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A war is brewing over water: will NAFTA encourage or prevent water exports from Canada?

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 11, 2008 at 7:19 am

From Niagara This Week:

Living in the Great White North, we spend a good portion of our year looking south with an envious eye to folks in the U.S. south and southwest basking in double digit temperatures while we’re scraping ice off our windshields with cold-numbed hands.

But millions of U.S. residents living in places such as California, Nevada, and Arizona could soon be looking this way with a hungry glint in their eye. And it won’t be our weather they’re coveting. It will be our water.

Living in Niagara, surrounded on three sides by two Great Lakes and the mighty Niagara River, and with dozens of smaller rivers and tributaries snaking through the peninsula, it would be easy to take water for granted. Not so in the U.S. southwest and in much of the world, where water is scarce — and getting scarcer. So much so that experts are predicting courtroom clashes between parched U.S. states, cities and regions fighting for finite amounts of water, and analysts predicting that in the 21st century water will become the new oil.

And like oil, another valuable, finite resource, nations will go to war over water.

The harsh reality is that while our planet may be two-thirds water — so much water that it’s the colour blue from space — the amount of freshwater world-wide is becoming stressed.

An interesting article touching on many issues, including whether or not NAFTA protects water exports from Canada:

Herb Gray, Canadian chair of the joint Canadian-U.S. International Joint Commission (IJC), which for almost a century has worked to settle water disputes on the Great Lakes and protect the lakes, believes Ontario and Quebec legislation, as well as federal laws in both countries, prohibits the mass siphoning off of water from the lakes to be shipped elsewhere. Federal U.S. law, for instance, allows U.S. governors to veto any such move. “There are regulatory safeguards,” he said in an interview after an address to the Niagara Falls Rotary Club recently.

Gray insists any court challenges to water export bans under the North American Free Trade Agreement should fail because water, in its natural state, is not a ‘commodity’ and therefore should be excluded from the agreement.

Maude Barlow, national chair of the citizens’ group Council of Canadians, begs to differ. The author of the new book ‘Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water,’ said while NAFTA can’t force a province to export water, once a province does begin to allow the export of water for sale — an idea several provinces have toyed with — then our water becomes a tradeable good under NAFTA and it opens the floodgates to exporting.

Barlow, fresh from a book signing tour in states such as Texas, New Mexico and California, said the states’ increasingly desperate water situation was an eye-opener. She said the Pentagon has been getting advice from companies such as weapons maker Lockheed Martin on how to access freshwater from other countries, and that it’s becoming a national security issue south of the border.

“I’m telling you, they’re in deep trouble,” she said in an interview. “It really is a crisis.

“I do feel they’ll be coming” for our water.

Read the full text of this article from Niagara This Week by clicking here.

July 11, 2008 · Filed Under National water news

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