From four decades of water contamination in Crestwood, Illinois to the Flint water crisis, the story of people paying the penalty for poor corporate practise sadly isn’t an uncommon story. But it’s not something the world expects from Canada. 

Nova Scotia-born Ellen Page acknowledges the juxtaposition between surface and underbelly in her 70-minute documentary There’s Something in the Water. This sobering portrayal allows viewers to step away from Canada’s progressive images of universal health care, marriage equality and all-embracing warmth long enough to allow a long gaze at the country’s legacy of colonialist subjugation and corporate neglect. 

Inspired by Ingrid Waldron’s book ‘There’s Something in the Water’, Page and her co-director/producer Ian Daniels (they worked together previously on Gaycation) take to the road to explore three of Nova Scotia’s worst-affected communities. Their unadorned documentary features interviews with activists and community-members whose neighbourhoods have been stricken by escalating numbers of cancer sufferers, exposing how minority and marginalised populations have paid, and are continuing to pay, the penalty for corporate and political disinterest.

“If you look at a map of Nova Scotia and you plot out the points where black and indigenous communities are located and then you mark where landfills and toxic industries are placed, a disturbing connection becomes clear", Page observes.

Shelburne County once boasted the highest population of freed black people in North America, however the community never experienced any real level of equality to their white counterparts. That was made very clear by the introduction of a dump in the 1940s, which led to a number of disturbing ramifications. The company regular burned parts of the landfill, which turned the air around the community into rank, thick smog, while the dump itself leeched high levels of arsenic and E.coli into the water. The result was that the area inherited the highest rate of multiple myeloma - a cancer of the plasma cells.

Louise Delisle, an activist who was told by local politicians to ‘stop playing the racism card’ comments, “It’s killing us. We didn’t put that there. Our families didn’t ask for that. And now we’re reaping the fallout from that by losing the ones we love. Racism… is still here. And my speaking out about it has separated me from some members in my community who don’t want to talk about it”.

Three hours north of Shelburne County is the film’s second stop, Boat Habor, Pictou Landing First Nation: home to the indigenous Mi’kmaq people. There’s a legacy of struggles between indigenous communities and the Canadian government, with its corporate, and often insidious, self-interests and we see the heartbreaking effects this has had on the Mi’kmaq people. Michelle Francis-Denny, an impassioned mouthpiece for her community, relays Scott Paper Companies introduction of a paper mill in 1965.

Despite assurances of no impact, the mill decimated the landscape, destroying all fisheries in a matter of days. The community was blighted by sadness and anger as their native home and traditional ways of living were laid to waste along with the environment. As a result, substance abuse, suicide and cancer rates rose. A tearful Denny comments, “I often wonder, if this didn’t happen, would we have had a chance to live in a way where we could grow old together?”

An hour away from Boat Harbor lies the film’s last stop, the town of Stewiacke, where history threatens to repeat itself. Alton Gas Corporation’s proposals to store natural gas in the salt caverns near the Shubenacadie River while dumping up to 3,000 tonnes of salt brine a day into the river is an apparent violation of treaty agreements. The effects on the natural landscape would again be devastating, as the brine dump would raise salinity levels to levels that are six times higher than what’s considered safe for fish to survive.

A group of Mi’kmaq activists known as the “grassroots grandmas” are opposing this new threat, squaring up to Alton Gas, local politicians and even prime minister Justin Trudeau himself. One activist comments, “They’re opening up our territory for business. Whether it be Alton Gas or fracking companies or rare-earth minerals or gold mines, those are all projects that affect our treaty rights,” while another observes, “Canada is not a nation, it’s a corporation. Doctrine of discovery - each and every time we asked them, “well, give us proof,” they can’t show us no proof. This is why we never get justice in this system, because we’re native, because we’re indigenous”.

This grave, unembellished portrayal of the struggles of these female community activists is sobering not just because of the breadth of the environmental racism on show, but because the suppression of these voices impact us all, globally. People’s needs have a legacy of taking the backseat to corporate interest, but where deception was once the default for companies looking to gain the upper hand, their ability to plough ahead with proposals, despite the public outcry, is now a greater concern. Where ancestral homes and civil liberties take decades if not centuries to put in place, as this documentary shows, permanent dissolution of both of these is far swifter.