Can Canada Block Massive Export Of Water?

Yesterday, the two big social and environmental coalitions partially divulged documents that describe the objectives of the closed meeting in Calgary. It is clear from the documents that the session is not an exploratory meeting between important theoreticians, as its promoters have asserted, but rather a meeting for preparation of policies that the three countries' private sector representatives are about to submit to their governments in the beginning of the fall. When the Conseil des Canadiens and Eau Secours asked Ottawa last week to prohibit its senior officials from participating in this "furtive" meeting, Federal Minister for the Environment John Baird retorted that the meeting could not initiate massive exports of Canadian water, since several federal and provincial laws prohibit that. Nonetheless, Ottawa did not forbid its high officials from attending. This Calgary forum was organized by the United States's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Conference Board of Canada and Mexico's Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economomicas (CIDE). According to the documents publicized by the two Canadian coalitions, this meeting provides for a Friday roundtable on the "future of the North American environment" that will notably address "water consumption, water transfers, and manmade deflections of water in bulk" with the objective of realizing "the optimal concerted use of available water" in North America, i.e. of Canada's water, since it possesses the lion's share of North American water. Now, as the two citizens' organizations note, by NAFTA's provisions, water becomes a commercial good as soon as it becomes - even for a single time - the object of a financial transaction between two parties from different countries. After that, no government will ever be able to regulate it again without that becoming a barrier to free trade. For the last few years, several legal scholars have confirmed that Canadian governments will lose their jurisdiction over the management of their water in favor of companies' priority rights to exploit them. According to the documents divulged yesterday by the two coalitions, the federal government is formally participating in this opaque process in spite of its denials. A forum document anticipates that "in order to respect the desired schedule for this plan" for the "continentalization" of resources, the American CSIS "will draw up its suggestions based on existing projection scenarios and on the examination done of the pertinent future concerning each of the six subjects on which the three governments have agreed, that is, labor force mobility, the environment, competitiveness and border infrastructure and logistics." http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042607G.shtml [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on April 30, 2007]

Note: http://www.truthout.org...