A rchive Date
[ 30-09-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.ottawasun.com/News/Columnists/Harris_Michael/2005/09/30/1241808.html
It all boils down to water
By MICHAEL HARRIS
Fri, September 30, 2005
For those who think that environmentalists are like phrenologists, alchemists, and soothsayers, a cautionary note: The Arctic is melting and it isn't because of alien heat rays fired from a Klingon ship or the "intelligent design" of the universe.
A new study by U.S. scientists confirms what Canada's indigenous people have been saying for years - that our Arctic permafrost is no longer permanent and the amount of sea ice in the far north is diminishing by an astonishing 8% per decade.
According to the new NASA study, which actually documents the melting sea ice from satellite imaging, we are now at the lowest recorded levels since 1978 - the year satellite data became available.
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have grabbed everyone's attention, as world weather patterns change, including where rain and snow fall and in what amounts. Only President Bush appears to doubt the reality of global warming, despite the best evidence of the U.S. Academy of Science.
Some places are getting more rain than they have ever seen, while other regions like the American southwest are literally drying up. One way or the other, it all comes down to water. And that places Canada in front of huge questions. The most important one is whether or not we should turn water into a commodity like oil, in other words, to sell it.
Given the vast weight of water and the costs of bulk exports, the only real customer is the U.S. With near dust bowl conditions in parts of the midwest and genuine drought in the southwest, America will soon be crying out for water the way it now craves cheap oil. Just last week the governor of California said that his state didn't have enough of this life-sustaining resource and needed to find new supplies.
Arnold needn't bother asking Mexico.
As Marq de Villiers wrote in the book that won him the Governor General's Award for non-fiction, that country has virtually none left after the U.S. "stole" the flow of the Colorado River from the Mexicans to water Las Vegas. Which leaves us as the supplier of last resort, sort of.
We are not as water rich as you may believe. Conventional wisdom has it that Canada has two-thirds of the world's freshwater resources. The true number is just 6%. I have read reports that the Great Lakes themselves contain half of the world's fresh water, a declaration too ludicrous for words. In fact, the Great Lakes are not even close to being the largest body of fresh water in the world, (that is a distinction reserved for a Siberian lake).
But there is an even more remarkable fact about them: Only 1% of the water in these lakes is replaced each year by feeder rivers and rainfall. The rest is a one-time only gift of nature, what the experts call "fossil water" from the melting of the glaciers 12,000 years ago.
Industry, agriculture, and dense human populations are obscenely overusing this gift to the extent that we are actually strip-mining our water. No matter how big the resource may appear on paper, human activity is inexorably lowering the levels of the Great Lakes. Ask any cottager in Georgian Bay.
So should we be selling it, any of it? After all, we sell every other natural resource we possess from oil and gas to gold and trees. Water, if properly managed, has the advantage of being infinitely renewable, or so the argument goes.
The reality is, however, that we have managed our water resources very poorly, despite our natural blessings. And there is another thing. Though precious, water is not yet valuable. We virtually give it away to those who want to exploit it.
And therein lies the rub.
When it comes to water, the Mulroney government gave away the farm in the free trade negotiations that led to the North American Free Trade Agreement. Take no comfort in the often repeated view that NAFTA is silent on whether water is included in the agreement. The federal government of the day utterly failed to exempt bulk water sales to the U.S. under the agreement, meaning that such exports are implicitly approved, which is exactly the interpretation the U.S. will place on the document when the time comes.
Coupled with the fact that NAFTA says that the signatories can't discriminate against foreign firms who want to get in on any commercial action in commodities, the question may ideally be should we sell our water, but the reality is likely that we have no choice.
What will price be?
I can still remember Canada's trade minister during the NAFTA negotiations, Pat Carney, insisting that water sales had been exempted from the agreement and then having to admit that it was not there in "black and white" as she and her officials insisted. And what will the price be?
Exactly what we charge on our citizens - virtually nothing.
These days, water exports are all the rage, whether they be by river diversion or basin re-routing, a dangerous business since water cannot reproduce itself. I am reminded of Dryden's great couplet: "The tampering race is subject to this curse/ To physic its disease into a worse."
And don't forget Coleridge: "Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink."
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