NWT - David Bonnetrouge set his fishing net at his usual spot in the Mackenzie River last fall only to drag it right back out again.

Kenny D. Kenny, 9, fishes on the Bear River near Deline. Anglers are expressing concerns about water quality in the territory due to rising pollutants. - NNSL file photo

"The water dropped so I pulled my net out," the 72-year-old Fort Providence resident said. He and his family live on fish through the winter – whitefish, pickerel, grayling – and he usually catches about 500 in a season. This year, he got 50.

"There's hardly any fish," he said.

At community meetings along the Mackenzie River, from Fort Providence up to Aklavik, residents have been asking the same question: what's wrong with the fish?

The Mackenzie is the main source of drinking water for six communities in the NWT, and fishermen's long-held concerns over discoloured or sparse fish populations have called into question the safety of the territory's drinking water.

"All the way down the Mackenzie, people have noticed there's something wrong with the fish a long time ago," said Sam Elleze, a long-time Fort Providence fisherman.

"Everybody who puts their nets in the water, they won't hardly catch anything," he said. The fish they do catch appear unhealthy, with reddish skin, some without fins or tails.

"Some people are really concerned about the water and about the fish," Elleze said. "It's getting worse now."

A recent federal fisheries department study found mercury, DDT and PCBs in Mackenzie River loche near Fort Good Hope. This prompted Sahtu MLA Norman Yakeleya to push in the legislative assembly March 24 for a more stringent water monitoring system along the river.

"This is scary, what's happening over there. Certainly the greatest threat is the Alberta tar sands," Yakeleya said in an interview. "This has been an issue since I became an MLA seven years ago. The elders talked to me about it. When I went into Fort Good Hope, they talked about 'dead water.'"

Yakeleya, along with NWT cabinet ministers Michael McLeod, Robert C. McLeod and Jackson Lafferty, are touring the Sahtu from April 6 to 9 – a ripe opportunity for them to address residents' concerns about the water, he said.

"We really need to listen to what our elders are saying in terms of our land, plants and animals. They've been telling us for years and years, 'If we don't have no water, we don't have no life,'" Yakeleya said.

"The Government of the Northwest Territories must develop a very aggressive trans-boundary water management strategy or agreement that will protect our water systems from any type of future contamination."

Final water strategy coming

A final version of the NWT's water strategy, which aims to set out and evaluate the territory's water policies, is expected to be complete in time for the May session of the legislative assembly. Environment and Natural Resources Minister Michael Miltenberger said the government can then prepare for agreement negotiations with Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan.

Miltenberger said the draft of the strategy, which is available on the department's website, shows that while many measures are in place to monitor and protect the NWT's drinking water, many of them may not be as effective as they should be.

"A lot of the monitoring and treatment deals with coliforms and fecal matter – we're talking chlorine and very basic treatment," that may not be "sophisticated enough" for contaminants such as heavy metals or hydrocarbons, he said.

"It's been pointed out – not only in the North but across Canada – that our monitoring of water by the governments, mainly the federal government, have been cut back draconianly so that there's huge, huge gaps in our ability to effectively monitor all of our watersheds."

Treatment plant upgrades underway

Ten water treatment plant upgrades are currently underway across the territory, according to the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs (MACA).

New treatment systems in Aklavik, Deline, Tuktoyaktuk, Ulukhaktok and Behchoko are in various stages at a total cost of $13.5 million, while five other communities – Jean Marie River, Trout Lake, Fort Good Hope, Lutsel K'e and Wrigley – can expect plant upgrades in the future within a $12.5 million budget.

"Those plants are currently involved in a competitive bidding process, they're out to competition and we hope to have a construction contract later this summer," said Perry Heath, MACA's manager of infrastructure.

In Colville Lake, where residents have been abiding by a constant boil-water advisory since 2004, a new treatment plant with a cartridge filtration system was recently built, but staff members are still being trained. Heath said the plant should be up and running by the end of the month.

Health Canada changed its standards for turbidity – murkiness – levels six years ago and "that was the major initiative for us to upgrade these water treatment plants," Heath said, adding the upgrades weren't prompted by contamination concerns.

Apart from the scheduled upgrades in those 10 communities, three community water sources – in Gameti, Wekweeti and Paulatuk – don't meet current Canadian standards for turbidity, which is the amount of sediment present in the water.

"Those plants are classified as very low risk, meaning that they have pristine water sources and they're very low risk from a public health perspective," Heath said. "We do upgrades on the highest risk plants first and move our way up the risk schedule from a construction perspective."

Down the Mackenzie River in Aklavik, where a large portion of the population is infected with the H. Pylori stomach bacterium, many residents continue to boil their water just in case.

"We always boil our water and then cool it off in the fridge," said 77-year-old Aklavik resident John Carmichael. "A lot of people buy water now too."

Carmichael has been monitoring char near the community for 15 years and he's noticed people aren't fishing as much anymore from the Mackenzie River as much as from its surrounding creeks and the Peel River, where more fish gather.

"Down here we don't have too much of a problem, actually, except that we're getting our drinking water that comes from up there (in the Mackenzie) too."

Increasingly high contamination levels showed up in loche near Fort Good Hope in a Department of Fisheries and Oceans study, co-authored by Gary Stern, which linked rising mercury, DDT and PCBs levels to climate change. Now, communities up in the Mackenzie Delta want to be sure the same isn't true in their area.

Amy Thompson, executive director of the Gwich'in Renewable Resources Board in Inuvik and a former fisheries biologist, collected some loche liver samples from Aklavik, Inuvik, Tsiigehtchic and Fort McPherson in 2007.

"What I was looking at is 'what's the level (of contaminants) in the livers and is it of concern?' Based on what Environment Canada could tell me, it didn't seem to be too much of a concern, but I'm still planning on following up with that after talking with Gary," Thompson said.