Drain Canada

The American Prospect: Prepare For U.S.-Canadian Water War

(The American Prospect) 

Immense though they are, the Great Lakes may not be big enough to survive their new world, one complicated by global warming and the North American Free Trade Agreement. According to an August 2004, report by the International Joint Commission, one of the bi-national bodies established to govern and protect the Great Lakes, most climate change models predict lower lake levels as the earth warms. And the same report appears to acknowledge that once a body of water has become “a commercial good or saleable commodity,” any effort to protect it could fall afoul of NAFTA. The message seems to be that if you want to protect any of the lakes, or perhaps any bays or inlets thereof, pass the law before some company starts selling the water.

Late last year, the governors of the eight Great Lakes states and the premiers of Quebec and Ontario agreed on changes to the annex to the 1985 Great Lakes Charter. If ratified by Congress and the Canadian Parliament, the changes would make it harder to divert water from the lakes.

But not hard enough, according to Susan Howatt, the national water campaigner for the Council of Canadians. “It’s full of loopholes," she said of the 1985 charter, including one for bottled drinking water companies — if the water goes into containers of less than 20 liters, it’s not considered a diversion.

Not all Canadians oppose water commerce. In the Maritime Provinces and in Western Canada, some businessmen, free-marketish scholars and a few public officials think it would be a great idea. But they acknowledge that theirs is a minority view. “Canadians tend to get rattled at just the thought of selling water to the U.S,” wrote Daniel Klymchuk, a real-estate developer in Western Canada. “It’s an irrational fear that will take time to dissipate.”

Beyond the specifics of this dispute is a question of political philosophy which is likely to become more salient in the years ahead, and which poses a special dilemma to those who lean politically left: Should water be considered a common natural heritage or a sellable commodity?

By temperament, liberals might be drawn to the view of Canadian writer Marq de Villiers that “water is not ‘ours,’ or ‘theirs,’ but the planet’s.” And there is little doubt that massive diversions could prove environmentally disastrous.

But then there will be all those thirsty people on their dried-out land, and in 1997 the United Nations concluded that the best — perhaps the only — way to get water to them was through a system of international markets and trade.

Closer to home, Americans and Canadians could alleviate the problem by wasting less water. We are the two most water-profligate nations in the affluent world. We might, for instance, stop irrigating (often at public expense) fields that produce crops already in surplus.

Or we could pursue what Susan Howatt called “the soft path” to water conservation, which would mean limiting the population of an area to the number of people its natural water supply could support.

Well, she’s a foreigner, so perhaps can be forgiven for such subversive talk. Had that been our policy, Southern California would be home to hundreds of thousands, not tens of millions. Someone should tell Howatt that, at least on this side of the border, science and logic are all very well in their place, but real-estate development rules.


Jon Margolis the former national political correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, is the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964."