U.S. President Donald Trump’s war on Canada is aimed mostly at Ontario’s auto industry in the early days.

Subsequent fronts will open later and one of them is likely to be the Columbia River, which prompted a small but telling move from the provincial government on Tuesday.

Trump’s delusional musings about a mythical “large ­faucet” that can solve California’s water crisis were greeted with incredulity last year when he first voiced them. Now he’s the president with an explicit goal of destroying Canada and taking it over. Water is one of the main attractions.

The river’s flow has been governed for the last 60 years under a highly-technical management treaty that involves flood control and hydroelectric power generation from various Canadian and U.S. dams.

Nine years of renewal negotiations led to a new deal last summer that changes the terms markedly. They were broadly considered, although not by everyone, to be to both sides’ advantage.

But it bogged down in the final approval process and didn’t get ratified before Trump took over.

Officials on both sides who are closest to the issue have been quietly puzzling for months about what would happen, with the........

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