From Edmonton's VUE WEEKLY
Week of October 30th

Get ready for the Maude squad
SCOTT HARRIS / scottvueweekly.com

For more than two decades, Maude Barlow has been one of the most prominent figures in some of the most high-profile fights in Canada.

As national chairperson of the national advocacy group the Council of Canadians, Barlow has been front and centre in challenging the expansion of corporate globalization, from the acrimonious debate in 1988 over the Free Trade Agreement with the United States to the post-9/11 efforts to forge the North American Security and Prosperity Partnership. In between, she’s taken on Monsanto and Conrad Black, opposed bank mergers and helped bring about the collapse of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.

In recent years, Barlow has increasingly turned her attention to what she calls the “global water crisis,” pushing both within Canada and internationally to have the right to water recognized as a basic human right. To that end, she co-founded the international Blue Planet Project and has penned two books, Blue Gold: The Battle Against Corporate Theft of the World’s Water and more recently Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Fight for the Right to Water. In 2005 she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “alternative Nobel Prize,” for her work on water.

Now 61, Barlow shows no signs of slowing down. On October 14, the president of the United Nations General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto, appointed Barlow as his senior advisor on water issues, a position she will juggle while continuing her position with the Council of Canadians.
Barlow will be in Edmonton this weekend for the Council’s annual general meeting, and Vue Weekly caught up with her, somewhat appropriately, in Niagara Falls.

Vue Weekly: I know that water issues have been your passion for a number of years. Can you talk about the situation globally that has compelled you to make water such a priority in your work and to accept this UN post?

Maude Barlow: Well, I’m in Niagara Falls speaking to the Niagara Health Council and I’m just going over the numbers and I think that it’s just stunning—it just kind of smacks you in the face—that water is the number one killer in our world today. More kids die from waterborne disease than HIV/AIDS, war and traffic accidents put together. The World Health Organization says that 80 per cent of all disease and illness worldwide is connected to contaminated water. It’s just a stunning, stunning reality.

And the problem is getting worse, not better, because we have a world where the demand for water is growing dramatically and where the population is growing and where the lifestyle of urbanization, industrialization and consumerism is growing, which means that the demands on water are growing.

Unless we really tackle this very, very seriously, a lot more people are going to die in the future and they’re not all going to be in the global south. This is not just going to be something far away, it’s going to be a global issue for all of us.

VW: Where does Canada fit into the global water picture, both in our domestic approach and what we bring to international discussions?
MB: We fit in very badly in a whole bunch of ways. First, we have very antiquated laws, particularly at the national level, to protect our water. The last national water act was brought in in 1970. We don’t know where our groundwater sources are and we don’t know how sustainable it is, so we need to do that mapping. We have no national drinking water standards, we allow huge amounts of contaminant dumping. Our lakes are in trouble. Lake Winnipeg is very sick, Northern Alberta is a destroying its water table to provide energy for the United States, the Great Lakes are in crisis. So we have what I call the myth of abundance. We contaminate and we waste and we do not protect our water. We think we’re awash in water so we don’t have to worry about it.

The second issue in Canada is that we live next to a thirsty superpower that is increasingly looking at water as a national security issue and is looking outside its borders, or will be soon, for new sources of water. I think it’s going to look to the Guarani Aquifer in Latin America and I think it’s going to look to Canada’s North. And we have a trade agreement with the United States—NAFTA—that defines water as both a tradable good and an investment, which means the American energy companies operating in Northern Alberta would have the right to sue for financial compensation if the government of Alberta ever said, “You have to cut back your water use because you’re destroying our water table.” And also if any province ever started the commercial export of water we would be liable—once the tap’s on under the provisions of NAFTA, you couldn’t say “Well, we’ve changed our minds.” So we need to ban the commercial export of water, and we need to re-open NAFTA to make that possible.

Thirdly, Canada does not respect and support the right to water either constitutionally in our own country or around the world or at the United Nations, and has been a retarding force with the United States in the promotion of this notion that water is not a commodity that can be denied people if they’re poor, but rather a human right that cannot be denied to anyone.

VW: What are you hoping to accomplish over the next year in your position as senior advisor on water issues at the UN?

MB: I think it’s going to be impossible to change the culture of the UN overnight. There’s an awful lot of work going on between some UN agencies and the World Bank and the big water companies and the World Water Council, and that has been a big concern of ours for years now.

But in Father Miguel d’Escoto we have a man who deeply believes in justice, in the right of food and water of all people, who cares deeply about the poor and disenfranchised. That’s what he wants to speak to and he’s hoping to bring these issues right to the floor of the General Assembly, which has frankly been allowing them to be dealt with by these other agencies. So, I think the possibility that we could start to change that, start to challenge the current thinking in there, start to shake things up, start to really get some action going around the Millennium Development Goals and so on, I think the potential is quite exciting, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken it because I just think you’d be spinning your wheels. But he just happens to be an incredibly important and marvelous man, and he needs support from northern governments and northern citizen’s movements and that’s what we hope to provide.

VW: Changing gears a bit: you’re coming to Edmonton for the Council of Canadians AGM, which is focusing on North American integration. Can you talk about how that process is affecting Alberta?

MB: Well, continental integration is already having a huge impact on Alberta. All of the energy that is being so brutally extracted from the tar sands and all of the planned expansion of that that’s destroying water and habitat and people’s livelihoods if they happen to be farming or doing anything but working in the tar sands—that is deep integration. It is all to supply the United States with energy because we signed this proportional sharing agreement on energy in NAFTA. So it’s very important that we understand that what’s happening in Alberta is kind of the symbol of deep integration.

VW: Where is the process of pushing for greater integration through mechanisms like the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) currently at?

MB: I think we’ve been successful in beating it back a bit. It’s certainly been slowed, but people need to remember that there are still these working committees across the border working to harmonize regulations, and of course under George Bush regulatory reform has all been one way in the United States, which is downwards. So we don’t have access to what they’re doing or dealing with so it’s anybody’s guess how much our regulations are already being affected. But I do think we have successfully challenged it in a very real way, in a very important way. So I do think there are some hopeful signs.

VW: What impact do you think what we’re seeing in world markets will have on the process of continental integration?

MB: Well, I’m certainly hoping people will see that putting all our eggs in the US basket was a mistake and that there were a few things that we did right, like not allowing the bank mergers—which by the way was a fight the Council of Canadians led; I loved hearing Jean Chrétien taking credit for it. I think that Canadians are looking at it now and saying, “Why would we want to integrate more deeply with an economy that can’t keep its own rogue financial industry in line?” We really are at a turning point.

What we’re concerned about, however is these new discussions about deep integration of the services industry between Canada and Europe. I’m afraid a lot of people are going to say, “Oh, that’s good, that’s diversifying away form the US.” But it’s actually just a great big sop to the service companies in Europe and a further way to break down public services in both Europe and Canada. And under the most favoured nation treatment of NAFTA, you can’t open that up to European countries and not open them up to the United States. So if we gave access to our public services to European water, health and daycare companies, we’d have to offer them to American water, health and daycare companies. So it’s a way of getting into our services.

VW: Many of the problems you’ve mentioned come back to NAFTA, and there’s been talk during the US election cycle about renegotiating NAFTA. Do you think anything will come of it after the election?

MB: I don’t. Well, I’ll put it a different way: if Obama gets in and if we had a government that we trusted at all in this country I don’t think any Canadian would be adverse to talking about joint projects on the environment, on public health issues and even security. I think Canadians would be a lot less nervous about Obama. The pressure will be on him by the progressive movements in the United States to remember who put him there and not to go too far over. We have to remember it was Bill Clinton who allowed the deregulation of financial services—Reagan started it, but Clinton took it a whole level further. It was Bill Clinton who was so behind the World Trade Organization and NAFTA, so just because you’re a Democrat doesn’t mean that you don’t look critically at these things.
That being said, I think that Obama might even be willing to reopen NAFTA so that we can get a different kind of trading relationship on the North American continent, and that I think would be exciting.