The Green Interview, October 21, 2013
The Canadian government’s new free-trade deal with Europe signs away people’s water rights and gives up local control over provision of water and other provincial-municipal services, warns Maude Barlow in a new Green Interview that discusses the world’s dwindling water supplies and explains the implications of CETA—Canada’s tentative Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with Europe.
“I want to sound the alarm,” says Barlow, whose newly released book, Blue Future: Protecting Water for People and the Planet Forever, outlines the problems and solutions to a global water crisis.
“It's a corporate coup in slow motion,” she says of the past three decades of free-trade agreements that have, among other things, made water a tradable good that corporations can own. The Harper government just announced it has signed CETA, a free-trade agreement that is the first in the world to extend free trade to municipal and provincial levels of government, where most Canadian tax dollars are spent and where decisions are made about how water is used.
“Any energy company, any big American agri-business company, any big American chemical company, any mining company that needs water for its operations here, could claim ownership,” Barlow explains. She cites the example of the U.S. pulp-and-paper company Abitibi Bowater suing the Canadian government under NAFTA for $130 million for water it left behind when it went bankrupt and pulled out of Newfoundland. “This proposed European agreement, CETA, would give European corporations the same rights in Canada as American companies have.”
That means the world’s biggest private water corporations—France’s Veolia and Suez—could establish themselves in Canada as for-profit suppliers of municipal water. And if municipalities want to make their water public again, “you can never take it back,” says Barlow, because like NAFTA, CETA gives companies ownership rights over water. In addition, it prevents municipal and provincial governments from developing their economies by hiring local companies and buying local products.
At the same time as industrial consumption of water is rapidly growing, water is disappearing.
“You can't exaggerate this. We have studies that tell us that the ground water is being pumped at double the rate, every 20 years. This means we are pumping ancient fossil water faster than it can be replenished by nature,” she says.
The Green Interview is a subscription website of extended interviews produced and directed by Chris Beckett in association with Silver Donald Cameron. The programs feature some of the world’s greatest thinkers, writers and observers—people whose ideas and perceptions are leading the way to a new era of sustainability. Visitors to the site can watch one interview free of charge. In addition, the interviews are available in thousands of libraries worldwide through GreenR, the environmental database service of Gale Cengage Learning.
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