This piece written by Maude Barlow was first published in the Toronto Star on November 16, 2024.
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 “running out of water.”
For Trump, to “Make America Great Again” is to bring jobs, agriculture and energy production as well as manufacturing back to the U.S. He can’t do that without water, and he has already signaled where he could find some. Canada has a “massive faucet” that would take only one day to turn on, and all of that water “would come right down here and right into Los Angeles.”
The idea Canada has water to spare, however, is dead wrong. Canada has about 7% of the planet’s 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 Canada’s lakes and rivers are “drying up.” In October 2024, Agriculture Canada classified 64 per cent of the country as abnormally to extremely dry, including 67 per cent of Canada’s agricultural landscape.
Yet the “myth of abundance” 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 1990’s, 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 “water sharing,” noting that we sell oil and gas, which are finite, but not water, which is renewable.
Trade agreements further put Canada’s water at risk. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) gave American corporations the right to directly challenge the Canadian government if laws and regulations protecting water affected their bottom line. While the agreement could not force Canada to sell its water, if any province decided to do so the “proportional sharing” provision would dramatically curtail its right to change its mind and put an end to the practice.
Thankfully, in NAFTA’s successor, the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), both the investor-state and proportional sharing provisions were dropped, giving Canada back much control over its water. As well, in 2013, parliament passed the Transboundary Waters Protection Act, to prevent water situated inside a province or territory from being exported.
However, these are laws and trade agreements that can be changed under political pressure. In his first administration, Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental rules. He has also declared that he wants to re-open CUSMA and that he will use tariffs to bend the policies of other countries to his will.
The planet is running out of clean accessible fresh water. One quarter of the world’s population is now without adequate access to clean water and one half does not have access to adequate sanitation. For those of us who are blessed to live in a country that still has freshwater supplies, there is a special responsibility to care for it.
To let it be opened up for commercial export by for-profit corporations so that Donald Trump can, in his words, “drill baby, drill” would be a betrayal of the environment, First Nations who have guarded this water for millennia, and future generations.
Where do the parties stand on this issue? And who among them will fight for the water?
Maude Barlow is a founding member of the Council of Canadians, where she served as the board chairperson for over three decades. An author and activist, Maude has worked on water protection and water justice for almost four decades and served as Senior Advisor on Water to the UN General Assembly.
