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First, there was Thomas Kierans, designer of the GRAND Canal in 1959. He secured an appearance in 1961 and again in 1965 before a parliamentary committee to present details of his mega-scheme to “recycle” water from the James Bay watershed into the Great Lakes and other regions of Canada and the United States. He was encouraged briefly by one premier of Quebec, but never gained serious support in either country for his grandiose vision.
More recently, the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI) reopened the prospect of diversion and export of Quebec’s “blue gold.” Marcel Boyer, an economist, released a paper in August 2008, which waxed eloquently, if not accurately, about the province’s “oversupply” of water, but failed to provide evidence of any real demand for it from the United States.
Neither sources nor destinations for northern water were identified in his assurance of wealth for the province from water sales. And his argument that the commercial value of freshwater will be determined by the cost of desalinating seawater is weak. A lower-cost alternative to that of transporting a low-value, high-weight commodity like freshwater over long distances is conservation and reuse of water. This is particularly the case where costs for diversion southward extend well beyond economics.
As if to set a new course, MEI released another brief paper in July 2009, from Pierre Gingras, a retired engineer from Hydro-Québec, who not only wants to keep building hydro stations on northern rivers, but diverting seasonal flood flows from three of them — the Broadback, Waswanipi and Bell, southward via the Ottawa River into the St. Lawrence. That would not be so unusual, except that this 800 cubic metres per second (m3/s) diversion, a frighteningly large increment to the Ottawa’s 1,290 m3/s annual average flow, was proposed as a replacement in Quebec for an equivalent flow which would no longer be needed from the Great Lakes, and could therefore be exported southward by the two provinces and eight states of the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence Basin.
The odds against such a proposal winning acceptance from federal and Ontario authorities, who also have jurisdiction over the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers, and from the Great Lakes states, who have sided with Ontario and Quebec against diverting their shared boundary waters out of the basin in any direction, almost guarantees that the Gingras proposal will fail completely. Even harder to justify is Gingras’ proposal for these surplus waters to exit the lakes at the existing Chicago diversion canal to flow down the Mississippi River. The U.S. Supreme Court placed a limit of 91 m3/s diversion there in 1967; and anything more than about 200 m3/s would overflow the channel at Joliet, Ill., anyway.
There’s more reason still to find this latest MEI scheme unacceptable to the federal, provincial and state governments which share jurisdiction over the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin. In 1999, the two federal governments requested the International Joint Commission (IJC) to investigate the issue of diversions out of the Great Lakes and to recommend safeguards for its basin ecosystem. The IJC found that economic benefits from inter-basin diversion projects or exports appeared dubious and recommended strict constraints on such practices. Shortly thereafter, the Great Lakes premiers and governors took up this issue and over the next several years hammered out two agreements, one among the provinces and states sharing the basin (non-binding) and the other an interstate compact to prohibit substantial or permanent water removal from the Great Lakes basin, the latter ratified by Congress and signed in 2008 by the president.
If any further indication of the likely rejection of MEI’s export proposals is required, one has only to review the progress of IJC boards exploring alternative international plans for the continuing regulation of flows and levels of the Lake Ontario–St. Lawrence River section and of the Upper Lakes section over the past decade, at a cost exceeding $20-million for each country. The possibility of significant water export or import was not anticipated in these investigations. Nor has it been raised for consideration in the current review of the Canada–United States Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.
Finally, one can imagine the outrage which would be expressed publicly on both sides of the border if flows up to 800 m3/s were committed, as Gingras proposes, to export via the Chicago diversion route, and thus were not available downstream to serve the existing hydroelectric, shipping, shore property, recreational and environmental interests in both countries. Certainly the onlookers on both shores would be underwhelmed by a declining spectacle at Niagara Falls. Gingras clearly has not understood the long-established balance of interests among the multiple users of the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin in proposing his tit for tat. The Montreal Economic Institute should not have waded into these issues.
Financial Post
Frank Quinn is Canadian Water Issues Council at Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto.