Long before Trump, diverting water to the U.S. was an ambitious vision for the continent

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The study imagines North America the way an engineer might, assuming that engineer was equipped with divine powers. First published in 1964, the concept of a North American Water and Power Alliance was an attempt to solve the design deficiencies of a continent that delivers great quantities of water to northern regions where few people live, while parching the sunny latitudes that provide an ideal home for suburbs and lettuce farms.

To fix it, some replumbing would be required, with the power of human technology – including, perhaps, nuclear-powered excavation – substituting for the tectonic forces that so badly misdirected natural water flows.

The concept, commonly known as NAWAPA, envisioned a hemisphere where staggering volumes of water from rivers in Alaska and the Canadian Arctic were redistributed south. With mechanical aid, they would flow to the U.S. Southwest and into Mexico, delivering great torrents of new hydroelectricity and etching waterways across the landscape that would allow ships to travel from Vancouver to the Arctic Ocean or Lake Superior.

The sheer grandiosity of the plan was one of the reasons it was never built, dismissed then and now as impractical and ridiculous. Today, the NAWAPA documents reside in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution.

But the ideas they embody are hardly relics. When U.S. President Donald Trump discusses opening a “very large faucet” of water from Canada, he is echoing a sentiment that some say this country should not immediately dismiss. In fact, more than 60 years after the publication of the NAWAPA plan, the concerns that motivated its extraordinary notions are little changed.

“Water is now our number one continental problem and must be solved on a continental scale,” the authors of the study wrote, warning of an “impending water famine faced by much of our continent.”

Indeed, shortages have grown more acute. The years between 2000 and 2022 formed the driest stretch in recorded history along the Colorado River, forcing southwestern states, including California, to agree to slash their use of water. A year ago, Mexico City came within a few months of running dry.

Given the scale of potential problems, it is “inconceivable” that Canada has never seriously considered diverting water to the U.S., said F. Pierre Gingras, an industrial engineer who spent decades working on hydroelectric projects in northern Quebec.

Many important waterways are already shared between the two countries. The Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909, which established the International Joint Commission to settle transboundary water disputes, is considered one of the most important U.S.-Canada documents. The Columbia and the St. Lawrence are jointly managed. So, too, are the waterbodies that form the biggest surface freshwater system on Earth.

“The waters of the Great Lakes belong as much to the Americans as to the Canadians. What would happen if the Americans diverted some of it to their country?” asked Mr. Gingras.

“There have been and still are conflicts and wars around the world for this reason, for exactly this same situation.”

Canada’s economy has been built partly on the export of natural resources to the U.S., with broad support for the sale of oil, potash, electricity and mined goods.

But water has always elicited a very different reaction. Decades ago, Arthur Laing, then Canada’s minister of northern affairs, dismissed the NAWAPA plan, saying: “there is no continental water in Canada. There is only Canadian water.”

Yet history, necessity and opportunism have continued to generate proposals for transferring Canadian water to the U.S. Some were quixotic, like plans to tow away icebergs. Others were smaller-scale, with plans to load freshwater onto tankers from places on the B.C. coast, including Toba Inlet and Ocean Falls.

Still others were vast in scale. One envisioned by a Newfoundland engineer called for building a 160-kilometre dike across James Bay to capture river outflows, which could then be re-routed south. That plan, dubbed the Grand Canal, won the support of former Quebec premier Robert Bourassa, who in 1985 told The Globe and Mail that the project “could create spectacular wealth for Canada.” It could also, he added, “change the political equilibrium in North America.”

Those ideas were formed in the crucible of the Cold War, in competition with similarly audacious hydraulic re-engineering envisioned by Soviet planners. “It was very much in the same spirit that animated the space race,” said Benjamin Forest, a geographer at McGill University who has written about the history of continental water-transfer projects.

Building NAWAPA would require moving enough dirt to build 7,100 Hoover Dams, boring a water tunnel 130 kilometres in length, filling an 800-kilometre long new lake alongside the western reaches of the Rockies and constructing extravagant systems to lift water over mountain ranges. One of those systems would be powered by seven times the electricity generated by the biggest nuclear power plant in the U.S.

Those plans held some engineering logic, but would cost tremendous resources to build and operate.

”But what you end up with is really expensive water,“ Prof. Forest said. ”From an economic point of view, it’s way cheaper to implement conservation measures.”

Politically, meanwhile, the idea of mass transfer of water to the U.S. has never been popular, seen as “sucking the lifeblood out of Canada,” he said.

Indeed, in B.C., the NAWAPA proposal helped to motivate establishment of the Agricultural Land Reserve to protect local farmland, over worries that exports of water to the U.S. would undermine domestic food supplies.

”If the NAWAPA plan went ahead, they would have the water to continue irrigating the desert, and we would be unable to compete with them to grow our own food,” said Harold Steves, a former provincial MLA and long-time city councillor.

Mr. Gingras, however, believes Canada should seriously consider working together with the U.S. on water. He has proposed a more modest plan to divert water from northern Quebec toward the St. Lawrence, a concept that, he has calculated, would quickly pay itself back in hydroelectricity generation alone. Freshwater sales would only add to its value.

If both sides fail to pursue plans that could be in their joint interests, his greatest fear is “that the Americans will impose thoughtless projects on us.”