Cascading crises leave Island Lake nations desperate for help

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This article was published 01/02/2021 (1731 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — After enduring a wildfire that sparked a meth crisis and now suffering a pandemic that has spurred two military deployments, the people of Island Lake are desperately waiting for an addictions-treatment centre.

“We desperately need help over here,” said Maureen Wood, who walked 3,000 kilometres to Ottawa in spring 2018 to beg for a treatment centre for her numerous friends dealing with addiction issues and taking their lives.

“They totally lose hope,” she said Sunday.

Island Lake’s 11,000 residents live on four First Nations reserves, served by flights and winter roads.

The area was evacuated in 2017 owing to wildfires, and nearly all residents were flown 475 kilometres to Winnipeg. Locals have testified to Parliament that the city’s drug dealers offered free samples to get people hooked on methamphetamines and proceeded to smuggle the drug into the community when everyone returned home. Child-welfare apprehensions rose.

Band leaders claim they had an inadequate response from Ottawa when they asked for mental-health services, and so families walked to Winnipeg and then to Parliament Hill.

During that visit in May 2018, Wood brought a federal minister to tears when she begged for help at the Assembly of First Nations annual meeting.

The federal Liberals promised to enact some form of support, and that they would seriously consider a mental-health and addictions centre within the community.

Within a year of that meeting, Wood, 35, said multiple young people took their own lives. “These were just kids, like 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds, committing suicide,” she said.

The communities set up detox units as an interim measure, to help wean people off drugs. Those structures are now being used as COVID-19 isolation wards.

Border restrictions are driving up the cost of drugs across Canada, and in Island Lake, some are entering withdrawal, while others are spending most of their income on crystal meth.

The pandemic has made it hard for medical staff to reach out with harm-reduction information. “People are sharing needles and stuff, and they don’t understand the danger,” Wood said.

Since mid-December, two of the four communities have had separate military deployments to contain the rapid spread of COVID-19 in crowded homes.

But that’s not the top worry for Alex McDougall, head of the Four Arrows Regional Health Authority.

He said generational trauma, recent suicides and now the COVID-19 pandemic have created a snowballing impact on mental health.

“We’ve seeing people having a really hard time dealing with the orders to stay home and not to move about in the communities, so much so that we’ve seen people committing suicide,” he said. “The amount of stress that is being caused to our members in these communities is extreme, to the point that we’re not only losing our members to the virus.”

Indigenous Services Canada said a feasibility study only got underway this summer — two years after the walk to Ottawa — and the report was submitted to bureaucrats in August.

“The steering committee reviewed and has accepted the findings of the feasibility study,” ISC spokeswoman Danielle Geary wrote. “A preliminary cost estimate for the project has been done as part of the study that will assist the department as it reviews capital project priorities and resources.”

That’s not a firm enough commitment for NDP MP Niki Ashton, who represents northern Manitoba.

“This isn’t a situation where communities haven’t made it clear what they need; they’ve gone above and beyond to do that,” Ashton said in an interview.

ISC has funded tele- and video-counselling for substance use during the pandemic, but Ashton said ISC should have helped locals to do the treatment centre’s feasibility study well before the pandemic.

“It’s not an acceptable timeline by any means,” she said. “It’s insulting the file didn’t get to the feds for years.”

Ashton noted Island Lake was hit hard by the 2009 H1N1 swine flu, when federal bureaucrats sent bodybags to the community.

Ashton said two military deployments shows there isn’t enough health resources to stem outbreaks and keep people healthier in the first place.

“This is an absolute wake-up call,” she said.

Wood said some in the community have discussed making another walk to Ottawa, but she’s unsure whether it would have an impact.

She blames herself for not following up with government bureaucrats. Wood said she stopped advocating for months, after a 16-year-old friend who was like a daughter to her died by suicide.

“I kind of shut down when my girl took her life,” Wood said, sobbing. “I don’t want to lose any more of my sisters.”

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @withfilesfrom