Trump water faucet comments and the Columbia River Treaty  – Richard Mills

2024.09.21

Donald Trump has once again waded into an issue he doesn’t understand — this time over diverting Canadian fresh water south for irrigating drought-affected areas.

The Republican presidential nominee announced an idea to help alleviate California water shortages involving British Columbia.

“So you have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps in Canada and all pouring down and they have essentially a very large faucet,” Trump said last Friday.

“And you turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it. It’s massive. It’s as big as the wall of that building right there behind you. You turn that, and all of that water aimlessly goes into the Pacific (Ocean), and if you turned that back, all of that water would come right down here and into Los Angeles,” he said.

Informed Canadians reacted immediately to Trump’s facile idea.

“It’s not that simple. To me, it’s an uninformed opinion. It’s somebody that doesn’t fully understand how water works and doesn’t understand the intricacies of allocating water not only between two countries but also for the environment,” Tricia Stadnyk, an environmental engineering professor at the University of Calgary, told CTV TV in Calgary.

The faucet Trump is talking about is the Columbia River, which begins in southeastern British Columbia and flows south to Oregon, where it empties into the Pacific Ocean near Astoria.  

The Columbia River Treaty regulates how much water is flowing across the border and what it’s going to be used for. The treaty originally required Canada to provide 15.5 million acre-feet of water storage by building three dams: Duncan, Hugh Keenleyside and Mica.

First signed in 1961 by Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and US President Dwight Eisenhower, the treaty was recently renegotiated and there is nothing in it about diverting limited water in US states like Idaho to California. Read more on the history

An agreement-in-principle signed in July enables officials to update the treaty to ensure continued flood-risk management and co-operation on hydro power on the river, CTV News reported.

US eyes Canadian water

It’s not the first time that California and Nevada have looked north to get more water, states an article published  in the Idaho Capital Sun.

Water — the next US-Canada trade irritant — Richard Mills

Columnist Rocky Barker reminds readers that in 1990, Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn won the unanimous vote of his colleagues on the Board of Supervisors to study transferring water from the Columbia River and the Snake River, its largest tributary.

An aqueduct system would start near Hagerman, Idaho, where river water would be pumped about 6,500 feet above sea level to Jackpot, Nevada. From there, the water would flow downhill to Lake Mead, where it would turn turbines to generate electricity at the Hoover Dam.

While the idea eventually died, Barker writes that Donald Trump has resurrected it. He also notes the US Senate must approve the re-negotiated Columbia River Treaty before it’s finalized, and asks whether, if Trump is re-elected, he will try to rewrite the treaty so it diverts Columbia-Snake River water to California.

Stadnyk, the environmental engineering professor, says the US doesn’t get to decide how much water goes across the border and how much stays.

“There is not a lot of water in any system just sitting there to be had. We are over-allocated in almost all our systems, for the increases in population that we have and the demands and uses of our water supply, both in Canada and the U.S.” she said.

Moreover, a diversion project would cost billions and the consequences would have everlasting effects on the ecosystem.

“We can’t just be taking water and diverting it and sending it somewhere else. Besides that, every time that we’re asked to do that, it’s a sign that we’re living outside of our means,” she said.

Werner Antweiler with the University of British Columbia Sauder School of Business said that there is no limitless supply of water in Canada as claimed by Trump.

“In fact, we’ve actually had less water because of climate change that’s going south,” he told Global News. “And so there has to be some adjustments made. But also the water is used for hydro dams. It’s used for maintaining the fisheries in the Columbia River all the way to the coast, all the way through Oregon primarily. And so there is just no spare water here, frankly, shipping it anywhere.”

Antweiler said B.C. and Canada needs its own water and there is no more to reroute in bulk to other countries.

“It’s unrealistic for ecological reasons as well as commercial reasons. And it would actually require a treaty and we would not negotiate a treaty that would be to the detriment of Canada. We would only want to negotiate a treaty that would be beneficial to us,” Antweiler said.

“In fact, that is exactly what the Columbia Treaty is doing.”

Trump said that if B.C. would turn the faucet then “farmers would have all the water they needed.”

Antweiler said it’s best to take comments like this one with a grain of salt.

“I’m sure Mr. Trump has never studied hydrology or the economics of water management and the actual, the needs of California, because what California needs is mostly local water,” he said.

“They need to actually manage their own water much better. They actually have water, but they’re mismanaging it for a number of reasons.”

Antweiler added that there is a lot that California can and should do to manage their water sources, including the use of water in agriculture.

California, whose nearly 40 million population is greater than Canada’s, is North America’s biggest supplier of fruits, nuts and vegetables. Not being able to properly irrigate its 43 million acres used for farming is their sole motivation to look elsewhere for a reliable source of H2O.

In fact, Canadians may be surprised to learn that plans have been on the books since the 1950s to divert a large amount of water from Canada, state-side.

The North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) proposed to use nuclear explosions to blast canals and channel water from the north-flowing Yukon, Liard, and Peace rivers, southward to water-deprived US agricultural regions and cities. A 2015 column posted on Radio Canada International notes that NAWAPA is still very much alive, with detailed proposals and analysis made in 2010 and 2012.

Another scheme, called the Grand Canal, would dam the top of James Bay, turning it into a huge reservoir, and cut a massive trench through northern Ontario that would bring fresh water to the Great Lakes, from where Americans could siphon however much water they need for farms, towns and cities impacted by climate change.

Abhorrent as these ideas seem, some Canadian politicians have advocated selling Canadian water down the river.

Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney introduced a bill that would have allowed exports by tanker and small-scale land diversion. Ex-NDP leader Thomas Mulcair wanted to explore the concept of bulk water exports while he was Quebec’s environment minister.

The Montreal Economic Institute reportedly argued that water exports would be a huge boon to heavily indebted Quebec, pointing out the province could earn as much as $65 billion annually by exporting around 10% of its fresh water supply.

Of course a large amount of Canadian water was shipped out of the country by Swiss consumer products giant Nestle, which sucked up vast amounts of groundwater for its bottling plant in Ontario, before selling its Canadian water business in 2020.

Columnist Lloyd Alter, in his piece ‘Canada has water. The US wants it’, claims that 3,200 cubic feet per second is pumped from Lake Michigan and sent south through the Chicago River and into the Mississippi, through deals made between Canadian and US industries.

The federal government’s Bill C-383 bans inter-basin transfers into international rivers but the legislation does not cover non-boundary waters or water resources in the north, states the Council of Canadians.

A further loophole in the act, is it narrows the definition of water removal to 50,000 liters or more, and exempts water used to make beverages.

Conclusion

Canadian politicians should be wary of any overtures the United States makes toward us for our water, not only because we may need all we can get, as drought conditions migrate north, but given how poorly our southern neighbour and supposed friend has treated us lately.

Consider how former President Trump decided the first country he would visit after inauguration in January 2017 was Saudi Arabia. Most incoming US presidents prioritize a visit with Canada, arguably its greatest ally, friend, and neighbor. The snub is not easily forgotten.

In 2018 Canada was surprisingly included among countries subject to Trump’s tariffs on imported aluminum and steel.

Then there was the fight over NAFTA. In renegotiating the trilateral agreement between Canada, the US and Mexico, Trump railed against Canadian dairy farmers, calling tariffs on milk, cheese and butter coming from the United States “a disgrace” and threatened to slap a 25% duty on Canadian-made cars.”

After Trump lost the election to Joe Biden many in Canada hoped the tense relationship between the two countries would become­­ more cordial, but Biden was quick to throw sand in the face of that notion. On his first day in office, Biden announced the Keystone XL pipeline expansion project would be scrapped.

It took a trade war with China for the US to realize how easily it can be held ransom over rare earths, cobalt, graphite, manganese or any other of the 35 minerals the US Geological Survey considers critical to US economic and national security.

Realizing that Canada supplies 13 of these minerals, and is America’s leading supplier of indium, potash, aluminum and tellurium, its second-largest supplier of tungsten, manganese and niobium, and ships roughly a quarter of US uranium supply, suddenly all previous acrimony was forgotten amid the new threat posed by China’s monopoly over much of the world’s critical minerals supply chain.

In January 2020, the two nations agreed to a Joint Action Plan on Critical Minerals Collaboration aimed at improving critical minerals security.

That was followed in 2021 with an agreement between Biden and Trudeau to build a US-Canada electric vehicle supply chain.

In March 2023, President Biden and Prime Minister Trudeau launched the one-year Canada-US Energy Transformation Task Force (ETTF) to accelerate cooperation on critical clean energy opportunities and supply chains. The ETTF was extended for another year this past May.

What gets me, though, is how bad Canadian politicians are at negotiating. Here we finally have a resource that should give us significant leverage in dealing with our largest trading partner. In return for offering our minerals and our mining expertise, what are we asking for in return? I’ve yet to discover anything in print.

Our best friend and ally’s reaction? To increasingly view Canada as a kind of “51st State” for mineral supply purposes (quoting here from Reuters).

Excuse me? A 51st State? What happened to Canadian sovereignty over it’s natural resources? Where’s the contrition in treating little brother Canada like a punching bag over our oil? Our minerals? Our lumber? Our dairy products? And now our water?

If we can’t even stand up for ourselves over mining, an area of national expertise since well before the United States asked for our help, what hope do we have in maintaining Canadian sovereignty over fresh water?

Richard (Rick) Mills
aheadoftheherd.com
subscribe to my free newsletter

Subscribe to AOTH’s free newsletter