moved that Bill C-202, an act to act to prohibit the export of water by interbasin transfers, be read the second time and referred to a committee.
Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to see so many colleagues in the House during this private members' hour. There is a lot of interest in this topic and I indicate my appreciation for that and also my appreciation to my hon. colleague for Regina-Lumsden for seconding this motion. I know he has had a longstanding interest in the subject material that is embodied in Bill C-202, as well as many other members of the House who over the last number of days have contacted me with an indication of their support, that they will endorse the principle of this bill at second reading and will vote in favour of it.
If this bill passes it would prohibit any company or any organization from diverting water from a Canadian river basin into, in this case, an American river basin for export purposes.
One might ask what prompts this bill at this time. A few days ago one of the officials responsible for the environmental aspects of the North American Free Trade Agreement made a speech in Montreal.
He said high water consumption and pollution could trigger disputes within the North American Free Trade Agreement. He urged Canadians to better manage their water resources and said that while Canada has sovereignty over its water, the resource is also a global treasure, much the same as the Amazon rainforest is a global treasure, that the world per se depends on it. Implicit in his remarks was that the North American continent depends on Canadian water.
He closed with this:
Pressure on Canada to increase exports to the United States will mount as scarcity becomes more widespread. Canadians therefore have an interest in encouraging their American neighbours to better manage their water too.
As late as November 9, 1995 in Montreal one of the key representatives to the NAFTA warned us as Canadians that a water crisis is pending in the United States and that the United States is obviously considering Canada as a source to relieve this pressure in the future.
We also want to acknowledge that water diversion schemes per se are not new. These are concepts that have been around for some time. We are well aware of the grand canal project enthusiastically promoted by Simon Reisman, one of our key trade negotiators with the United States.
Another is the North American water and power alliance, commonly called NAWAPA; coming out of California a massive scheme to divert western Canadian rivers into the southwestern United States and northern Mexico.
There was also a project to pipe vast quantities of Great Lakes water to the high plains states in the southwest to replete their depleted aquifer, a 1984 scheme. A few years later there was a proposal to feed New York City's vast population with Lake Ontario water. A few years later came a concept involving the blasting of a 400-mile canal from Lake Superior to the Missouri River in South Dakota at a cost of $30 billion.
There was also a proposal to construct a canal from Lake Erie to the Ohio River, again to move water and shipping between the two countries. There was also a federally funded plan to drill a hole in the bottom of Lake Michigan and drain the water through bedrock layers for southern Illinois cities.
I have a list here. I could go on and on, but I make the point that there has been a long list over particularly the last two decades, when water diversion was an entrepreneurial interest by some very creative people, primarily to move Canadian water to the United States.
Anyone who has travelled in the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico will acknowledge that the water sources there are presently being used to their maximum. The Colorado River often dries up before it actually reaches the ocean because all the water is used up. Also, one could wade across the Rio Grande River at El Paso probably without even getting their knees wet, which indicates that massive river system is exclusively used for domestic, agricultural, and industrial water needs.
We acknowledge that virtually all of the major aquifers in the southwest United States and northern Mexico are being depleted on a daily basis. When one travels through the area and talks to people who are responsible for water resources for the future, virtually everyone assumes that Canada will one day be their salvation, that Canada's fresh water, which people in Mexico and the United States assume is being wasted, will be diverted one way or another for use in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico.
Major industrial development, agricultural expansion, and population increases are occurring in that southern sun belt. There has been vast industrialization of Mexico, particularly in the maquiladora zone, where just in the last few months hundreds of new industries have started up, all with some need for water. The case is clear that increasingly there will be a need, much earlier than anticipated even a few years ago, to obtain vast amounts of water. I can say that our American friends to the south almost exclusively look to Canada as a source for that water to make up for their shortfall.
I think it is fair to say that over the last couple of decades the hope was that this matter would go away. All levels of government had not taken any decisive action up until very recently in the hopes that this was a problem that hopefully would never occur. I refer particularly to the governments of British Columbia and Ontario-there may be others, but I am not familiar with them tonight-which passed legislation in their provincial legislatures banning exports of water from their provinces.
We have to acknowledge that there are two levels of government involved in the management of water resources in Canada. Under the Constitution Act the provinces exercise direct control over many aspects of water management within their boundaries. Water is a natural resource and provincial governments have jurisdiction over it within their own boundaries. They are therefore able to legislate in the areas of domestic and industrial water supply, pollution control, hydroelectric power development, irrigation, recreational use of water, et cetera.
However, again because of the Constitution Act, the federal government has jurisdiction over inland and ocean fisheries, including their protection and particularly the protection of river basins. In addition, Parliament has the residual power to legislate for peace, order and good government of the country, including the regulation of trade and commerce. The federal government is responsible for conducting relations with other countries, which is extremely important with respect to water because so much of Canada's water resources are in boundary water basins.
We basically have two areas of jurisdiction: provincial jurisdiction for use within the province; and because it could become a matter of international trade and because international trade and commerce is a federal responsibility, there is a need for the federal government to become involved in this as well.
As I have said, some provinces have taken the only action at their disposal and have passed legislation prohibiting this type of interbasin sale of water. My thesis would be that may be fine and dandy, but the federal government must also act. Some people have said that there is a federal policy. Some years ago, back in 1987, Canada tabled a water policy, which was essentially a statement of what the government would like to do in the future. It has no legislative authority. There are no regulations or laws or statutes attached to it. It is simply a policy and nothing more. Part of that policy states that "the Government of Canada will take all possible measures within the limits of its constitutional authority to prohibit the export of Canadian water by interbasin diversions".
At the time I was in the House and I thought we were finally going to make some headway in this area. I was absolutely thrilled some months later on August 25, 1988 when Bill C-156 was tabled in the House. It was entitled the Canada Water Preservation Act, an
act to prohibit any export or diversion of boundary waters for the purpose of export. We thought we were finally going to have legislation passed in the House that would indicate the will of Canada in this area. Unfortunately, Bill C-156 died on the Order Paper and it has never been reintroduced. Today we do not have any federal legislation that would prohibit the export of water from Canada in terms of interbasin transfers to the United States for eventual sale into Mexico. That is the purpose of Bill C-202.
Part of the motivation for this came from a number of schemes, one from my own constituency, namely on the North Thompson River. This scheme was intended to divert about 50 per cent of the water flow of the North Thompson River into the Columbia River basin, which would eventually travel through various water basins in the United States for eventual sale in the Los Angeles area. Since this scheme was proposed formally to the provincial government in British Columbia, people obviously have opposed it in light of the fact that there is an absence of federal legislation. Of course they are concerned that NAFTA opened the door for this type of enterprise, which I will discuss in a moment.
Many communities rallied quickly. Over the past few months I was able to table in the House 123,000 names of people from a variety of communities throughout British Columbia and various parts of Canada but particularly from the communities of Kamloops, Heffley Creek, Raleigh, Westsyde, Barrière, McLure, Avola, Vinsula, Clearwater, Black Pines, Chu Chua, Birch Island, Blue River, Louis Creek, Whispering Pines, and many others within my constituency, to say nothing about cities, communities, and rural areas throughout all of British Columbia, much of Alberta, and other parts of western Canada. There has been an overwhelming negative reaction to this proposal.
There have been times when people have said that NAFTA protects us from this. I want to reject that. NAFTA includes water as a good under the terms of the agreement. I would emphasize the word "good". We could also use the term "commodity". Article 102 of NAFTA sets forth the objective of the agreement "to eliminate barriers to trade and facilitate the cross-border movement of goods and services between the territories of the parties, to increase substantially investment opportunities in the territories of the parties, and to establish a framework for further trilateral, regional, multilateral co-operation to expand and enhance the benefits of this agreement".
Basically it says that the purpose of NAFTA is to eliminate barriers to trade in goods. Water is a good. Therefore, fundamentally this is one of the purposes of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
It goes on to describe this more accurately. It is important to take a moment to do that. Goods are defined in article 201 of NAFTA as products that are understood in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or now the World Trade Organization. This means that
any good covered by a GATT tariff heading is subject to all the provisions of the agreements themselves unless explicitly excluded.
Mr. Speaker, you will recall that a number of areas in NAFTA were excluded specifically. Raw logs, beer, and two or three other items were mentioned specifically as being exclusions from the North American Free Trade Agreement.
