We had better be ready.
President-elect Donald Trump has noticed something in his travels across the U.S. Many parts of his country are running out of water. Groundwater supplies are being depleted faster than they can be replenished. The American west is in a multi-year water crisis. National Geographic says the country is “running out of water.”
For Trump, to “Make America Great Again” is to bring jobs, agriculture and energy production as well as manufacturing back to the U.S. He can’t do that without water, and he has already signaled where he could find some. Canada has a “massive faucet” that would take only one day to turn on, and all of that water “would come right down here and right into Los Angeles.”
The idea Canada has water to spare, however, is dead wrong. Canada has about 7% of the planet’s renewable freshwater and needs every drop to deal with both climate change and demand. British Columbia and Alberta in particular have faced severe drought and fires in past summers, leading the Wall Street Journal to say Canada’s lakes and rivers are “drying up.” In October 2024, Agriculture Canada classified 64 per cent of the country as abnormally to extremely dry, including 67 per cent of Canada’s agricultural landscape.
Yet the “myth of abundance” persists in Canada and elsewhere and there have been many plans to commercially export our water to the U.S. Canadians successfully opposed a number of commercial water export schemes, including the GRAND Canal that would have diverted water from James Bay, and the NAWAPA, that would have dammed rivers in northern British Columbia for diversion to the Southern U.S. Public outcry also stopped two proposed massive water export plans in the late 1990’s, one from Lake Superior, the other from a glacier lake in Newfoundland, both bound by tanker for Asia.
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