agree. The word “adjacent” treats water like a parcel of land. But water is always moving, and reminds us that there is no harm we make that does not return to us.
This bill is overdue. 39 long-term drinking water advisories remain in 37 First Nations communities, some for decades, because of chronic underfunding and neglect. First Nations and this committee already did the work of fixing this bill, through C-61. Many of your 2024 amendments are missing from C-37. I will name five.
First, restore the human right. C-61 affirmed that every individual on First Nation lands has a human right to clean and safe drinking water. C-37 downgrades that to a “policy” of “progressive realization.” A child under a boil-water advisory cannot drink a policy. Restore the C-61 language in clause 3.
Second, protect water as one body. Remove the word “adjacent,” and make source water protection mandatory. Officials told you this bill cannot compel provinces to the table. Fix that. The threats upstream are material: mines, pipelines, industrial water takings, and now water-hungry data centres. Governments authorize that activity, and nothing in this bill puts drinking water ahead of it. If approvals are streamlined and handed to provinces, Canada must keep its own duty to review the impacts on First Nations drinking water and health.
Third, end the contradiction. In the Shamattawa case, the Federal Court found that Canada owes a legal duty to provide safe drinking water on reserve. Canada appealed, and has argued twice in court that it owes no such duty: while this committee studied C-61, and again weeks before tabling C-37. We urge you to press the government to withdraw the appeal.
Fourth, guarantee public funding, and fix liability. Replace “best efforts” with a binding duty to fund, including operations and maintenance. The 4.6 billion dollars announced with this bill is welcome, but it covers less than a fifth of the 44 billion dollar gap the Assembly of First Nations has identified.
That money must build public systems under First Nations control. As drafted, if Canada says it made best efforts, the Crown is shielded and First Nations carry the risk. Underfunded, and holding the liability, Nations are left vulnerable to private companies offering to finance and run their water for a profit. This bill creates the conditions for exactly that.
Liability should rest with power: with the government that controls the funding. It must not fall on First Nations water operators without the technology and resources to match. First Nations did not create this crisis, and should not carry its risk.
Fifth, restore co-development. Regulations must again “be co-developed,” not merely “reflect” it. C-61 was built with First Nations, while C-37 was drafted without them. Build on that work.
The Minister told you C-61 was written for a context very different from today’s. Today, Bill C-5 lets projects be fast-tracked around the laws that protect water. Bill C-39 would cap federal reviews at one year, effectively putting a time limit on a constitutional obligation. And now a water bill removes consent, downgrades a right, and shifts risk onto First Nations. The direction is clear: fewer checks on extraction, fewer obligations owed to First Nations, and greater risks to everyday people in a time of global water poverty and climate distress.
Finally, water is not a policy aspiration, or a resource to make a profit from. Water is alive, the element that animates us all, a relative to every bloodline and all life on Earth. You would never sell your grandmother.
Thank you. I welcome your questions.
