On a cloudy day last spring, I found myself in the dining room of a home in North Bay. After a long drive from Toronto, I watched a deer stroll out from behind the trees in the backyard, and trot through the melting snow around Lees Creek – a quiet current that leads to the waterfront of the small Ontario city nicknamed “the gateway to the north.”
My focus turned back to the man in front of me, who had invited me into his home but didn’t want to be named. He dropped a heavy stack of papers on the wooden dining table. I tried to read the documents while he spoke, his voice growing frustrated at the problem plaguing his daily life.
Roughly seven years previously, a military official had arrived at his door to tell him that recent testing had found that toxic PFAS, also known as Forever Chemicals, had contaminated the creek in his yard.
The documents in the man’s possession, sent to him by Canada’s Department of National Defence (DND), showed the toxins had flowed downstream from the local airport and a military base, where they were first released during firefighting drills.
In 2017, the government had disclosed that the chemicals had reached some drinking water wells, a contamination which left some locals relying on bottled water to drink and cook.
But the man said he felt much more was still being kept secret. He thought something had been covered up.
Honestly, I didn’t believe him, but a sense that there was an untold story in North Bay stayed with me. So, I kept digging for more than a year, learning all I could about the string of poisonous chemicals which kept the man from drinking his own water.
Then one evening, sitting at my desk, I struggled through a 2,000-page maze of water testing data I had received through a freedom of information request. There, on page 1,836, I found a needle in a haystack. It was the first PFAS test from Lees Creek – the same serene stream which flowed through the man’s backyard. The test had been conducted in 2012 — five years before the man told me that a military official had knocked on his door to warn him about PFAS in the creek.
I read over it again and again, until I was sure I wasn’t mistaken. I grabbed a corkboard, post-it notes, string and printed screenshots to put all the scattered pieces together. Not knowing whether I was losing my mind or on the precipice of a major revelation, I stepped back and looked at my creation. My old-school, analog investigation board showed that over and over again, dangerous levels of the chemicals had been found near people’s homes, sometimes right across the street or steps from their doors, years before the DND warned anyone about it.
Leading PFAS researchers and a former environment ministry official called it a multi-year “cover-up” of a public health threat — one that ultimately erodes trust in the government’s ability to keep people safe. The DND said they hadn’t recognized those initial, surface water tests as a threat to drinking water at the time.
The man with the stack of papers was the first resident I told about my findings. He wasn’t surprised, though he found the new information was “damning” and was happy that someone was digging deeper into what had happened there.
I hope our investigation into the concealment of water contamination in North Bay, published in recent days, will provide some further answers for this man, and for the many other locals who were also kind enough to share their stories with me.
- Behind the Reporting: Masih Khalatbari Uncovers the Hidden Truth About ‘Forever Chemicals’ in North Bay - 24 October 2025
- Feds ‘covered up’ toxic forever chemicals in the water of this Ontario city for 5 years - 20 October 2025
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