Trade of a crucial resource short-sighted

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Canadians are among the most wasteful users of water in the world. The average citizen uses more than 300 litres per day, more than any country other than the US. In addition to withdrawals from major bodies of water, it is estimated that there are over 500,000 wells in Ontario alone drawing water, with 14,000 new wells being added each year.

One reason for the extravagant use of water is that it is cheap. Typically, Canadians are charged 36 cents per 1,000 litres of water. In comparison, Australians are charged $1.47. Furthermore, bottled water has now become a commodity to trade and sell like any other good. Bottled water is drawn mainly from groundwater aquifers throughout the country and much of this product is exported abroad. In other words, we take water for granted.

We have felt free to dam and divert our rivers to suit our needs for cheap electricity and transport, without fully understanding the long-term impacts on ecosystems of large-scale water diversions. Hydrologists, who make it their profession to try to understand these effects, tell us that over three-quarters of the 139 largest rivers in North America and Eurasia are now dammed or otherwise controlled mostly with harmful effects, including fragmentation of habitat quality, land-water interactions and migration corridors for aquatic wildlife.

For example, Quebec Hydro's James Bay Project diverted three rivers into La Grande Riviere. One of the rivers, the Eastmain, is just a trickle of its former self, reduced to 95 per cent of its original flow. Sea grass beds on the coast of James Bay are in danger of disappearing because the swollen La Grande is flushing the mild salinity they require out into the bay.

The complaints of the James Bay Cree about massive ecosystem destruction, earlier dismissed as sour grapes, are now coming to pass. In other words, it is nearly impossible to predict what large scale water diversions or takings will do to an ecosystem. It's no wonder First Nations enjoin us to look seven generations into the future before we do something irreparable to the environment. If we cannot know what massive diversions or extractions will do, we must err on the side of caution.

The Canadian federal government, in November 1999, announced draft amendments to the Boundary Waters Treaty Act that would prohibit bulk water removals and diversions from all Canadian boundary waters unless licenced by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. His discretion will be guided by new regulations to the Act, which are not yet complete. The teeth of the new legislation will be in these new regulations, which makes them crucial to the goal of conservation.

In addition, the proposed federal legislation deals only with boundary waters, it remains essential to deal with interior waters and that requires complementary action by provincial governments. A unified cross-Canada approach is essential and must give top priority to water conservation for the sake of ecosystem protection and sustaining water for future generations.

This issue was on the table at federal-provincial meetings of the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment in Alberta at the end of November 1999, but no agreement was reached. The Accord that the ministers of the Environment discussed at Kananaskis, Alta. had a good objective: to "establish a Canada-wide approach for the protection of Canadian waters, by prohibiting bulk removal of surface and ground water from major drainage basins in Canada, including for the purposes of export." A noble goal, but as Canada and the provinces debate who should be doing what, time is running out.

A U.S. company, Sun Belt, is suing Canada for billions of dollars under the North American Free Trade Agreement because British Columbia thwarted its plans to pipe fresh water down to California. The Nova Group, stopped by public outrage in its 1998 bid to export millions of litres of Lake Superior water, has said, if it can't tak the lake, it will take ground water. Bottling companies in Canada are permitted to take some 30 billion litres a year, for free, from reservoirs under the ground. Meanwhile, thirsty U.S. states are eyeing our water as their own aquifers begin pumping dirt.

It's tempting to think that all that water going over Niagara Falls and out the St. Lawrence is just going to waste, we should do something with it; sell it maybe. But only one per cent of Great Lakes water is renewable. All the rest is our legacy from the glaciers. If we take too much, we are no longer trading on the interest from that inheritance, we are mining the capital and putting the whole ecosystem at great risk. The trouble is, no one knows how much is too much.

The International Joint Commission is scheduled to deliver its final report on the matter of large water diversions and takings from the Great Lakes in March. We are at a historic threshold. Will we take a path toward ecosystem unsustainability and lose our ability to protect the ecosystems of our natural waters? Or, will we insist that water is a basic human right and that in North America, we will work towards ensuring that water will no longer be wasted and polluted, or ecosystems degraded and destroyed by removing water or diverting it?

David McLaren is the Communications Co-ordinator for the Canadian Environmental Law Association, a legal aid clinic, based in Ontario, serving those who would not otherwise have access to legal services on environmental matters. Mr. McLaren can be contacted at d.mclaren@bmts.com.