How Donald Trump's giant faucet of Canadian water will get turned on

Americans have been eyeing Canadian water for years. They have a plan.

Donald Trump recently noted that Canada has a lot of water and a very big faucet. “And you turn the faucet, and it takes one day to turn it, it’s massive. And you turn that and all of that water goes aimlessly into the Pacific. And if they turned it back, all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles.”

This is not quite true, and nobody can find a giant faucet. But Canada does have a lot of water, and Americans have been eyeing it for some time. Ten years ago there was some discussion about this, and I wrote a series of now-deleted articles for Treehugger, which I have merged and reconstructed here. From 2015:

Over on Buzzfeed, Michelle Nijhuis titles a post The Forgotten Project That Could Have Saved America From Drought.

She describes the huge international plumbing job in the subhead:

The North American Water and Power Alliance was an audacious proposal to divert water to parched western states that would have cost hundreds of billions of dollars and pissed off Canada. But what if it had worked?

It indeed was audacious, and has not been forgotten; I wondered about it last year in Will the next war with Canada be a fight over water? noting,

In the 50s, the US Corps of Engineers proposed the North American Water and Power Alliance, diverting western rivers to a giant 500 mile long reservoir that would hold 75 million acre feet of water, enough to feed the west and even Mexico. Beloved Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson said "This can be one of the most important developments in our history; Environmentalists of the time described it as "brutal magnificence" and "unprecedented destructiveness."

And others south of the border haven't forgotten it either:

NAPAWA via Wikipedia/Public Domain

"For those of us who work in the water world, NAWAPA is a constant presence,” says Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute. “It’s the most grandiose water-engineering project ever conceived for North America. It’s both a monument to the ingenuity of America and a monument to the folly of the 20th century. In a sense, we measure all other ideas against it."

There was one major problem, as Chris Mims notes in a tweet:

Since 1964 we've had a plan to end drought in California forever. All it requires is that we invade Canada.

— Christopher Mims (@mims) September 20, 2015

The Canadian Ambassador to the US, Gary Doer, thinks it is a much bigger issue than, say, the Keystone Pipeline.

We’re blessed with a lot of water, but we cannot take it for granted. We have to manage it more effectively and that means waterflows south to north and north to south … There will be pressure on water quality and water quantity. I think it will make a debate about going from 85 to 86 pipelines look silly.

And not everyone in Canada is against shipping water south; In the Globe and Mail, Barrie McKenna reminds us that Tom Mulcair, now leader of the NDP with a real shot at being Canada's Prime Minister, once thought it made a lot of sense. Back when he was Environment Minister for the Province of Quebec, which drains billions of gallons of water uselessly into Hudson's Bay, noted:

“[If] I can export, and I’m capable of ensuring the sustainability of the resource, and it could bring something to the region, why wouldn’t I do it?” Mr. Mulcair told Quebec’s National Assembly. “This is a renewable natural resource, unlike a mine. … If we manage it properly, if we take care of it as we should, why can’t we even talk about it?”

GRAND Canal via Wikipedia/Public Domain

Mulcair has evidently changed his mind, but others have not. And in fact, the NAWAPA proposal was not the only one on the table in the sixties; there was also a proposal from engineer Thomas Kierans, the Great Recycling and Northern Development (GRAND) canal, where a big dam would be built across the top of James Bay, and all water that flowed into it from Quebec and Ontario would then be diverted south and dumping 2.5 times the volume of Niagara Falls into into the Great Lakes, which could then be shipped south.

Kierans claimed that “before construction is completed, the total value of social, ecologic and economic benefits in Canada and the U.S. will surpass the project’s costs.” Prime Minister Mulroney loved the idea, but many Canadian conspiracy theorists were convinced that it was all part of a plot: "Conspiracy theorists believed that forces interested in a North American Union would agitate for Quebec separation, which would then touch off a Canadian civil war and plunge the Canadian economy into a depression. Impoverished Canadians would then look to the canal project and North American Union to revitalize the Canadian economy."

Barrie McKenna quotes a professor of environmental law, who, being located in Arizona, thinks it's all a fine idea.

Canada should arguably treat water the same way it treats oil or gold – a valuable commodity on the international market with benefits from exportation outweighing the costs of depletion...Allowing the world to access Canada’s vast water supplies in a way that is sustainable, responsible and even profitable for Canada may be part of solving the global water crisis.

As with oil and gold, when the USA wants something, it usually gets it.

Canada has a lot of water, much of it just draining away to the north. Nobody knows whether the Americans will come and take it or the Canadians will sell it, but something is going to happen, whether we like it or not.