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 change of government, to all the work that went into the treaty renewal.
The puzzlement will be shifting to outrage when the full scope of the U.S. plan becomes apparent.
. But if deciding the river’s future management plays out like the early days of the tariff war, it will be handled on the U.S. side completely outside civilized norms, and all reasonable expectations will be shelved.
International treaties are always complicated. Signing one in the midst of an all-out economic war verges on impossible.
Most of the Canadian decisions on the Columbia are handled by the federal government, since it’s an international dispute. But B.C. has much more authority than it normally does in federal-provincial arrangements. The province is the designated beneficiary of the Canadian entitlement. Ottawa has final say, but provincial officials are the lead hands in how the treaty works.
That gives Energy Minister Adrian Dix considerable authority. He adjusted his stance significantly on Tuesday.
Early in his new posting as energy minister he did a webinar on the future of the treaty. He downplayed Trump’s penchant for destruction.
He said B.C. would keep defending Canadian interests “and not be distracted by political discussions.”
“You can expect us [to work on renewing it] not by getting into debates, but by being respectful to our American friends, by being determined in what needs to happen.”
But there was no talk of friendly respect on Tuesday. Dix made it known that the U.S. has suspended work on converting the agreement in principle into a final treaty. That would be normal during a change of government, “but what isn’t normal is some of the musings of the president.”
Dix said B.C. is prepared if the U.S. decides to take unilateral action, but wants to sign the treaty as it stands. The concern is “the consistent attack on our sovereignty, the consistent suggestion we’ll be the 51st state.
“What’s different here is the vicious anti-Canadian attacks that have been made on us.”
Dix said people have approached him in the grocery store asking him why B.C. can’t just turn off the tap.
“Canadians are angry about this unprecedented attack undertaken by the Trump administration.”
But voiding the treaty or imposing a surtax on electricity exports would “hurt us more than it hurt them.”
Trump’s dim vision that water could be somehow re-directed from the Columbia 1,600 kilometres south to Los Angeles rivals his promise to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border “and make Mexico pay for it.”
“They have a very large faucet and you turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn, and it’s massive… you turn it and the water goes aimlessly into the Pacific. And if you turned it back, all of that water would come right here into Los Angeles.”
There is no faucet. But control of water might explain his repeated, deadly-serious goal of making this country his 51st state.
However it plays out, it’s better to live up-river from a bad neighbour than down.
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