Economic boon or national calamity: Canada is once again under pressure to export our blue gold. Part 5 of a five-day series
HUBERT BAUCH
The Gazette

"Canada has probably one of the largest resources of fresh water in the world. Water is going to be, already is , a very valuable commodity and I've always found it odd that Canada is so willing to sell oil and natural gas and uranium and coal, which are by their nature finite. But talking about water is off the table, yet water is renewable."

Paul Cellucci, former U.S. ambassador to Canada

"Water is an economic good, but it is so much more than that: It is the basis of all life, not just human. It is integral to the health and beauty of Canada's landscape. It is the key to our past and future. If this, the last and greatest natural resource still in Canadian hands is traded away, we are a lesser people, sovereign in name only."

Frank Quinn, leading Canadian water expert

The viewpoints above are opposite poles of a longstanding controversy over Canadian bulk water sales.

It has simmered with periodic bursts to roiling boil for half a century now, and in that time the two sides have moved no closer to compromise.

For proponents, now as then, exporting bulk water is a potential economic boon. For opponents, it has been and is a prescription for national calamity.

Canadians tend to be of latter mind. Past schemes to export Canadian water in bulk, via canal, pipeline or tanker, were corked by sufficiently furious public outcry to sway politicians who contemplated them. Polls tend to run 70 per cent against bulk water export, and the issue reportedly ranks in the Top 5 of concerns expressed in letters to the prime minister's office, suggesting the presence of a febrile protectionist lobby.

We do export water now, though it must be in containers of no more than 20 litres. But pressure is once again building on Canada to share its rich water supply more abundantly, notably with the relentlessly parching U.S. southwest, whose booming population is draining the region's fresh-water basin several times faster than nature can replenish it. In a U.S. government survey this decade, two-thirds of U.S. states reported they expect water shortages within 10 years.

Recent high-level talks on North American integration were initiated by the U.S., Canadian and Mexican governments under the disarming name of a Security and Prosperity Partnership, which would extend the existing continental free trade treaty to new areas of administration and jurisdiction. The SPP has renewed fears that our water is on the bargaining table and the Americans will get at it one way or another, that if we don't give in and sell it to them, they'll come in and take it.

The official government line is an emphatic, "No way!"

"The government of Canada has no intention of entering into negotiations behind closed doors or otherwise regarding the issue of bulk water exports," Environment Minister John Baird declared this year in response to reports otherwise. "Canada has restrictions in place to prohibit bulk removal of water backed by serious fines and/or imprisonment. Canada is committed to protecting water in its natural state and preserving the state of ecosystems and will continue to be so."

Water conservationists, however, have doubts as to that and warn any amount of bulk water sell-off would be too much, in that once the tap is turned on even a little, there'll be no turning it off even if we're in danger of running dry.

Leaked SPP documents suggest water as a topic for discussion and some leading promoters of bulk water exports are involved in the SPP process. Critics also maintain Canada sorely lacks a comprehensive water protection policy and that existing laws against bulk exports are too vague and too vulnerable to challenge under the continental trade regime.

One of the leaked SPP discussion papers put the issue bluntly: Canada will have an overabundance of water in years to come while the United States is destined for a shortage. "At the end of the day there may have to be arrangements."

Conservationists say Canada had better be ready, much better than it is at present, for the evening of that day.

"There is no question the United States is eyeing Canadian water," says fresh-water activist Maude Barlow, author of a new book, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. "Water has become as important as energy to the White House and the Pentagon as well as the big business community in the United States."

And it's not just what some might dismiss as the enviro-nutter fringe evoking grim scenarios. As rock-ribbed a Canadian establishment man as former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed also said in a recent interview that we'd better watch out: "I predict that the United States will be coming after our fresh water aggressively." And if they do, he advised we hang tough: "We Canadians should be prepared to respond with a forceful 'no.' We need it for ourselves."

For now at least, there is a preponderance of interests in Canada, both environmental and economic, ranging across the political spectrum from Barlow to Lougheed, arrayed against bulk water exportation.

The conservationist argument disputes the widespread notion propagated by the export lobby that Canada has an overabundance of water. The recurrent line is that Canada, with just half of one per cent of the world's population, holds fully one-quarter of the world's freshwater supply and, therefore, has as much to share as can profitably be moved.

But of that, only over six per cent is actually renewable, making Canada fairly average by global standards, and the greater part of that flows in relatively inaccessible northern rivers. Furthermore, less than three per cent of that renewable supply is handy to the Canada-U.S. border, where most Canadians live. While these would be the most economically viable waters to tap for bulk export, they are already being used to capacity or toxically polluted and additional major withdrawals would have devastating effects on the ecosystems they sustain.

Such concern is heightened by uncertainty over the effects of manifest climate change.

There is also a persistent economic argument against bulk water export, which holds that water is vital to Canadian industry and agriculture and that exporting our water would encourage development of both elsewhere and amount to exporting Canadian jobs. Furthermore, existing Canadian industry would be strapped to compete for the water it needs at global market price, unlike the quasi-giveaway rate it now enjoys.

"It's nonsense to talk about a surplus and it's dangerous folly even to contemplate selling water," said General A.G.L. McNaughton, another eminent Canadian establishmentarian and former head of the International Joint Commission that administers border waterways. "All our water resources can be translated into growth somewhere. Let that growth take place here in Canada."

A recent government briefing note concluded exporting water in bulk would create few new jobs beyond initial infrastructure construction, nor would there be as much of a royalty windfall for the Canadian public purse as some expect: "Bulk water export offers little advantage to the Canadian taxpayer in the long term."

But just saying no to the Americans may not be easy if they want our water badly enough.

No analyst pro or con on the issue seriously envisages a U.S. invasion to hijack our water at gunpoint. Besides the brutal military implications, there would be the monstrous complications of building the extensive infrastructure necessary for bulk water transport under hostile conditions, even if Canada were a bigger pushover than Iraq. Besides the hideous cost and engineering problems, it would be vulnerable to sabotage unless Canadians were reduced to an abject slave society.

On the whole, the Americans stand a better chance of making us cough up bulk water by sending in lawyers waving money than marines toting guns.

The implementation of the Canada-U.S. free trade treaty in 1989 and its continental successor four years later raised the question whether water in its natural state is now a tradable good, a commodity subject to liberalized trade rules, said leading environment writer Andrew Nikiforuk in a paper for the program on water issues at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies.

"To date, no one has been able to provide a reliable answer; the facts are generally muddy," he concluded after a survey of existing water protection laws.

Early drafts of the first treaty specifically exempted water as a tradable good, but the clause somehow didn't make it into the final text. Nor is there a specific water exemption in NAFTA, so whether it is or not largely depends on the eye of the beholder. Export critics maintain there is legal room for U.S. interests to sue for Canadian water on the ground we are withholding a vital tradable good. It is feared even formally declaring bulk water something Canada isn't prepared to trade would in effect acknowledge that it is, in fact, a tradable commodity and, therefore, subject to continental demand.

And there's no giving in just a little, critics maintain. Under continental trade rules, there's no cutting off the customer. Any cuts in supply to U.S. or Mexican markets would have to be proportionally matched by cuts to Canadian consumers.

"It would be a sorcerer's apprentice situation," said Adele Hurley, director of the Munk Centre water program. "You then trigger all sorts of situations beyond your control under trade agreements. Once you start, you're in a race to the bottom."

A possible safeguard for Canadian water is that it could legally be excluded on the grounds a ban is needed to conserve the resource to protect human and environmental health, suggested Paul Muldoon, former head of the Canadian Environmental Law Association.

For that, he added, a coherent Canadian water strategy, which we don't currently have, would be greatly helpful. "A national conservation strategy would not only serve the purpose of protecting our future water supply but provide a foundation for Canada to assert its sovereignty over its own resources and withstand any trade challenges that come our way."

But assertions of Canadian sovereignty on present grounds might be moot in the future, some suggest.

"North Americans are ready for a new relationship that renders the old definitions of sovereignty obsolete," mused Robert Pastor, a leading U.S. academic promoter of continental integration.

The best thing Canada can do for the Americans is not sell them water, but rather convince them to conserve to the point where they can live within their own water means and persuade them it is lunacy to allow urban sprawl in places like Arizona and Nevada, Adele Hurley said.

But one way or another, it's something we have to talk about with the Americans and we should be doing it now, said Andrew Weaver, a climatologist with the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria. While inclined to the conservationist view, Weaver says circumstances decades hence may yet make bulk exports inevitable.

"We should be talking now about how we're going to get fresh water to the U.S. and work out sound water policies together because, say, 50 years from now when there are serious water crises, they'll be on us like big brother. We're like one state to them, and if there's no policy in place, they'll start to set the terms of such a policy."