The Council replies: Letters to the editor
Canadians share view of banning water exports

Meera Karunananthan
The Ottawa Citizen
June 11, 2008

Re: Liquid gold -- and it's not oil, June 7.

If the Council of Canadians' views on the need to protect water as a human right from corporate theft on world markets represent, as the Citizen claims, "a protectionist wing... increasingly obsolete in a globalized world," it is a view widely and unsurprisingly shared by most Canadians and by human rights activists around the world. According to an Environics poll conducted for the Council in April, 89 per cent of Canadians support a ban on bulk water exports and recognition of water as a human right. But of course when newspaper editorialists invoke the authority of investment banks such as Goldman Sachs rather than the UN or human rights activists, we know where their real sympathies lie.