On February 9, 1999 I moved a NDP Opposition Day motion on freshwater exports. The motion called for an immediate moratorium on the export of bulk water shipments and inter-basin transfers, and for the government to introduce legislation to prohibit bulk freshwater exports and inter-basin transfers, in order to assert Canada’s sovereign right to protect, preserve and conserve our freshwater for future generations.

The motion, including our amendment which stated that Canada should not be a party to any international agreement that compels us to export freshwater against our will, successfully passed the House (a rare occurrence).

The NDP moved this motion as part of an ongoing strategy to force the government to put in place a national policy to protect Canadian sovereignty over our freshwater resources. We also want to ensure that our water remains a public resource, with its care and distribution remaining in public hands, and not those of multinational corporations who want to try and use trade agreements and privatization to treat it like any other product for sale.

The NDP has been calling for action on this issue for many years. We warned during the debates around the Canada/US and North American Free Trade Agreements that our water resources were vulnerable.

Recently, this vulnerability has been illustrated by a challenge under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by an American company, Sun Belt Inc. This company is claiming over $ 300 million (Cdn.) in damages under Article 11 of NAFTA (the investor state dispute mechanism that was to be expanded in the MAI), because the NDP government in BC stopped this company from exporting BC water in supertankers.

This is a perfect example of what’s wrong with NAFTA - it allows a foreign company to take our governments (municipal, provincial, federal) to court to enforce their "right" to profit. This is the same thing that forced the government of Canada to settle out of court with Ethyl Corp. for attempting to prevent them, for health and environmental reasons, from selling the gasoline additive MMT in Canada.

The day following our motion, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of the Environment tried to pretend that they were living up to the NDP motion passed in the House of Commons the day before.

However, what they announced falls far short of the NDP motion. For example, the motion called on the federal government to declare immediately a moratorium on bulk water exports. Instead, all the Liberals would do was call on the provinces to institute 10 separate provincial moratoriums and they are not necessarily immediate, if some of them happen at all.

Worst of all the Liberals continue to parade the half-truth that water is not affected by NAFTA. If so, why do they seem to be saying that they want to avoid a national ban on exports on the grounds that that would treat water as a tradable good and might trigger NAFTA?

If water was exempt like raw logs, beer and culture are under NAFTA, we could ban it or not ban its export as we please; but we cannot and we will not be able to until the Liberals face up to the reality of what they once knew and now deny, that we either have to change or scrap NAFTA.

We do not want to be in the situation three, five, or ten years from now where the Liberals say then what they are saying now about magazines and about drug patent legislation. "Oh well, yes, we were against extending the drug patent legislation and we are for protecting the Canadian magazine industry, but what can we do because we are in NAFTA and we are in the WTO. It really does not matter what we said before. We are hapless victims. We are at the mercy of these trade agreements."

Of course, what they will not say is, with respect to NAFTA and the WTO, is that the Liberals themselves signed these agreements.

Canadians have had enough of this self-inflicted powerlessness and they don’t want to see a repeat performance on water.