[LINK] "Can the NDP be first place for First Nations?"

[rfmcdonald]

Nancy Macdonald of MacLean's reports on the NDP's efforts to capture the First Nations vote.

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair is finishing off his day in Kenora. The sprawling northwestern Ontario riding is home to 40 Indigenous communities, 25 of them under boil-water advisories—though it’s hard to consider these “advisories” when successive governments have allowed them stand for decades.

Conditions on the Shoal Lake 40 First Nation is particularly galling. It provides Winnipeg with all its drinking water, but the community itself has had to endure a boil-water advisory for 17 years. Residents were cut off from the outside world, with no year-round access road, when it was tapped by the Manitoba capital decades ago.

On the nearby Neskantaga First Nation, where a boil-water warning has been in place for 20 years, dirty water is blamed for a host of illnesses, sores and rashes; its Oji-Cree residents are forced to bathe their babies using cleansing wipes.

So it’s an important riding with deadly serious issues, and one in which the NDP, represented by former provincial NDP leader and Kenora MPP Howard Hampton, hope to pick off Resources Minister Greg Rickford. Right now Hampton and Liberal Bob Nault, who represented the riding under Jean Chrétien, are tied in support at 29 and 28 per cent respectively, according to a recent Environics poll. Rickford is ahead, at 40 per cent.

For a long time, many Indigenous voters in the 40 per cent Indigenous riding could be counted on to vote Liberal—but that’s starting to change. Many still remember the First Nations Governance Act that Nault introduced when he was minister of Indian affairs; that landmark legislation—designed to clean up reserve finances—was widely hated, particularly by chiefs. More and more Indigenous voters, who traditionally voted Liberal, are shifting allegiance to the NDP.