‘This is part of our job’: Obed wants to have the hard conversations

He admitted it can be difficult, pointing to the ongoing challenge of pressuring the federal government to provide drinkable water to Canada’s remote Indigenous communities. Obed said there were 298 boil water advisories between 2015 and 2020, including four that went on for more than a year and 50 that lasted more than three months. “This is part of our job,” he said of keeping Canadian government leaders accountable to fix these problems. “Our job is to articulate and quantify what it means to eliminate an infrastructure gap. These require billions of dollars, new relationships, and on ongoing effort where you tweak it over time.”