So it turns out that if you dig down about 60 centimetres into the ground near an old paper mill upstream from the Grassy Narrows reserve in northern Ontario and then test the soil samples, they have way more mercury in them than you’d normally expect – as much as 80 times more.

We know this not because experts from Ontario’s environment ministry or any other official body took the time and trouble to explore the site themselves, find the soil samples and have them analyzed.

We know it because a couple of reporters from the Toronto Star, as well as volunteers from an environmental advocacy group called Earthroots, took on the task themselves.

They were looking for potential sources of ongoing mercury contamination in the river system that flows by the old mill – and eventually flows into the territory of the Grassy Narrows First Nation. Generations of people there have suffered from dangerously high mercury levels in the water and fish, while governments have dithered and found all sorts of excuses not to act.

This latest episode has all the hallmarks of another government fail. The Star’s Jayme Poisson and David Bruser reported last year about claims by a retired mill worker, Kas Glowacki, that back in 1972 he had been part of a crew that dumped barrels filled with salt and mercury near the mill.

Could that be the source of the ongoing contamination? The environment ministry duly investigated and in November the minister, Glen Murray, said they had concluded that the barrels weren’t there.

End of story? Hardly. The Star reporters and Earthroots volunteers looked in an area identified by Glowacki and brought back soil samples with extremely high levels of mercury. Two leading scientists tell the Star the results are a clear sign of industrial mercury contamination, though not necessarily the existence of a dump. All the more reason, they say, for the government to investigate.

How is it, then, that the province could send experts to the same area and come back with nothing, leading the minister himself to stand up in the legislature and assure Ontarians that there’s nothing to find?

Did they simply not look long enough or hard enough? David Sone of Earthroots says it looks like the government just lacked the will to do a thorough investigation of a problem that, let’s remind ourselves, goes all the way back to the 1960s and has been on the public radar for many decades.

The government now promises to “carefully review” data from the soil samples and “take appropriate investigative action.”

We should certainly hope so. It should not be up to journalists and NGOs to take the initiative on addressing a public health disaster that has been begging for a solution for half a century. The government should finally lead on this issue – not continue to limp behind.