The common symptoms of mercury poisoning are loss of balance and impairment of speech, sight and hearing that becomes permanent with continued exposure, along with convulsions and premature death.

The pollution began in the 1960s when Dryden Chemicals Ltd., 130 km upstream from Grassy Narrows, dumped 10 metric tonnes of mercury into the river system.

That poisoned the water, animal life and the fish, a staple of the local Indigenous diet, and destroyed what had been a thriving fishing tourism industry, leading to mass unemployment.

With the local economy devastated and no means to earn a living, many local residents continued to eat what up to then had been their main and readily available source of food — fish.

This was fish with mercury levels up to 50 times higher than that found in fish in neighbouring waterways and dangerous for human consumption.

In 1970, the Ontario government banned commercial fishing and ordered the company to stop dumping mercury into the river, but not airborne mercury emissions which continued until 1975, a year before the plant ceased operations.

Think about that. That was more than half a century ago and progress on righting this terrible wrong by the Ontario and federal governments has been painfully slow.

In 1985, 15 years after the fact, the two levels of government and the companies responsible for the pollution agreed to establish a fund to compensate the victims of mercury poisoning through the creation of a disability fund, part of a one-time, $16.7 million legal settlement.

In 2017 — 47 years after the discovery of the pollution — the Ontario government announced an $85-million trust fund to remediate mercury contamination in the English and Wabigoon Rivers, which will take years to address.

In July of this year — 51 years after the discovery of the pollution — the Trudeau government announced a total of $88.4 million to design, build, maintain and operate a care home for the victims of mercury poisoning on the reserves, plus $1.1 million to design a water treatment plant for the facility.

Given how federal auditors generals have condemned the wasteful spending of the federal Indigenous government bureaucracy going back through Liberal and Conservative governments, it’s a safe bet it will be years before any of these issues will be finally and fully addressed.