Thousands of demonstrators walked from an Indigenous Services Canada office on Bay Street to Queen’s Park in Toronto on Wednesday, demanding Ottawa force the closure of the paper mill they blame for six decades of mercury contamination in Grassy Narrows First Nation.
Toronto police estimated the crowd at roughly 2,000 people, though organizers said the true turnout was higher, according to CP24. The march was led by children from Grassy Narrows and joined by labour unions, environmental organizations and faith groups, Narcity reported.
“Everybody’s lost somebody,” Chief Sherry Ackabee told the crowd, according to CP24 and Narcity. “I myself have a child who was born with one functioning kidney.” Ackabee questioned how the community can recover “when Dryden’s still operating,” a reference to the mill roughly 100 kilometres upstream on the English-Wabigoon River system.
From 1962 to 1970, Dryden Chemical Co., then a subsidiary of the British company Reed International, discharged between 9,000 and 11,000 kilograms of mercury into the river system, according to research dating to a 1973 study that has been cited in subsequent CBC News and Toronto Star investigations. An estimated 90 per cent of Grassy Narrows residents show some degree of mercury poisoning today, with effects passed from mothers to children across generations, CP24 and Narcity reported. Community member Chrissy Isaacs said she uses a wheelchair some days and gets tremors from what she described as fifth-generation exposure.
Neither wire report on Wednesday’s march mentioned a detail that matters to Ackabee’s question: the mill has changed corporate hands repeatedly since the dumping stopped, and it is not the same company under fire today. Reed sold it in 1975, and it passed through several forestry companies, including Weyerhaeuser, before Domtar Corp. bought it in 2007. Canada’s Competition Bureau confirmed in an Aug. 2, 2023, notice that Domtar had sold the mill to an affiliate of First Quality, a privately held Pennsylvania hygiene and paper products company. A 2024 Western University study found the mill’s effluent is still generating methylmercury downstream, meaning the change in ownership has not changed the chemistry Grassy Narrows blames for continued poisoning, even as accountability for it keeps shifting to a new owner with no history on the file.
There has been movement on one of the community’s other longstanding demands. Ottawa and Grassy Narrows signed an agreement to build an on-reserve mercury care home, backed by $19.5 million in federal construction funding, and construction began in March 2025. “Canada, and Minister Miller, have made sacred promises to us in this contract,” Chief Rudy Turtle said when the deal was signed, while the community warned it “does not give Grassy Narrows the certainty it requires on long-term funding” to actually run the facility once it opens. As of an APTN News update in May, the building was nearing completion, but no opening date has been set and the operating-cost question Turtle raised remains unresolved, nine years after Ottawa first promised a treatment centre in 2017.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s office has faced its own reckoning on the file. According to CP24 and Narcity, staff said Carney could not hear protesters who confronted him at an earlier public event, and aides met with the group afterward. No apology has been issued.
For a community marking six decades of contamination, Wednesday’s demonstration made clear that a care home under construction is not the same as a river cleaned up, or a mill closed. Grassy Narrows says it intends to keep marching on Queen’s Park until both happen.
Via CP24, with additional reporting from Narcity.
