Tuesday January 04, 2000 Share This Story With A Friend

Ottawa worried for a decade about water exports, documents show

SANDRA CORDON

OTTAWA (CP) - For more than a decade, Ottawa has worried about tankerloads of fresh water being shipped out of the country, yet its barriers remain porous, federal documents show.

Since at least 1988, federal officials have said they must act to protect Canada's fresh water resources from a thirsty world, according to documents obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.

Yet an accord between Ottawa and the provinces to ban bulk fresh water exports remains elusive.

Five provinces refused to sign on to a national ban on large-scale water exports after a meeting in late November of federal, provincial and territorial environment ministers.

A spokesman for Environment Minister David Anderson says the government is still optimistic a deal will be concluded this year.

"We've got the ball rolling," John Fraser said Tuesday.

"We're building on the accord . . . we expect to be able to add quite a few (more provinces) in the year to come."

Critics say it's taking far too long to negotiate the accord - with still no end in sight.

"I think this is going to drag on for some time," Bill Blaikie, the federal NDP environment critic, said Tuesday.

His motion a year ago in the Commons to ban bulk water exports received wide approval.

The Liberal government promised then - as it had the year before - to move quickly to ban bulk water removals from Canada.

Environment Department documents show the issue has been dragging on for more than decade.

"In 1988, the federal government had considered legislation to prohibit large scale exports or diversions for the purpose of exporting water," in large volumes, according to a July 1998 document on water export strategies from Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

The runup to the 1988 election may have squelched the bill.

Before that, the 1987 Federal Water Policy talked of prohibiting fresh water transfers, although attention then was focused on massive water diversion projects.

Ten years later, pressure to export Canada's fresh water in bulk - rather than bottles - is growing.

"Issues of water export is re-emerging as a concern - with forecasts of increasing pressure for diversions to address existing water shortages and potential impacts of climate change," says a 1997 Environment Department memo.

Concern heated up dramatically a year later when Nova Group, a based in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., got a permit from the Ontario government to ship up to 600 million litres of Lake Superior water to Asia by 2002.

The permit was withdrawn amid angry opposition on both sides of the border.

Ottawa then began a serious effort to prevent bulk removals of boundary waters shared with the United States.

As a result, a bill to prevent water exports from international waters - particularly the Great Lakes - is now before the Commons.

Canada has been selling its water for years, but only in bottles - a mere drop in the bucket compared with what ocean tankers could haul.

About 80 per cent of Canada's 126 million litres of bottled water - valued at more than $250 million in 1998 - were shipped from Quebec and almost entirely to the United States.

That annual total is less than one supertanker load, officials say in the documents.

Although provinces and territories are all opposed to bulk exports, several still don't like Ottawa's accord. Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Quebec refused to sign on two months ago.

But the most vocal critic is British Columbia, which was the first to bring in its own law banning bulk water exports in 1995.

It argues the federal accord doesn't go far enough because it ignores trade issues.

Federal officials concede it's not likely the province will sign the national accord.

But they insist that if Ottawa brought in a water export ban under trade legislation, as some lobby groups want, water would become vulnerable to trade challenges.

"We're not about to let some Geneva bureaucrat at the WTO (World Trade Organization) decide what we can and can't do with our water resource," said Fraser.

Blaikie argues an export ban - which Ottawa could quickly impose - would be the most and direct way to protect Canada's water.

"An overwhelming majority" of Canadians oppose large-scale water exports, the documents state, although some businesses are eager to cash in.

More than one billion people lacked access to adequate supplies of fresh water in 1997, with about one-third of the world's population in countries that were experiencing moderate to high water stress.

By 2025, that could grow to include two-thirds of the world's people, officials say in the documents.

) The Canadian Press, 2000

-- Vern (bacon17@ibm.net), January 04, 2000

Answers

What ever became of "The Grand Canal"?

-- Ron Schwarz (rs@clubvb.com.delete.this), January 04, 2000.

Remember when I first raised that, Ron, back in those faraway days when we worked together on ACT? Was that 1992, or 1993? Anyway, I passed on the warning that we had received about Quebec declaring UDI [a Unilateral Declaration of Independence, by Quebec], thus triggering the elite's script for Continental Union and opening the way to their making a fortune from the sale of Canadian water.

In 1998 three key Canadians attended the Bilderberg Conference which reportedly finalized this; in 1999 Bilderberger Jean Chretien held a weekend retreat for his government on 'an open border' with the US, while the public was prepared with arguments for a 'comman North American currency', and - surprise! - Quebec Premier Bouchard began talking menacingly about UDI!

The elite-owned and -financed Grand Canal Corporation still exists and waits, headquartered in St. John's, NFLD.

The UDI scenario was confirmed in detail two years after our ACT discussions in a remarkable book called "BREAKUP: THE COMING END OF CANADA AND THE STAKES FOR AMERICA", by a well-connected ex- Rockefeller man, Lansing Lamont. It never circulated widely, being apparently intended as a 'briefing book' for assorted insiders and hangers on.

It's still a remarkable idea: sell Canadian water to Americans and American water to Mexicans via a huge cross-continental trunk network of canals, paid for wherever possible with public money, and create - as I warned at the time - a never-ending, elite-owned 'river of liquid gold'!

They're running behind schedule, but they're still aiming to do it!

-- John Whitley (jwhitley@inforamp.net), January 04, 2000.