Mr. Speaker, the hon. member is absolutely right, this is what today is about, that we bring attention and that we work to get 100% of people living on first nations reserves the water and waste water treatment the rest of Canada has.
Nursing stations in Island Lake offer baths to medically vulnerable people who have no running water at home.
The physicians say, “We complain to each other about how much time we spend on this stuff. We would like to spend more time on education, heart disease, diabetes prevention, maternal child issues, but we cannot, because we have to take care of what needs attention right now”.
Being unable to wash can have much more serious health consequences than diarrhea and skin infections, as residents of St. Theresa Point discovered when H1N1 flu exploded in the spring of 2009. “Lack of access to water and overcrowding facilitated the spread of these viruses”, a Health Canada media spokeswoman acknowledged.