Canada has water, the U.S wants it.

by Marc Montgomery on October 1, 2015

Once again this year, a severe drought hit the west coast of North America and the south-western US. This put enormous pressure on existing water supplies for agriculture and cities across a large section of the continent.  Also again this year, the situation reached crisis levels for the south-western U.S. and  California, the biggest suppliers of fruit, nuts and vegetables to all of North America.

Many Americans once again looked to Canada and said there is plenty of freshwater being “wasted” by allowing it to flow freely into James Bay, the Arctic and Pacific Oceans. They say that the water could be sent to them,… some insisting not could, but should.

Although water is a critical resource and becoming ever more so because of climate change, it has not been discussed in Canada’s current election campaign.

Lloyd Alter has written several times on this subject. He is an adjunct professor teaching sustainable design at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario. He is also the design editor at Treehugger and a regular contributor of environment-related articles to Treehugger, the Guardian newspaper, Corporate Knights magazine and others.

Professor Alter points out that there have been a number of schemes in the past to take freshwater from Canada and send it south to alleviate shortages in agriculture and in American cities.

In the 1950s there were plans to use nuclear explosions to blast canals from Canada’s north, down to the US border. The plan was called the North American Power and Water Alliance, or NAWAPA. An incredibly ambitious concept, it would change the ecology of North America. Most Canadians would be absolutely horrified at the thought, but most have also never heard of it. Yet the idea has never gone away and still lurks in the minds of many American politicians, and industrialists.

The idea was to redirect flows of major Canadian rivers southward through the Rocky Mountain trench, to the US west.  and also dam James Bay, blast a huge canal south through Ontario and send water into the Great Lakes, and then southward to the central US.

(Editorial comment:  The dam across James Bay and redirecting fresh water south is also known as the Grand Cannel Project from the 1980s)

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