Fact-based journalism that sparks the Canadian conversation

Articles Business Environment Health Politics Arts & Culture Society

Special Series Hope You’re Well For the Love of the Game Living Rooms In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration Terra Cognita More special series >

For the Love of the Game

In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration

More special series >

Events The Walrus Talks The Walrus Video Room The Walrus Leadership Roundtables The Walrus Leadership Forums Article Club

The Walrus Video Room

The Walrus Leadership Roundtables

The Walrus Leadership Forums

Subscribe Renew your subscription Change your address Magazine Issues Newsletters Podcasts

Renew your subscription

The Walrus Lab Hire The Walrus Lab Amazon First Novel Award

Amazon First Novel Award

Trump Is Thirsty for Canada’s Water, but Our Own Gluttony Is the Bigger Threat

Scarcity, pollution, and deregulation are putting the country’s supply under siege

IMAGINE THE AMERICAN federal government goes rogue amid an unprecedented drought, disregards all laws and agreements on paper—and sticks a very large drinking straw into Lake Ontario from its southern shore in New York State.

How would it all play out?

If the threat is backed by military force, Canada will likely find our water laws suddenly moot—relics from a time before Trump 2.0 sidestepped a global rules-based order and pursued self-interest with impunity. Guerilla-styled sabotage of water pipelines by the Canadian military or regular citizens would become the only option for stopping the illicit flow.

Decode the stories behind the headlines with The Walrus newsletter. Sign up for The Walrus newsletter and get trusted Canadian journalism straight in your inbox.

If our relationship continues to deteriorate with the Donald Trump administration, this scenario will not be as outlandish as it sounds. “Trump is not going to ask us permission,” says water activist, author, and Council of Canadians co-founder Maude Barlow. “I don’t think he thinks that way. He would just say, ‘We need water, I’m going to put some pipes in the Great Lakes and take it.”

In the wake of the 2024 California wildfires, Trump suggested exactly that kind of resource theft. “You have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps and Canada, and all pouring down and they have essentially a very large faucet,” Trump said of the transboundary Columbia River, which originates in British Columbia. “You turn the faucet, and it takes one day to turn it, and it’s massive.”

Short of outright annexation, nothing raises Canadian elbows more than the prospect of Americans stealing our natural endowment of fresh water. But Trump’s threats and our nationalistic pride in this precious resource mask an unsettling reality: Canada’s real vulnerabilities are internal. They include uneven and often unsafe access, heavy industrial use, and permissive policies that enable over-extraction and contamination. We are our own worst enemy—careless stewards squandering an advantage we assume will always be there.

AT THE HEART of Canada’s complex relationship with fresh water is the misconception that we are infinitely water rich. “I call it the myth of abundance,” says Barlow. “Canadians have this notion that we love our water—it’s in our history, it’s in our culture and music. But we have not taken very good care of it.”

A glance at a map is enough to lull most of us into a false sense of water security: about 20 percent of the fresh water in all the lakes on Earth resides in Canada. The Great Lakes alone are the envy of the world: a chain of five interconnected inland freshwater seas, flowing eastward from Lake Superior, eventually reaching Lake Ontario and draining into the Atlantic via the St. Lawrence River.

Standing on the shores of Lake Ontario in Toronto—Canada’s biggest city, which treats over a billion litres of lake water every day from intake pipes up to five kilometres offshore—feels like standing on the edge of a vast freshwater ocean. But 60 percent of Canada’s surface water actually flows north to subarctic and Arctic regions—moving in the opposite direction from where most Canadians can access it.

Our access is also spotty: water is not plentiful everywhere. Many First Nations have been left on their own when it comes to securing safe water to drink. In spite of progress made to lift long-term drinking-water advisories, thirty-nine such notices remained in effect in thirty-seven First Nations communities in Canada as of February.

These realities do not stop many of us from behaving like world-class water gluttons, just behind our neighbours to the south. According to the Water Footprint Network, the amount of fresh water consumed by Canadians per capita per day, both directly and indirectly, is around 6,400 litres, a figure augmented by long showers, washing machines, and lawn watering. Americans use about 7,800 litres, while our average counterparts in China and Bangladesh consume 2,900 and 2,100 litres respectively.

Meanwhile, our industries—notably farming, mining, oil and gas, and bottled water—consume and pollute massive quantities of fresh water, paying bargain basement prices, if anything at all. According to a survey of Canadian provinces last October, BC charges a maximum of just $2.25 per million litres of water, the lowest rate for industrial purposes in Canada, for use in oil and gas, energy, and mining. Nova Scotia charges between $66 and $179 for the same quantity, while Ontario gets just $3.71 per million litres for........

© The Walrus