Canada is facing a water crisis unlike anything in recorded history and we have nothing but colonialism to blame.
But we in the North stand to pay among the biggest price for a problem not of our making.
A few water-dependent provinces are sort of taking this coming water shortage seriously, as in they’re telling voters to drink and wash less so industry can continue on its merry way. It won’t be enough, considering our industrial and extraction practices consume vastly greater quantities of water than people do.
Northerners already have to shell out extra money for diesel power thanks to the low flow of the Athabasca River rendering our hydroelectric dams all but useless — we’re already paying for the rest of Canada’s mistake. But with a fire season looking potentially worse than last year staring at us and climate change now melting the last of our glaciers away, we’ve probably only scratched the surface of how much Canada’s self-created water crisis is going to cost us.
It didn’t have to be this way. This is a problem dating back to the 1930s, when the Canadian government, fearful of American expansion into the northern Prairies, decided to practically give away land for next to nothing to encourage Canada’s growing population to settle there. At the time, the Prairies were experiencing an abnormally wet period, which any Elder this side of the Rocky Mountains could have told them, had colonists bothered to ask or listen. But instead, colonists went full throttle on transforming the Prairies from grasslands and wetlands into an uninterrupted blanket of agriculture.
Then, in 2006, one of the world’s leading water scientists, Dr. David Schindler, revealed what traditional knowledge understood all along: Canada’s Prairies are typically drier than they were through the 20th century. A lot drier. How did he figure this out? Simple — he looked at tree rings, which tend to be larger in wetter years when trees have more resources to put into growing. With these, he was able to map out the moisture levels of southern Alberta and Saskatchewan for the past thousand years and found that for at least a third of that time the region was practically a desert.
Of course, this was scientists telling colonists information which made colonists uncomfortable and would have hindered their means of making money, so people chose to ignore it. Instead, water-intense activities like drilling for oil, fracking and meat production have increased dramatically since 2006.
In other words, our Prairie provinces have known they were creating a public health disaster for close to three decades but chose to do nothing, at the behest of voters. The history of climate change mitigation in Canada is a damning paper trail of willful negligence by Canada’s “haves” so they could have more.
Not Northerners, mind you. In spite of all the diesel burned throughout the Arctic over the last two centuries — not that colonists gave Northerners a choice — the North’s contribution to glacier-melting climate change amounts to a drop in the bucket compared to the industrial emissions of Ontario and the oil sands of Alberta.
Even our voting record shows at no point when asked did Northerners ever vote “for” climate change, in the sense they haven’t elected a representative from the lone “do nothing about climate change” party, that being the party that began as Reform and now stands as Canada’s Conservative Party.
As an aside, the now-defunct Mulroney Progressive Conservatives had a respectably robust environmental policy for their time, to their credit.
Compare the North’s record to the voting record across the Prairies now bracing for the water shortage, who have had this information available to them and basically chose to ignore it so they could continue to make money. Remember, the world had come to a climate agreement in the Kyoto Accord, which Canada pulled out of after the pro-oil parts of society had the controls. It’s been pretty much “drill, baby, drill” the entire time, even during the brief tenure of the NDP in Alberta.
We can rest assured the farmers, ranchers and other rural residents who have largely insisted that global warming was a socialist hoax will be the first to demand and receive compensation when climate change leaves their crops bare.
But what about us Northerners, who are once again sitting on the sidelines watching colonists and industrialists — who appear to still think they know more about North America than people who have lived here since the last ice age — keystone cop their way through a crisis of biblical proportions they created themselves?
Anti-oil sands activists in Edmonton have a slogan: Everyone’s downstream. Any problems hitting southern Canada will be amplified up here. Eating healthy in the North is already a challenge. If a drought causes food prices to surge down south, we’re in a lot of trouble.
Since the people who should have known better have enjoyed such prosperity over the past few decades, I think it’s only fair southern provinces compensate the North for the humanitarian crisis Northern governments are going to be stuck with — preferably before that crisis happens so a massive disruption to our supply chains can be managed.
Northerners did not suck Canada dry. Those who got rich doing so should be compensating the territories so we can maintain our quality of life.