With parts of the U.S. facing chronic drought, the president has reportedly threatened to tear up joint agreements regulating the natural wonders. Joe O’Connor looks at what is at stake
Thomas Kierans was stopped by a reporter in St. John’s, Nfld., on the occasion of his 100th birthday. Regarded around town as somewhat of a local treasure, he was dressed in a tan winter coat, a colourful knit scarf and a newsboy-style cap, and he was asked about some of his equally colourful and yet never realized ideas for mega-scale infrastructure projects.
For example, there was the Rock Arena, which the one-time engineering professor conceived of being built inside St. John’s iconic and rocky Southside Hills, as well as the fixed-link tunnel he imagined would connect Newfoundland to Labrador. Arguably, his most ambitious idea was conceived in the 1950s and was inspired by the Dutch method of dykes.
All that freshwater would be annually recharged and channelled south to the Great Lakes and out to the Canadian Prairies and the American southwest, refilling depleted underground aquifers along the way while resolving any existential worries either Canada or the United States would ever have of running dry.
Kierans estimated the canal would cost $100 billion to build and it could be financed by charging the communities that drew from it, with 90 per cent of the water destined for export to the U.S.
“I think the good lord wants me to stick around for that one,” he told the reporter that day.
Even swampy Florida is in the grips of a water crisis, as are Atlanta and the Norfolk naval base in Virginia. The homeport of the U.S. Navy is currently sinking due to the groundwater beneath it being drained faster than it can be replenished. Over in Texas and New Mexico, the once mighty Rio Grande River annually runs dry, drained of its contents for irrigation purposes, and the mightily stressed Colorado River has become a fierce bone of contention between the seven states that rely upon its gifts since there is simply no longer enough water to go around.
No wonder Canada, the resource-rich jewel of the north, with its rivers and two million freshwater lakes, including the Great Lakes, four of which — Erie, Huron, Ontario and Superior — are shared between the two countries, is coveted by Trump. The lakes are a natural wonder visible from outer space and together account for about 20 per cent of the planet’s freshwater reserves. Lake Superior, the biggest, contains enough water that, according to some rough, hydrological math, were the lake to be tipped on its edge and relieved of its contents, it could flood both North America and South America to a depth of 10 centimetres.
It is water, arguably more than any other natural resource, that makes the world go round by making human habitation possible, so it is no accident that Toronto and Chicago rose alongside a Great Lake, or that 40 million people call the Great Lakes region home. Were the border-straddling region to declare independence, it would boast an $8-trillion-plus economy and instantly become the third-largest economy in the world, behind only the United States and China.
Damning possibilities
Water politics is never far from Daniel Macfarlane’s mind. The Canadian environmental studies professor at Western Michigan University takes his students on camping trips to Lake Michigan during the warmer months, and he has taken an intellectual approach since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 that can be summarized as even the unthinkable is now worth thinking about.
The Great Lakes are safeguarded by diplomatic agreements and subject to strict protections about water use, which, for example, would make it impossible for Texas to appear before Trump begging for water one day and be awash in the good stuff from Lake Superior the next day.
There is a shared recognition among the eight states — Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York — and Ontario and Quebec that the lakes they border are a public resource that needs to be protected in perpetuity, a brilliant idea underscored legislatively by the Great Lakes Compact.
The American-made deal between the bordering states was signed into law in 2008 by president George W. Bush — a Texan, no less. Quebec and Ontario adopted what amounts to a companion agreement, and the big takeaway is that you can’t simply take water out of the lakes without putting it back in, with few exceptions.
The history of Canada and U.S. relations around water has sort of worked on an honour system
Daniel Macfarlane, environmental studies professor, Western Michigan University
“The history of Canada and U.S. relations around water has sort of worked on an honour system, where you actually lived up to what you said and to the letter of the agreements,” Macfarlane said. “But if you’ve got a leader who doesn’t do that, then there’s a whole lot of problems that can arise.”
Historically, countries that fail to live up to international agreements might fall foul of international courts, face economic sanctions or, in extreme cases, be subject to military intervention, typically led by the U.S., as was the case in the 1991 Gulf War.
Now, it is March, and the American Southwest is gripped by a mega-drought, with no end in sight, and Los Angeles only narrowly escaped being consumed by wildfires.
In short, a water crisis that is already bad could get even worse, and Macfarlane imagines a world, not necessarily tomorrow, but a few decades out, where the U.S. government looks north for its solution. A Trump heir, with a pliable Congress, could attempt to unravel the legislation protecting the Great Lakes and declare open season on massive water diversion projects.
“The U.S. government has to take a whole country approach,” he said. “I can see scenarios where the federal government goes, ‘OK, well, we need water and some of that Great Lakes water, well, we need it more in California or Arizona than we do in the Great Lakes.’”
Mind you, the Great Lakes aren’t the only shiny, freshwater bauble capable of potentially catching Trump’s covetous eye, as evidenced by his “faucet” comment, nor was Thomas Kierans the only engineer to dream up ways to pipe Canadian water to the American south in the 1960s.
Among the items housed online by the California Water Library, a non-profit organization funded in part by the state, is a 48-page brochure detailing the North American Water and Power Alliance plan produced by the Ralph M. Parsons Co. engineering and construction firm.
What we’re seeing are some extraordinary investments, remarkably, including by major cities, to turn their sewage into drinking water
Peter Annin, director of the Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation, Northland College, in Ashland, Wisc.
The firm’s namesake founder made a name, not to mention a fortune, for himself building oil refineries, chemical plants, mines and nuclear missile launch facilities, among other things. Parsons in 1964 turned his gaze to Alaska and the Canadian Arctic.
NAWAPA, as his plan came to be known, called for the Alaskan and Canadian rivers and runoff waters that were draining into “the sea” to be collected in reservoirs and channelled south through the Rocky Mountain trench. The redirected water would replenish the Great Lakes with 13 trillion gallons a year and allow for a “seaway” to be built from the Atlantic Ocean to the “heart of Alberta.”
Thirty-three American states would benefit, as would Mexico, while Canada could count upon a steady drip of US$2 billion a year in revenues through the sale of power and water. NAWAPA was championed by Utah senator Frank Moss, who saw the need for something as ambitious and “farsighted as was the Louisiana Purchase” to secure America’s water future.
The cost of all this, in 1960s dollars, was estimated at US$5 billion in construction equipment and tools, “100,000 tons of copper and aluminum, 30 million tons of steel and US$25 billion in construction labour.”
NAWAPA died under the weight of its grandiosity, projected price tag and opposition from a dawning environmental movement. But what has lived on, according to Peter Annin, director of the Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation at Northland College, in Ashland, Wisc., is a form of “Great Lakes paranoia.”
It’s a fear, seeded by the grand plans of the good old days, that someone in the present day could revive one of the schemes and make a play for the Great Lakes.
But even as wildly unpredictable as Trump has shown himself to be, Annin just can’t see a water grab in the making. What he instead expresses optimism for is a more obvious solution to America’s water woes, which he spoke of while en route to El Paso, Tex., a desert city home to 700,000 people and less than 25 centimetres of rain annually. In other words, the place is parched.
He was flying down to witness a groundbreaking ceremony for what will be the first wastewater-direct-to-drinking-water treatment plant in the U.S., projected to cost US$295 million.
“What we’re seeing are some extraordinary investments, remarkably, including by major cities, to turn their sewage into drinking water,” he said.
We just can’t react fast enough to a lot of the changes that are happening in the U.S. government right now
Vito Figliomeni, executive director, Ontario Commercial Fisheries’ Association
Los Angeles has pledged to turn 100 per cent of its sewage into drinking water by 2035. San Diego, California’s second-largest city, has pledged to turn 100 per cent of its sewage effluent into drinking water by 2035, and it is already home to the largest desalination plant in the U.S.
Big things are afoot, and if Americans can look in the “mirror” and ask some tough questions — such as why Arizona farmers are growing a water-intensive crop such as alfalfa for export to Saudi Arabia when parts of the country, including Arizona, are clearly running dry — and instead embrace a spirit of water “conservation” on a grand scale, Annin said the U.S. is entirely capable of solving its own water problem without pulling Canada under.
“In the grand scheme of things, Canadians, in particular, have a lot more important things to worry about right now than the United States stealing their water,” he said.
Fishing for customer loyalty
John Neate is among the worriers. The chief executive of Great Lakes Food Co. Ltd. was “barreling down” the highway from Toronto to a fish-processing plant near the shores of Lake Erie mere hours before Trump launched his trade war. One of the great, often-overlooked facts about the Great Lakes is that they support a commercial fishery that does about $300 million a year in business and employs some 1,500 Canadians.
His company has a fleet of five 65-foot trawlers that ply Lake Erie for smelt, a small fish that is a staple at all-you-can-eat Asian buffets, as well as being a traditional delight among Portuguese, Greek and Italian immigrant communities.
About 50 per cent of the company’s five-million-pound annual catch is exported to California, with most of the remainder destined for Japan, where smelt is served head on, guts in, as part of school lunch programs.
Neate, who prefers his smelt beheaded, guts removed, soaked in milk, battered, flavoured with garlic, paprika and onion powder, all tossed into the deep fryer, said he would prefer not to get burned by tariffs, and has informed his American buyers that he will be passing on whatever the resulting costs are to them.
What he does not know, at least not yet, is whether those buyers are going to bite. If they don’t, his company and the Great Lakes fishery at large that also sends Canadian-caught yellow perch and walleye to American consumers in the Midwest are going to be in a “world of hurt.”
It is in this world that Neate is less concerned about Americans going after Canada’s water than he is about his business staying afloat.
An additional Trump 2.0 concern among fishers is sea lampreys, a giant, blood-sucking wormfish that latches onto other fish like a Dracula of the deep. The best way to control sea lampreys is to kill the creatures in their spawning grounds, a job the Americans at the Environmental Protection Agency are expert at, but, unfortunately, won’t be doing this year because the seasonal workers hired to control the lamprey population have fallen prey to Trump’s budget cuts.
“We are not too happy about it,” Vito Figliomeni, executive director of the Ontario Commercial Fisheries’ Association, said. “We just can’t react fast enough to a lot of the changes that are happening in the U.S. government right now.”
Trump has talked about reducing the EPA workforce by 65 per cent, but he has also talked about slashing the agency’s budget by 65 per cent. What actually happens is anybody’s guess, but what seems clear is that an agency tasked with policing water quality is going to have reduced capabilities, including in its Chicago office, where six attorneys assigned to bring cases against alleged Great Lakes polluters were reportedly fired as part of the wider purge of the U.S. federal civil service.
The clear and present danger to the Great Lakes region and the waters here is just the erosion of the U.S. federal civil service
Gail Krantzberg, professor of engineering and public policy, McMaster University
“The clear and present danger to the Great Lakes region and the waters here is just the erosion of the U.S. federal civil service,” Gail Krantzberg, a professor of engineering and public policy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., said.
She lives near Lake Ontario and cherishes its immensity and calming presence; water is her happy place. It is a love that originally welled up from the mud and sediment of smaller, northern Ontario lakes, where she cut her environmental teeth working on what was then the issue of the day, acid rain.
These days, Krantzberg sits on the scientific advisory board of the International Joint Commission, a binational body rooted in the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 that works to prevent and resolve any issues related to shared waters between Canada and the U.S.
She has heard from her American friends on the commission that they have been instructed not to speak to Canadians. Her fear is that silence, in place of co-operation, will paralyze programs that have a shared purpose, such as controlling invasive species and protecting groundwater quality.
During Trump’s first term, he proposed a 90 per cent cut in funding to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. The program has received US$4.9 billion in federal funds since its founding in 2010, and its mandate is to revive areas of the lakes damaged by pollution, control invasive species, protect wetlands and wildlife habitat, tackle issues with toxic substances and more.
Trump did not follow through with his proposed cuts in the face of widespread, bipartisan political pressure, but the fear now, with a new round of funding up for authorization, is that he will hold the line.
“If Trump decides he’s going to cut all funding for wastewater infrastructure, we’re going to get, for example, raw sewage going into Lake Erie, and Lake Erie is going to be a mess again,” Krantzberg said. “And then if Trump decides that the Army Corps of Engineers is no longer going to operate the dam that stops Asian carp from coming into Chicago — and Asian carp come into the Great Lakes through Chicago — then all bets are off for our sports fishery, which is a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry. And if he cuts enough that pollution is enhanced, it will affect all the lakes.”
It is not a pretty picture, but the professor has another image of a potential future that she would like to paint, and it involves a massive economic opportunity for the Great Lakes region, assuming its water resources are not diverted elsewhere or despoiled through lack of oversight.
The logical alternative to moving water to areas of the U.S. that are starved for it is for the people living in those areas to move to where the water already is.
The Great Lakes are already home to a multi-trillion-dollar economy, with Toronto and Chicago leading the way, but the region also includes lakeside cities, such as Buffalo and Rochester, N.Y., and others, that have shed population over the past 50 years due to industrial decline.
These cities need more people; millions of Americans need more water. It almost sounds like a slam dunk.
“When the situation becomes, ‘Well, I’m not rebuilding that house that has burnt down four times in a forest fire, or I live in the Florida Keys, which are now half underwater — or maybe the flooding in Manhattan becomes intolerable,’ then where am I going to go?” Krantzberg said. “I’m going to go where there’s water and there are jobs. And where is that? The Great Lakes.”