Trump’s Obsession with Canada’s Water

Two politicians who have proven they can’t be trusted are Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and U.S. President Donald Trump.

Smith chose energy sales over country in the ongoing trade crisis with the United States, depriving Canada of a united front in its fight against Trump’s absurd and extortionist tariffs.

Trump not only brazenly violated the terms of a trade agreement he himself negotiated, the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, but has openly declared that he wants Canada to become the 51st state.

And there is one expert who thinks that Trump and Smith could come together over the contentious issue of diverting bulk water to the United States from Canada. It is a complex tale but well worth exploring.

I. TRUMP’S WATER FANTASIES

Water was rarely mentioned by Trump in his 2020 presidential campaign. But climate change has increased the demand for water, and groundwater is under threat in many locations. In the United States, the precious resource has now become an issue of national security.

Almost unnoticed was an executive order signed by Donald Trump on Jan. 26, 2025, directing the federal government to override California state water practices if they were found to be ineffective. The order was issued shortly after Trump visited the Los Angeles area, recently devastated by record-breaking wildfires.

The order directed the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to deliver more water through the Central Valley Project network of dams and canals. The White House budget office was ordered to see if it could attach conditions on federal aid to California to ensure co-operation. Trump said, “I don’t know what’s controversial about sending... millions and millions of gallons of beautiful fresh water from the Pacific Northwest and further up than even that into an area that’s bone dry.”

On Jan. 31 of this year, Trump officials began releasing large amounts of water from two dams in California’s Central Valley. Trump had falsely blamed the Los Angeles wildfires on Democrats’ water policies in the state. But none of the released water will reach Southern California, even though Trump continues to insist that his action would have prevented the wildfires. The truth about Trump’s lie is that the water had no way of travelling to Los Angeles.

And there was another problem with thoughtless meddling. The release actually took water from farmers who will need it for irrigation in the spring and summer months during California’s hot, dry weather. Another fact to bear in mind as Trump makes things up: there is no water pipeline from the Pacific Northwest and Canada.

Water politics is complex. That’s because water use is a delicate balance of many interests — farms, cities, ecosystems. There is also the pressing need to keep sea water from flowing into fresh water in estuaries if water is diverted.

There are extremely important salinity issues that affect the entire ecosystem, not just humans. Despite Trump’s boast on social media that under emergency powers the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, or USACE, had “TURNED ON THE WATER,” alarmed local water managers had serious concerns about the stability of local levees and the safety of residents downstream.

At a news conference, Gov. Gavin Newsom shared calming facts. Despite the reports, “there was no military sent to the Central Valley.” The federal government was doing maintenance at the Central Valley Project from Jan. 21 to Jan. 24. When the maintenance ended, it took a few days to get the pumps back up to 100 per cent.

But Trump had made other wild water claims in the recent past. In September he declared that B.C. held the solution to Los Angeles’s water woes. “So you have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps in Canada and all pouring down,” Trump said. “And they have essentially a very large faucet. And you turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it. It’s massive.”

And on Jan. 15 of this year, Trump said that during his previous term as president he had demanded that the governor of California accept the water coming south from Canada. “They would have had so much water they wouldn’t have known what to do with it. You would have never had the fires.”

II. THE GREAT RIVER RIDDLE

What was this great source of water from Canada that Trump vaguely claimed he could command to flow to parched Southern California?

Many assumed Trump was referring to water from the Columbia River that flows from mountainous eastern British Columbia south through the U.S. Pacific Northwest, reaching the ocean at the border between Washington and Oregon.

But as experts pointed out, there is no infrastructure to send the water farther south to California. Diverting the water would take hundreds of billions of dollars and years of construction.

In July 2024 Canada and the United States announced they had negotiated an agreement in principle to renew the Columbia River Treaty for 20 years. After 19 rounds of negotiations over six years, more than 50 community meetings and significant input from Indigenous nations, a modern treaty emerged.

The original treaty was signed in 1961 to regulate the flow of water from the Columbia River. Under the renegotiated agreement, B.C. will have greater control of the river but will forfeit over US$1 billion in hydroelectric revenues to power users across the U.S. Pacific Northwest. The Columbia waterway generates 40 per cent of U.S. hydroelectricity and irrigation for agricultural products worth US$8 billion.

The new terms reduce the water B.C. must give the United States for hydro power by 25 per cent, and that’s good news for British Columbians experiencing drought conditions. The two countries also agreed to restore salmon to the upper reaches of the Columbia, where dams have blocked the movement of spawning fish. A win for everyone, most concluded.

So was Trump ready to defy what had been worked out for the Columbia? Or might he be talking about tapping some other source of Canadian water?

On the Joe Rogan podcast, while campaigning in October of last year, Trump again conjured visions of a massive valve that took a whole day to turn that would redirect water from Canada to California, delivering to the most populous U.S. state “more water than they could ever use.” Again he pointed north and spoke of “a very large faucet.” He repeated that theme as he rode to victory a month later.

Still, no one was completely sure Trump was referring to the mighty Columbia that flows from B.C. through seven states, providing drinking water to many communities and irrigation for 600,000 acres of farmland while churning turbos for 19 hydroelectric dams that produce about half the region’s electricity and help regulate flooding.

What if he meant a different river? What if he meant instead the Peace, which straddles B.C. and Alberta?

III. LOOKING FOR THE VALVE

Wendy Holm is a retired professional agrologist and farm columnist. She has written books about water and free trade, and the hidden costs of the Site C dam. Her impressive resumé is 13 pages long.

After looking at old maps, Holm has a theory, which she emailed me: “Want a selfie of you with THE VALVE? Go to Dunvegan, Alberta, just on the border of B.C. Future site of the Amisk dam, designed as the ‘elbow’ that will siphon off water from the north-flowing Peace River and send it flowing south.”

The Amisk Hydroelectric Project is on the Peace River, about 15 kilometres upstream from the community of Dunvegan in northwestern Alberta. Amisk is projected to be the largest hydro project in Alberta’s history.

Holm told me in an email: “Amisk dam will sit downstream of tremendous storage capacity. All of the different engineering plans drawn up and submitted to USACE [in the 1950s] show a facility with hydrotechnology capable of directing water not only north into the Peace River system — as nature intended — but also into diversion channels to head south.”

“The Amisk dam will be justified and built for flood relief and irrigation benefits to Alberta farmers,” Holm explains. “The issue of water diversion will not enter into the discussion. If it were to become part of the discussion, stopping the Amisk dam to stop the realization of this almost century-long plan will see a vigorous attempt by right-wing governments to discredit it as ‘tin-hat, conspiracy theory thinking.’” But Trump’s clear obsession with Canada’s water compels us to examine the scenario seriously.

If Holm is right and the great big tap is in Alberta, what will Danielle Smith do? She has refused to sign on to Team Canada and is against retaliatory tariffs and export restrictions because they would harm the Alberta energy industry. She went to Mar-a-Lago in an attempt to cajole Trump into exempting tariffs on Canada. Her “Alberta First” lobbying didn’t help her country, but she claims to have persuaded Trump to set tariffs at 10 per cent for Alberta oil and gas rather than the 25 per cent level he vowed to impose on other Canadian products.

Holm believes she sees a way that Alberta, led by a Trump-friendly Smith or politician of a similar stripe, could be key to “a system that would allow water from the Peace River to be funnelled south” to the United States.

Start with the fact that Canada’s Transboundary Waters Protection Act of 2013 prohibits the bulk removal of waters that cross or form the boundary of the Canada-U.S. border. In B.C. and Alberta, the Yukon River, Puget Sound, and the Columbia, St. Mary and Milk rivers are protected under the act. But Peace River water diverted at the Amisk dam to run south into the United States would be neither covered nor protected by the Transboundary Waters Protection Act, argues Holm.

Holm also notes that under the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, water that has been removed from its natural, free-flowing state — e.g., by dams, diversions, bottling — is classified as a “good” under the Harmonized Commodity Coding System of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and World Trade Organization. As such, it is subject to all the provisions of the trade agreements. A side letter to the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, or CUSMA, of 2020 purporting to exempt water refers to “natural water.” Once water is “commodified” by altering its free-flowing state, all provisions of NAFTA/CUSMA apply.

As Holm reads it, “if Canada wished to uphold an export ban we would be obligated to also take the punishment that action would evoke.”

Holm theorizes that if the Americans diverted Alaskan water headed for the ocean and engineered it to flow instead into the Peace River system, they could argue they have the right to use the Peace River as they might a railway or a highway to transport that “good” to their markets.

OK, but how does water from the Peace River, which flows northeast from B.C. into Alberta, get to the United States?

Holm dusts off proposals by engineering firms dating back to the 1950s, when the far-sighted U.S. Army Corps of Engineers called for ways to ensure Americans do not ever run out of water. USACE conceived a massively constructed continental water management scheme that was to divert water from rivers in Alaska south through Canada. In 1964 a California engineering firm proposed damning the Yukon, Skeena, Fraser, Peace and Columbia rivers to divert Alaskan and Canadian water south as far as Mexico.

That trillion-dollar megaproject never happened, but Holm notes that today a large amount of upstream storage capacity is conveniently in place. Key pieces include the W.A.C. Bennett Dam, the Peace Canyon Dam and now the Site C dam. Conveniently, the Amisk dam will be situated exactly where those engineers, back in the 1950s, placed it to divert Peace River water south.

It may seem far-fetched that the United States would press claim and win rights to own access to “Alaskan” water flowing through the Peace River, and build the infrastructure needed to send it as far south as Los Angeles.

And they’d need some compliant government in Canada to do it.

But water is a resource whose value will only increase as the climate crisis worsens. Can Canadians assume they are immune from tensions over water that have led to conflicts worldwide?

IV. TESTING THE WATERS

According to a recent United Nations report, more than three-quarters of the Earth’s surface has become permanently drier. Increased temperatures cause more evaporation, “therefore removing moisture from soil.”

2024 was the hottest year on record, climbing to more than 1.5 C over pre-industrial levels for the first time. Almost the entire United States faced drought conditions in October 2024.

We have also seen severe drought in Western Canada. The cost of the July 2024 Jasper wildfire damage is estimated to be $1.23 billion, second only to the $6.2-billion 2016 Fort McMurray wildfires.

Droughts are becoming more frequent, longer, more severe.

Which raises a very big question. Should private companies have easy access to vital water reserves? How could that happen? It would require research supported by private companies. And some tricky manoeuvring by a provincial government.

Consider: the University of Alberta has just opened a Water Research Centre funded by a $1.4-million donation from EPCOR, a private utility company owned by the City of Edmonton. The company expanded into the water market in the United States in 2011 and is growing its business across the U.S. Southwest.

The research centre’s work will be focused on global challenges such as supply and demand, treatment and reuse, and the impact of extreme weather conditions such as droughts and flooding, which threaten global water supplies. The Water Research Centre director said, “This could put us on the national and international map, highlighting the research we’ve been doing for years and putting us in contact with other centres we might end up collaborating with.”

On the government side, Alberta officials are working on plans for a marketing agency to buy oil and then sell it to the United States. This will theoretically exempt Alberta oil shipments from an export tax because one government cannot tax another.

The same thinking could easily be adopted by the City of Edmonton, which owns the water company EPCOR. Theoretically, at some point in the future, that municipal government could sell water to governments in the United States without a tax, even if the Canadian government tried to put an export tax on bulk water sales to the United States.

And don’t be too sure a future Canadian government would fight to prevent water exports. It's true that since 1987 that’s been the federal policy. But everything might be on the table in these tumultuous political and economic times.

High on the list of disruptors has been Danielle Smith, fierce in putting Alberta first while demonizing Ottawa’s claims to power over her province’s dealings. Her take on tariffs, as Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid has commented, is, “One way or another, all the scenarios seem to fit neatly into her sovereignty agenda.”

The United Conservative Party government’s controversial Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act is intended to protect provincial interests. Smith has said that nothing in the bill calls for separation but “Albertans come first, always.”

And that apparently means treating a bellicose United States as a favoured customer. Witness Smith’s government sending three Alberta cabinet ministers to last week’s 73rd U.S. National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. The reason was not godly, but to “strengthen relationships with one of Alberta’s top trading partners.”

If Donald Trump comes for Canadian water, no one should be surprised if Danielle Smith is the one who turns on the big tap.