You could be forgiven for thinking that many of the coffee table book titles published in the United States over 20 years ago had been created for afternoon soaps: ‘Strong of Heart’, for instance, or ‘So Others Might Live’.
But no. They were written after the US invasion of Kuwait in 1999 in order to ‘stiffen the sinews’ of the American public as they watched George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq on CNN in 2003. However, even then, in the Middle East, water was causing as much tension and potential for violence as oil had already done.
Turkey, for instance, had built 22 dams on the Euphrates River. Israel was scrambling for water alongside Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, with their eyes on a canal from the Tigris-Euphrates into the Negev.
At that time, Canada had so much water that as early as 1953 the United States developed plans for their Corps of Engineers to redistribute it to the lower 48 states under the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWPA).
Such a project would see water collected from the Yukon and Alaska by a series of dams, canals and tunnels and rechanneled into the Rocky Mountain Trench which would then be dammed to form a lake 800 kms. long and 16 kms. wide stretching as far north as Valemont, B.C. This would be accomplished through 369 separate construction projects which would also divert the Liard and Peace rivers to the head waters of the Colorado and the Yellowstone rivers.
Western historian W. de Buys wrote that ‘the NAWPA died a victim of its own grandiosity’. Perhaps so, but in the light of Trump’s vainglorious neo-imperialism and his reference to Canada as ‘a giant faucet’ perhaps the federal government should be concerned.
They should also be concerned about who will own our water should it become just another commodity, traded on global exchanges like pork bellies.
In 1988, 12 countries allowed their water to be privatized. In 1990, 53 did and market-driven corporate policies were force-fed to 300 million people through their wells, pipes and faucets. In 1995 there were ten companies world-wide, then six, of which three had a stranglehold on the market: Suez and Vivendi (French) and Thames (German).
And even in the face of a flawed philosophy and the observable inefficiency of these corporations, right wing ideologues continued to maintain that the privatization of water would bring to consumers a service which is efficient and disciplined.
Instead, it has been market-driven and punitive.
The citizens of Hamilton, Ontario, for example, were taken to the cleaners by five companies in eight years and exposed to corruption and duplicity. In South Africa corporate stormtroopers turned off the taps in the dirt-poor black townships when payment failed.
But in Cochabamba in Bolivia there was wildness and music in the streets and the Cochabambinos rode water privatization out of town on a rail.
That was 22 years ago.
And now?
Will a Poilievre Conservative government encourage the privatization of Canada’s domestic water supplies, as instructed by the Fraser Institute and the ghosts of Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman?
Almost certainly.
Will a Poilievre Conservative government have the intestinal fortitude to front up to the USA and assert control of Canada’s total water resources against a hostile American takeover?
Almost certainly not.
JC Vallance,
Cokato.
