This article was originally published in the Montreal Gazette on February 26, 2025.

President Donald Trump has been talking about water, suggesting that Canada's blue gold can help solve his country’s growing water woes. The President’s recent trade salvos and provocative rhetoric around Canada’s territorial integrity have raised concerns that he has our freshwater in his sights.

We must never let our guard down when it comes to protecting our freshwater sovereignty. Fortunately, an array of factors and safeguards mitigate against any serious attempt to move water en masse outside Canada’s borders.

To begin with, there is no "large faucet" — the President's words — to turn on. Most rivers in Canada run south to north, some major cross-border rivers too. Also, climate change is putting our own water supply at risk, especially in the western provinces. And finally, a stack of treaties and federal and provincial laws act as a bulwark against grandiose schemes to send our freshwater to the U.S. in bulk quantities.

Much of Canada’s freshwater is in Quebec. In 2009, the province adopted Bill 27 legally affirming the public nature of water and providing for increased protection of the resource. The new law reformulated a prohibition on moving water out of province adopted in 1999.

Regulations under Bill 27 specifically prohibit the transfer of water out of the St. Lawrence River Basin, implementing Quebec's obligations under the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin Sustainable Water Resources Agreement. The Agreement is a cooperative regional defence — signed by Quebec, Ontario and the eight Great Lakes states — against economic or political forces that would seek to remove water from the world's single largest watershed containing more than 20 percent of the planet's supply of surface freshwater. For its part, Ontario adopted legislation in 2008 to enshrine the terms of the Agreement in provincial law.

The Canadian consensus against exporting water to dry parts of the continent is, therefore, reinforced by a like-minded consensus among economically and politically powerful states within the U.S. itself.

At the federal level in Canada, the Chrétien government amended the Boundary Waters Treaty Act in 2002 to prohibit the mass removal of water from boundary waters including the Great Lakes.

Then, in 2013, Parliament passed Bill C-383 to prohibit using naturally flowing transboundary rivers to funnel Canada’s water south. This legislation amended the International Rivers Improvements Act (IRIA) to prohibit the issuing of a licence to link inland waters to "an international river if the purpose is...to increase the annual flow of the international river at the international boundary." Bill C-383 also de facto blocked a province from building a water pipeline to the U.S., a pipeline being considered a transboundary river under the amended IRIA. Even if a court were to disagree with this interpretation, the amended IRIA's stated purpose — to "prevent the risk of environmental harm resulting from the permanent loss of water from Canadian ecosystems" — would constitute a sound legal backstop.

And while NAFTA once raised fears about the vulnerability of Canada's freshwater to trade pressures, its successor, CUSMA, largely removed those. CUSMA did away with NAFTA's controversial Chapter 11, the investor-state dispute mechanism. Chapter 11 had raised the spectre of Canadian governments one day being forced to pay large compensatory sums to private foreign interests blocked by our domestic laws and regulations from exporting our water south. For extra measure, a side letter to CUSMA, similar to the declaration appended to NAFTA by the Chrétien government in 1993, states anew that unless water in natural form has entered into commerce, nothing in the agreement obliges either Canada or the U.S. to "exploit its water for commercial use, including its withdrawal, extraction, or diversion in bulk."

CUSMA will be up for renegotiation in 2026. We must be steadfast in preserving the gains won in the previous negotiations that help keep Canada’s freshwater from becoming a cross-border tradeable good. Otherwise, we risk undermining the broad consensus in this country against bulk-water exports and the political will that has codified that consensus in law.

Francis Scarpaleggia is the Member of Parliament for Lac-Saint-Louis and at the time of prorogation was chair of the House of Commons standing committee on environment and sustainable development. He has presented numerous bills and motions to Parliament on issues of freshwater management and protection.