Water Policy

Monday April 29, 2002

    Mr. Bill Blaikie (Winnipeg--Transcona, NDP): Mr. Speaker, reports today that Alberta may want to withhold more of the water which currently flows from Alberta into Saskatchewan, and indeed ultimately into Manitoba and Hudson Bay, raise serious questions not just about the effect on downstream communities and provinces but also about water policy in Canada in general and the lack of an overall water policy based on sustainability and the maintenance of water as a public good and not a source of profit or the object of various privatization schemes.

    We need a federal water policy, but before we can have a serious discussion about what that policy looks like we need to know that the government can be trusted. So far it has not been willing to live up to its own commitment made in the House to ban the bulk export of water. Until it does, or until it admits that it is NAFTA that keeps it from doing so, we cannot have an honest debate about water policy in the country.