Canada's Water

Martin O'Malley & Angela Mulholland
CBC NEWS ONLINE 

When people around the world think of Canada they think of vast spaces, forests, rich mineral deposits, and an unlimited supply of fresh water. 

There are many places in the world where fresh water is considered the ultimate luxury. The desert of Jordan is one such place, where water is severely rationed, where villages get water once a week, for a day. It is cause for celebration when this happens. 

Not so Canada, which has more fresh water than any other place on earth. Just turn on the tap, have a drink, there's lots for everybody. Or is there? The tide seems to have turned recently, with more environmentalists worried that not enough attention is being paid to our water supply. 

It is said that fresh water will be "the oil of the 21st century." But the abundance of fresh water puts Canada in an enviable position and the trouble with being in an enviable position is sometimes the wrong people envy you. Wars have been fought over water since biblical times. 

Other, drier countries cast covetous looks at our ample water, whether for greener golf courses in Arizona, parched farms in Europe, or huge areas suffering drastic shortages of drinking water in distant parts of the globe. 

When she was the federal minister of the environment, Christine Stewart wrote: "Water is more than a precious resource. Water is life itself. Unfortunately, too many Canadians think it's limitless. We say it's priceless, but we act like it's dirt cheap. We waste it and pollute it. 

"We do not have unlimited quantities, even if it does seem that way to some people because it keeps falling from the sky. We are one of the highest per capita consumers worldwide - 326 litres per person, per day." 

Alarming reports from "water-poor" countries have been appearing regularly in reports around the world. Last year, some 20 million Chinese were short of drinking water because of a severe drought affecting Sichuan, Guangxi, Gansu and Guangdong provinces. More than 200 million acres of farmland in China were "parched."

Iran has been hit by the worst water shortage in three decades. The official IRNA news agency reports that Iran is short by 1.2 billion cubic metres of water for farming.

In Bangladesh, hundreds of residents of Dhaka attacked a power supply office last spring, barricaded roads and burned vehicles to protest against a scarcity of running water. The Dhaka Water and Sewage Authority said more than 30 per cent of the city's 9 million residents had no access to drinking water. Dhaka normally requires 1.4 billion litres of water a day and was getting only 960 million litres.

And here we are in Canada with water thundering over Niagara Falls, countless freshwater lakes and rivers, frozen water in the snow and icebergs of the Arctic, and one of the largest land masses in the world to catch rain and snow from the sky. Canadians worry more about flood than famine.

So, what's the problem? If water be "the oil of the 21st century," let's sell the stuff. Why not cash in? The Globe and Mail said in an editorial earlier this year: "Exporting some of the water from our brimming lakes and rushing rivers will not cause anyone in Canada to go thirsty. If, for some unimaginable reason, it does, there is a simple solution. Turn off the tap." 

Unfortunately, the solution is not simple. And it has set environmentalists and those who want to make a buck out of water on opposite sides of what is becoming an increasingly bitter dispute. There are those who want all exports of water banned, even bottled water in litre-jugs. There are those who want only bulk exports of water banned. There are those who want to sell anything they can, bottled water, bulk water, icebergs, you name it. Water's a renewable resource, isn't it? 

Enter Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians, a citizens' group with 100,000 members. "There is a common assumption that the world's water supply is huge and infinite," Barlow says.

"This assumption is false. At some time in the near future, water bankruptcy will result." She cites a United Nations study that says by 2025 - only 25 years away - two-thirds of the world will be "water-poor." 

"The wars of the future are going to be fought over water," Barlow says. 

Is Canada morally obliged to share its water with an increasingly thirsty world?

Can it even be done without upsetting delicate ecosystems?

And if it can be done, who's going to do it? And who's going to profit by it? 

When something valuable becomes scarce - and drinkable, usable water is becoming scarcer and scarcer - inevitably the profit-makers find a way to jump into the game. This is what alarms Barlow most of all. The free-traders want water to be regarded as a commodity, something to be bought and sold, perhaps included as an integral part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This makes environmentalists shudder.

In a paper released early in 1999, The Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA) said, "Water is an essential need, a public trust, not a commodity. It belongs to everyone and to no one." CELA argues that bulk exports of water will not help water-poor countries:

"Even large-scale water exports cannot possibly satisfy the social and economic needs of distant societies. "Water shipped halfway around the world will only be affordable to the privileged and will deepen inequities between rich and poor. International trade in bulk water will allow elites to assure the quality of their own drinking water supplies, while permitting them to ignore the pollution of their local waters and the waste of their water management systems."

Commenting specifically on the Great Lakes Basin, shared by Canada and the United States, CELA says: "Changing water levels and flows will have unpredictable and harmful consequences to basin habitat, biodiversity, shorelines, jobs and culture, particularly to First Nations. Lower water levels will mean greater disturbance of highly contaminated sediments in shallow harbours and connecting channels and less dilution of polluted waters."

An example of the passion that the subject of water can provoke occurred on March 31, 1999, when the province of Ontario issued a permit to a private company to collect Great Lakes water and transport it to Asia. The permit was issued to Nova Group, a company in Sault Ste. Marie, allowing it to ship up to 600 million litres of Lake Superior water to Asia by 2002. 

There was such a public outcry on both sides of the border that the permit was withdrawn and the deal never went through. 

Barlow, the Council of Canadians and the Canadian Environmental Law Association expect there will be more such attempts in coming years as people seek to turn a profit from water.

On its website, Environment Canada predicts that Canada soon will be in the commercial water export business. The National Post has jumped on the export-water bandwagon, calling water "blue gold." The Post's financial columnist, Terrence Corcoran, has written: "Canada is a future OPEC of water. Here's a worthwhile long-term bet: by 2010, Canada will be exporting large quantities of fresh water to the U.S., and more by tanker to parched nations all over the globe."

Paul Muldoon, executive director of CELA and a co-author of CELA's report says Ontario is lagging in its efforts to manage its water resources. There is a law to block water exports, the 1989 Water Transfer Control Act, but Muldoon says it has never been proclaimed. Another provincial tool, enacted in June 1998, is the Surface Water Transfer Policy. It expressed opposition to water transfers, but carries no legal weight, Muldoon says. The latest provincial regulation aimed at managing Ontario's water supply is the Ontario Water Resources Act, which was proposed in December 1998. Its purpose was to give legal weight to the Surface Water Transfer Policy, but it has not been approved by the Ontario Cabinet.

Muldoon says protecting Ontario's water is more urgent than ever because of growing world demand for water, and because entrepreneurs increasingly are looking for ways to export and sell large amounts of Canadian water. They are also looking for precedents, anything that could be used to have water designated as a "commodity" that can be bought, sold and exported.

Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy is on the record as saying water is "not just a commodity." In March 1999, Axworthy announced an export moratorium that will remain in place until all the provinces can agree on a method to ban water exports permanently. The provinces share jurisdiction with the federal government over lakes and rivers in Canada.

There may already be a precedent, however, as it is legal to export bottled water, which is not considered a "bulk" export. A survey conducted for The Globe and Mail in September 1999 showed that Canadian bottlers draw about 30 billion litres a year of top-quality Canadian water, which they sell at home and abroad. They pay next to nothing for the water. On the export market alone, the bottlers fetched $200 million. 

The sale of Canadian water to other countries has doubled since 1996. In 1989, 23 million litres of Canadian bottled water were sold to the United States; by 1998, this figure increased to 272 million litres. Canadian water bottlers now are the largest suppliers of bottled water to the United States. 

Newfoundland now is trying to decide whether to allow bulk export of fresh water, despite the federally imposed moratorium on any exports of bulk water shipments. 

McCurdy Enterprises of Newfoundland wants to "harvest" 13 billion gallons of water a year from Gisborne Lake, an 11-square-mile lake in Newfoundland. The plan is to take water from the lake by pipeline eight kilometres to the coastal town of Grand LaPierre, where it would be loaded into scrubbed, single-hull former oil tankers. McCurdy Enterprises also plans to open a water-bottling plant in Grand LaPierre that would employ 150 people. 

Premier Brian Tobin of Newfoundland says he is concerned about compensating businesses who spent money in good faith - in the Gisborne Lake example, nearly $1 million - expecting to be rewarded for their enterprise, only to run into the federal moratorium.

Another Canadian company, Global Water Corporation, has a bulk-water purchase agreement with the Alaskan community of Sitka, which would allow the company to take five billion gallons of water a year from the glacier-fed Blue Lake for export to China. The bottled water would be contained in five-gallon jugs.

In February 1999, The New York Times carried a story on Canada's position in a water-rich, water-poor world. It began: 

"For just about as long as there has been a border with the United States, some Canadians have believed that Americans covet their country and the resources it contains. 

"A few conspiracy subscribers still believe Washington harbors ambitions about northern expansion similar to those that provoked the first armed incursion into what is now Canada in the 18th century. And a certain type of Canadian is sure that free-trade agreements are a plot to make Canada a commercial colony of the United States.

"But there is one subject that leaves a broad range of even normally clear-eyed and level-headed Canadians looking for American subterfuge - fresh water.

"From the thunderous torrent at Niagara Falls to the perpetual rainy coast of British Columbia, Canada is awash in more fresh water than almost any other place on earth. But although it contains 20 per cent of the world's known freshwater resources, Canada believes it has little or none to spare."

The Times article quotes Barlow of the Council of Canadians as saying, "I don't think the United States is going to send up an army to take our water. I don't think they have to." What Barlow means is that under the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Canadian bulk water may already be subject to continental exploitation, and unless Canada acts firmly and forcefully it almost certainly will be. Canadian bottled water already is included in NAFTA. The difference between a litre of bottled water and a supertanker of bulk water may turn out to be merely a matter of size and semantics.

Muldoon of the CELA expects the first serious pressure on Canada's water resources to come from the U.S. Southwest where development is rapidly outgrowing the region's water supply. He also expects pressure from the American plains, where intensive agriculture is depleting aquifers. 

Muldoon fears that even a modest water export precedent "could open the floodgates, changing Canada's water supply position for the worse - and forever."

Those worries may soon be relieved. In August 1999, the International Joint Commission released a report in Washington and Ottawa recommending a six-month moratorium on the bulk sale of water from the Great Lakes. Water levels on four of the five Great Lakes are too low, the commission warned, and the ecosystem is in danger. According to the report: 

"...it is not possible at this time to identify, with any confidence, all the adverse consequences of water removals..."

Ottawa is expected to follow the commission's advice and impose the temporary moratorium.
The federal government is expected to go one step further by introducing legislation to ban large-scale water exports for good. It plans to introduce amendments to the International Boundary Waters Treaty Act, which will prohibit removals of water from boundary waters such as the Great Lakes. Welcome news for many environmentalists, but only the first step.

An irony here though, Maude Barlow points out, is that even an attempt to ban water exports would acknowledge that fresh water in lakes and rivers is a commodity subject to trade-agreement regulations. Her mission now is to emphasize Canada's sovereign rights, its right to control its own resources.

Meanwhile, the Council of Canadians keeps churning out warnings, which are worth reading and heeding. Such as: 

The consumption of water is doubling every 20 years, twice the rate of world population growth; 

The underground aquifier that supplies one-third of the water for the continental United States is being depleted eight times faster than it is being replenished; 

Saudi Arabia is a net exporter of wheat using non-renewable water reserves. Saudi Arabia is expected to exhaust its water reserves in 50 years; 

The manufacture of computer wafers, used in the production of computer chips, uses up to 18 million litres of water a day. Around the world, the computer industry uses 1.5 trillion litres of water and produces 300 billion litres of wastewater every year. 

Barlow expects the first severe impact of the coming water bankruptcy will hit China, where annual industrial water use is expected to rise from 52 billion tons to 269 billion tons in the next 30 years, due to a huge population increase and rising incomes that mean more indoor plumbing. "China will be the first country in the world that will literally have to restructure its economy to respond to water scarcity," Barlow says.

We will be hearing much more about water in coming months and years. And if wars of the future will be fought over water, Canada will be in the thick of the battle.

Translate this page automatically.