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

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.

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 industrial use, although they make bottled-water companies pay more.

To grasp the severity of what’s at stake, it’s necessary to forget the misleading bounty we see on the surface and take a deeper look underground.

LATE LAST SUMMER, as heat records were being smashed all over the world, an international team of scientists published an analysis of more than twenty years of satellite data from the US’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration, concluding that the continents are slowly dehydrating—likely as a result of uncontrolled mining of groundwater by farmers, cities, and corporations—imperilling people and ecosystems across 101 countries.

With rising heat and drought conspiring to reduce surface water, humanity is increasingly extracting groundwater stored in aquifers—subterranean basins that underlie all the continents, composed of porous layers of rock and sediment that store precipitation as it seeps down from the surface. Much of this groundwater, replenished over millennia, is being exploited too intensely for it to recharge adequately.

We are now collectively pumping so much water to the surface, it is discharging via rivers into the world’s oceans, becoming one of the greatest contributors to global sea level rise. The depletion of underground water joins another kind of freshwater depletion on land: melting glacial ice. At least 70 percent of BC’s 17,000-plus mountain glaciers, which run up the Western Cordillera like a frozen spinal column of fresh water, will melt into the sea by 2100.

Further south, an arid zone has grown over the past two decades, now stretching from Texas up into the southern High Plains, where the Ogallala Aquifer faces severe depletion from overextraction. This single aquifer, which provides a quarter of the total agricultural water supply in the United States and is the primary source of drinking water for 2.3 million Americans, could decline by 70 percent in less than fifty years without drastic action.

In Canada, about a third of the population relies on groundwater for drinking supply, rising to 80 percent in rural areas. There is enormous variation in aquifer health depending on location: “Some Canadian aquifers are under threat and vulnerable to climate change and human interference,” says Natural Resources Canada.

Just north of Toronto is the Oak Ridges Moraine, a naturally occurring geological formation that stores and purifies groundwater. It spans 160 kilometres, from Peterborough in the east to the Niagara Escarpment in the west. “The moraine is like a sixth Great Lake,” says Steve Holysh, senior hydrogeologist and program manager with the Oak Ridges Moraine Groundwater Program, a group responsible for gathering moraine water data. The moraine acts as a sort of giant Brita filter that purifies precipitation, removing bacteria and sediment as water permeates through the stratified layers below the surface. What it cleans and stores provides up to 70 percent of the total flow to the region’s rivers and wetlands, as well as the water critical for growing crops in some places on the moraine’s fertile terrain.

In spite of its importance, Robert Brown, co-chair of the nonprofit Save the Oak Ridges Moraine (STORM) Coalition, laments that getting people to pay much attention to it is a “tough sell.” “A lot of people have forgotten about what the moraine is,” he says on a bright early-October morning as I drive with him up Highway 400 north of Vaughan, toward expansive new upscale subdivisions flanked by farmland.

Our destination is a development in King Township being built adjacent to Mary Lake, what STORM warns is a precedent that will allow more development of pristine areas of the moraine. It is a kettle lake, a predominately closed system, fed by small streams and precipitation slowly percolating to recharge the aquifer below. The water table is so close to the surface here, the developer must apply for permits to pump groundwater away from the new building foundations in perpetuity, discharging it, along with all the residue road salt and hydrocarbon, into Mary Lake and, by extension, into the aquifer.

Mary Lake is one of at least four kettle lakes on the moraine that have been severely polluted or outright destroyed by development in recent years, according to Brown. “This is the freshwater lifeblood of the GTA,” he says as he pushes through yellow birch and buckthorn to the lake’s edge, “and lakes like this are its heart.”

What activists fear most are more “carve-outs.” The Greenbelt and Oak Ridges Moraine are technically protected, but precedents like Mary Lake are happening anyway. Enormous pressures now exist to advance development, including the creation of economic exemption zones that operate above and outside the normal rules.

Holysh says the big-picture impact of a single development like Mary Lake is difficult to measure. “It’s more like death by a thousand cuts,” he says. “With Mary Lake, if it gets the green light, then others can point to it and say, ‘How come they were approved and we weren’t?’ It’s just that incremental creep.”

Development pressures on the Oak Ridges Moraine illustrate how the biggest and most immediate threats to water are often short-sighted government policy. Ontario narrowly dodged a bullet in 1998 after the Nova Group secured a permit from the province to fill tankers with up to 10 million litres a day of Lake Superior water to ship to hotels in Asia. Fortunately, the company never even had a boat, let alone investors or money.

Ontario has since prohibited such activities, but new threats stem from the imperative of the current provincial government to streamline regulations. Last August, Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives made it easier for companies to transfer and sell water permits, allowing the removal of more than 50,000 litres of water per day from lakes, rivers, streams, or groundwater—including for agriculture, gravel mining, and water bottling. The changes, now in effect, eliminate the previous requirement for a new application, public review, environmental assessment, and First Nations consultation whenever a permit changed hands.

This is a huge red flag for Barlow, who says her concerns about water policy transcend the provincial. If she has one “big worry” about water, it is that Canada’s attempts to gain greater economic independence from the US by ramping up everything from LNG exports to new mines, pipelines to AI data centres—all of them water intensive—will mean the country’s fresh water will not be sufficiently protected. This is a federal government, says Barlow, “that wants to protect the environment and deal with climate, but at the same time, in Carney’s own words, ‘to make Canada an energy superpower.’ What are we prepared to do to make that happen, and how do we protect water at the same time?”

Climate change impacts like drought and unpredictable winter storms are also conspiring with human activities to exacerbate water crises. Two of Canada’s most important farming centres—the Fraser Valley of BC and the Palliser’s Triangle of southern Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba—are now under severe water duress.

Less than 100 kilometres east of Vancouver, the Abbotsford–Sumas Aquifer stretches across 260 square kilometres, beneath the US border and into Washington state. The aquifer is the sole source of drinking water to the city of Sumas, Washington, and thousands of private well owners, and it provides a secondary drinking water source for the city of Abbotsford.

On the Canadian side, intensive poultry farming has created a glut of manure, which is then spread as fertilizer onto fields—with the excess polluting the surface water and seeping into the ground. The aquifer is highly susceptible to pollution because the water table is very close to the surface, and high rainfall in the region ensures that pollutants on the surface permeate into the groundwater. Nitrate contamination of the groundwater from manure is getting worse over time and has been detected in many wells in the region, at levels above what is deemed safe by government.

In the rainy months, multi-day rain storms, now known as “atmospheric rivers,” are wreaking havoc of their own. In 2021, after an extreme-rainfall event that dropped over 400 millimetres of rain on parts of BC’s Fraser Valley over two days, the Barrowtown Pump Station came dangerously close to failing, and the long-lost Sumas Lake, which was stolen from local Stó:lō people and drained to create a farming district in 1924, reappeared in its original footprint like a ghost.

When the flood waters receded amid billions of dollars in destroyed farms, homes, and businesses, researchers tested the surface water and groundwater and found excess nutrients, metals, fecal coliform, hydrocarbons, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, perfluorinated compounds, and tire-related chemicals—much of it deposited as a residue of the flood.

In December 2025, another atmospheric river descended on the area, triggering severe flooding, landslides, and evacuations, prompting some Stó:lō Nation leaders to call for a permanent return of Sumas Lake, requiring the managed retreat of farms, homes, and businesses to create more space on the land for the increasingly routine seasonal flood waters to safely accumulate.

Meanwhile, about 700 kilometres to the east, in the drought-prone Palliser’s Triangle, advancing drought could eventually see the redrawing of Canada’s agricultural map as water accessibility determines where future intensive agriculture takes place—and where it cannot. The water that makes it possible to farm Palliser’s Triangle comes from the Rocky Mountains via several rivers that cross the southern Prairies. “The southern Rockies are drying out from less snow and disappearing glaciers that historically supported runoff across the Prairies,” says John Clague, an emeritus professor in earth sciences and formerly the Canada research chair in natural hazard research at Simon Fraser University. “I expect farmers and ranchers are very worried.”

As surface water disappears and groundwater is depleted and polluted—including in places like California—Holysh sees the potential for a northward shift in farming, to places like Southern Ontario. The Great Lakes Basin is relatively water rich, Holysh says, with great soil from the last ice age and a climate that enables the farming of many different things. “You’ve got an ideal set-up for really intensive agriculture production,” he says. “And so these companies one day might be looking to move here.”

In effect, a future where water accessibility for farming cannot be assured will brand new winners and losers.

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WATER CONFLICTS ARE rife in the world today, and Canada’s predicament of facing down an aggressive, dominant neighbour over shared water has become an unfortunate wave of the future.

Last April, in response to the murder of twenty-six tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir, allegedly by Pakistani militants, India unilaterally suspended the sixty-five-year-old Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan. It marked the latest flashpoint of geopolitical weaponization of water, or what Pakistani journalist Ishaal Zehra has called “retaliatory hydropolitics.”

Both countries rely on the rivers flowing out of the Himalayas for survival, and the 1960 treaty, created in the wake of the partition of India to form Pakistan, set the terms for how the waters of six big rivers would be shared. The large majority of Pakistanis depend on drinking water from this single river system; it makes agriculture and energy from hydro dams possible.

The treaty stood the test of time—until now. The result has been an uneasy stalemate, with Pakistan demanding a return to the existing treaty while India wants a renegotiation and presses ahead with new hydroelectric projects. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi is now treating Pakistan in much the same way we fear Trump may act toward Canada.

There is a growing movement in the world, as American threats and India’s actions demonstrate, to use existing agreements and treaties not so much as protectors of stability but as tools of political pressure and war. The plight of China’s eighteen relatively small and weak downstream neighbours—which share at least 110 rivers and lakes with China—approximates the state of Canada’s long undefended border with the US. As China continues to build mega dams that throttle shared rivers, there is little these countries can do but officially protest—and watch it happen.

A world away, on the Great Lakes, Noah Hall has a very different take on how a hypothetical American water theft would play out. “It would be totally illegal,” the Wayne State University law professor says. It was the fear of water diversion, adds Hall, that motivated both Canada and the US to craft strong bilateral laws in the first place, with deep redundancy to ensure that the kind of theft that Trump has suggested could never happen.

“One thing that should give folks in Canada confidence in all of these laws,” says Hall, “is that, in designing them, we didn’t put the US federal government in the driver’s seat, because at the end of the day, the president of the United States governs a country that is largely outside of the Great Lakes, and it’s pretty dry. We wanted the Great Lakes to be governed by the folks who live on the shore and look out at it and see it as their ocean.”

The Great Lakes agreement and compact, for example, consists of signatories across eight US states and two Canadian provinces (Ontario and Quebec). For water from the Great Lakes to be shipped to Arizona, says Hall, it would “require a breakdown of literally every government,” from Ontario and Quebec to the federal government on the US side, down to each of the eight states, ripping up two or three different laws “at every level.”

From myriad angles, Canada’s precious endowment of fresh water, including the Great Lakes, cannot at this moment in time be considered secure from threats either internal or external. Yet the situation on this irreplaceable inland freshwater sea, Hall says, is fundamentally different than most international water-body disputes.

“The Great Lakes have huge value in the region for shipping, for the waterfront, for property values. The Great Lakes just sitting there, as is, is the value to the province of Ontario and the state of Michigan. So while the US federal government might decide to rip up a treaty and try to shift the water elsewhere, the states would never want the water to leave the basin. You can’t just drain the Great Lakes.”