Blue Gold by Maude Barlow

Author:Maude Barlow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2011-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

GRAND CANALS

In recent years, there has been a revival of more traditional methods of transporting bulk water — namely, canal schemes. Given new engineering and construction technologies, canals are now being planned and developed on a cross-continental basis. Suez, the global water giant, for example, is planning to build another Suez-type canal, this time in Europe. Recently, the corporation announced its intention to construct a 160-mile artery to transport water from the Rhône River through France to the Catalonian capital, Barcelona.

Although numerous canal schemes for bulk water transfers are being planned and developed all over the world, nowhere have the canal dreams been as grandiose as in North America. Here, a number of grand canal schemes have been devised to reroute natural river systems in order to deliver huge supplies of water from Canada to the U.S. One of the more prominent of these proposed schemes was literally named the GRAND Canal — the Great Recycling and Northern Development Canal. As originally conceived, the GRAND Canal plans called for the building of a dike across James Bay at the mouth of Hudson Bay (both of which now flow north) in northern Quebec, thereby creating a giant fresh water reservoir of about eighty thousand square kilometers (about thirty thousand square miles) from James Bay and the 20 rivers flowing into it. Through a system of dikes, canals, dams, power plants, and locks, the water would then be diverted from the reservoir and rerouted southward down a 167-mile (269-kilometer) canal, at a rate of 62,000 imperial gallons (about 282,000 liters) a second, into Georgian Bay in Lake Superior. From there, the water would be flushed through the Great Lakes into canals for delivery into markets in the American Midwest and the U.S. Sun Belt.

The GRAND canal vision was widely promoted in the mid-1980s by Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa, who presided over the construction of the massive James Bay hydro project, and by Simon Reisman, Canada’s chief negotiator for the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement. Before being appointed Canada’s free trade negotiator, Reisman had been an Ottawa lobbyist for Grandco, a four-company consortium promoting the proposed Can$100 billion GRAND Canal. The Grandco consortium was headed by Thomas Kierans, the engineer who had initially developed the scheme and was one of Canada’s leading managers of investment capital. One of the major partners in the consortium was the Bechtel Corporation, the U.S. engineering and construction giant that has become, more recently, a key player in water privatization. As trade negotiator, Reisman initially used the GRAND Canal idea as a means to interest the U.S. in free trade, declaring: “In my judgement, water is the most critical area of Canada-U.S. relations over the next 100 years . . . How quickly this issue develops and how much attention is paid depends on how critical the American water shortage is.”

Another mega-canal proposal was the NAWAPA — the North American Water and Power Alliance — designed to carry bulk water from Alaska and northern British Columbia for delivery to 35 U.

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