Wait until they come for our water...
When Trump comes calling for our water, Canada must be ready
We had better be ready.
President-elect Donald Trump has noticed something in his travels across the U.S. Many parts of his country are running out of water. Groundwater supplies are being depleted faster than they can be replenished. The American west is in a multi-year water crisis. National Geographic says the country is ā
running out of water.ā
For Trump, to āMake America Great Againā is to bring jobs, agriculture and energy production as well as manufacturing back to the U.S. He canāt do that without water, and he has already signaled where he could find some. Canada
has a āmassive faucetā that would take only one day to turn on, and all of that water āwould come right down here and right into Los Angeles.ā
The idea Canada has water to spare, however, is dead wrong. Canada has about 7% of the planetās renewable freshwater and needs every drop to deal with both climate change and demand. British Columbia and Alberta in particular have faced severe drought and fires in past summers, leading the Wall Street Journal to say Canadaās lakes and rivers are ādrying up.ā In October 2024, Agriculture Canada classified 64 per cent of the country as abnormally to extremely dry, including
67 per cent of Canadaās agricultural landscape.
Yet the āmyth of abundanceā persists in Canada and elsewhere and there have been many plans to commercially export our water to the U.S. Canadians successfully opposed a number of commercial water export schemes, including the GRAND Canal that would have diverted water from James Bay, and the NAWAPA, that would have dammed rivers in northern British Columbia for diversion to the Southern U.S. Public outcry also stopped two proposed massive water export plans in the late 1990ās, one from Lake Superior, the other from a glacier lake in Newfoundland, both bound by tanker for Asia.
Since then, a number of university and private policy think tanks have proposed that Canada consider putting our water on the market for sale like oil and gas. In 2011, former Prime Minster Jean Chretien said
it was time for Canadians to debate the issue of āwater sharing,ā noting that we sell oil and gas, which are finite, but not water, which is renewable.
Maude Barlow warns against the exploitation of Canadaās freshwater resources, highlighting the dangers of commercial water exports and the need for strong protections in the face of politicalā¦
canadians.org
