When 200 people evacuated from Kashechewan First Nation arrived in Kingston, Ont. on a Sunday afternoon in January 2026 — many Elders, children and medically complex family members — the urgency was immediately clear. By the next afternoon, my colleagues from the Indigenous Interprofessional Primary Care Team and I had brought our mobile clinic to the evacuees’ hotel and were seeing patients who had been abruptly displaced by yet another failure of their community’s drinking water system.
At the same time, Kingston’s Indigenous friendship centre was organizing volunteers to lead cultural programming and create supports to help families maintain connection and dignity during displacement.
This matters because Kashechewan is not an exception. Research across Canada shows that unsafe drinking water continues to drive preventable illness, mental distress and evacuations in First Nations communities.
