Ginoogaming First Nation, near Longlac in northwestern Ontario, has spent $1.6 million of its own money since May 2024 policing a drug trade that outpaced the officers assigned to protect it, running a self-funded highway checkpoint this summer that stopped more than 22,000 vehicles, according to CBC News.
The community declared a state of emergency over drug trafficking in May 2024 and hired a private firm, Anishinaabe Ambassadors Inc., to help run security, Chief Sheri Taylor told CBC. From June 22 to Aug. 13, the checkpoint processed 22,226 vehicles, an average of nearly 468 a day, and logged 102 incidents: 27 drug-related seizures totalling 42 items, 13 alcohol seizures involving 16 containers, and one weapon that was handed over to the Ontario Provincial Police.
“This is an extraordinary burden for the First Nation to carry,” Taylor said, adding that “our people need safety now” and that policing “is one part of that solution.”
Ginoogaming, a community of about 200 people on-reserve, is policed primarily by the Anishinabek Police Service, funded through the federal First Nations and Inuit Policing Program, with OPP backup. Nishnawbe Aski Nation Deputy Grand Chief Anna Betty Achneepineskum said policing has “continued to be a challenge” for NAN’s member communities. The strain was on display in May, when Anishinabek Police and the OPP raided a home on the reserve after a weapons call and seized 137 grams of fentanyl and 159 grams of cocaine, according to CTV News, which reported two men were charged. The OPP commissioner has since agreed in principle to negotiate a long-term policing framework for the community, with a 30-day followup promised, though no new funding has been announced.
The numbers land as Ottawa faces renewed pressure to change how it funds First Nations policing altogether. Days before Ginoogaming’s checkpoint figures became public, Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak told chiefs gathered in Brandon, Man., for the start of Parliament’s fall sitting that legislating First Nations policing as an essential service is among her top asks of MPs this session, according to an AFN statement issued Sept. 17. Essential-service status, the designation given to provincial and municipal police forces, would in theory guarantee a funding floor instead of leaving communities to apply for federal policing dollars year to year, or cover shortfalls themselves, the way Ginoogaming has done.
Ginoogaming has not said publicly whether it is asking specifically for that legislation, but its own figures make the funding gap concrete: a small community ran vehicle-by-vehicle enforcement for nearly two months, at its own expense, in a service the federal government has yet to classify as essential. Woodhouse Nepinak’s other fall priorities include hate crime legislation targeting residential school denialism, ending the Indian Act’s second-generation cut-off rule and changes to the proposed First Nations Clean Water Act, with a First Nations-First Ministers Meeting set for Oct. 26 in Ottawa to press the file further.
For now, Ginoogaming’s checkpoint has wound down, but the drug trade it was built to interrupt has not, and the community is back to relying on a police service stretched across a vast swath of northwestern Ontario while it waits to see whether Ottawa changes how the job gets paid for.
Via CBC News. Read the original report: First Nation in northwestern Ontario says it has spent $1.6M on private security to fight drug trafficking.
