Six Nations Elected Council (SNEC) is looking at the next steps in tackling the lack of clean drinking water on Six Nations after hearing this week that Six Nations and its members will be not eligible to receive compensation in the First Nations Drinking Water Settlement.

Until the Nov. 14 council meeting, SNEC had been encouraging its members to apply individually still to show the need for clean drinking water within the community and to be financially compensated, potentially.

The First Nations Drinking Water Settlement allows certain First Nations, and their members, that were subject to a drinking water advisory that lasted at least one year between Nov. 20, 1995 and June 20, 2021 to receive financial compensation.

JFK Law associate Laura Edwards said that the administrator in the class action settlement made the decision to not include Six Nations on the impacted First Nations list after Six Nations had submitted its documents to be included. Six Nations will now have to make a decision on what the next steps will be to address the drinking water circumstances in the community.

Edwards said that the long term drinking water advisories would have needed to be issued by a recognized health organization such as Health Canada, Ontario Public Health or Indigenous Services Canada. She said there wasn't enough evidence to support Six Nations claim to be included in this class action settlement. Six Nations had the chance to appeal the decision but chose not to do so and did not state why the decision was not appealed.

"Unfortunately, in July of this year the claims administrator responded and denied Six Nations application to join the class action, stating that there wasn't enough evidence to support their application to be an impacted First Nation under the class action settlement agreement," she said.

"So Six Nations as a band is not eligible to join the class action or to get any band level compensation and any Six Nations members who were living on Six Nations lands during the claims period are also not eligible to join the class action."

Edwards says that she sees two options that Six Nations can choose to navigate. Those options would be developing an action plan with Canada to develop a better water system within the community, as well as launching it's own litigation against Canada to look for financial compensation to improve the current community's water infrastructure.

"The two avenues I see for Six Nations really are to come up with an engagement plan directly with Canada, to find ways to get more centralized water systems in place and to address the situation with private wells in the immediate future, but you could also launch your own claim to address this issue and to try and get money from Canada to fix these problems," she said.

"The only issue with launching your own claim of course is the expense and the uncertainty of knowing how it will go, and you'll never know how much money you'll actually get."

She says Six Nations does not have to chose between the two options and can instead pursue both options to leverage Canada into providing money to improve the community's water infrastructure.

Coun. Melba Thomas says she believes that Six Nations launching its own claim is the only option to address these issues being faced by Six Nations community members.

"We certainly can't just sit by and allow them to not include us in their business concerning Six Nations drinking water," she said.

"It's a terrible shame again that we are might as well say, second class citizens with third world similarities. I think we have no choice but to take the advice of JFK Law and certainly launch our own claim and put the pressure on Canada."

SNEC moved and passed a motion to have JFK Law begin exploring Six Nations next steps and perform a preliminary claim analysis on the claims potential and developing a litigation budget for council's consideration.

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