Canada has water – lots of it. It has some of the largest rivers in the world, many fed by glaciers, and the Great Lakes hold around 20% of the world’s freshwater.

So it wasn’t a huge surprise when George Bush, the then President of our more parched American neighbor talked about getting access to Canada’s water to reporters in 2001 saying he “looked forward” to discussing the matter with then Prime Minister Jean Chretien.

Bush called for talks to discuss US private companies buying Canada’s water in 2003, according to Fred Pearce in “When the River runs Dry,” as he wanted to establish that the North American Free Trade Agreement could cover the continent’s water.

He was flatly refused. “We’re absolutely not going to export water, period,” said David Anderson, then Canada’s environment minister.

Due to comments such as these, Canadians have always thought the mostly likely threat to our water came from our neighbour to the south. But now it seems Canada’s water, and the life that lives within it, is facing another threat – an enemy from within.

Under the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, Parliament has passed  the C-38, an omnibus budget bill, which amends lots of different legislation and has swept away decades of hard-won environmental safeguards. Canada’s commitment under Kyoto has been formerly ended and it “guts or significantly weakens rules relating to fisheries protection, environmental assessment, endangered species, and national parks”.

It reduces the scope of the fisheries act, by removing the term “habitat” from it, referring only to stopping activities that could have an “adverse” effect “on a fish of economic, cultural or ecological value.”

“What is a fish of economic, cultural or ecological value?” Otto Langer, a retired biologist, who received leaked documents about the proposed changes to the fisheries act, said in response. “If it has no economic value, can it now be needlessly destroyed?”

He warned that the changes were being proposed to remove restrictions on protecting such important fish habitat in order to clear hurdles for the implementation of the Northern Gateway project. The project would carry crude oil from Alberta to British Columbia, crossing “hundreds of rivers and streams.”

The Canadian government is also cutting back on scientific research. For example, the government has: “withdrawn support for the Experimental Lakes Program in northwestern Ontario, which has used 58 lakes to conduct groundbreaking studies on phosphate, mercury, and bacterial contamination, as well as research on how climate change affects freshwater systems. And it has killed funding for a program that helps keep more than a dozen Arctic science research stations operational.”

Is it any surprise it’s been said: “Ottawa is going to war on the environment”?

Scientists are protesting against the cuts – they are planning to march through Ottawa in white lab coats next Tuesday.

The government has also been clamping down on environmental charities, giving the tax department (CDN) $8 million to enforce rules on political activity and foreign-funded backing.

The government says it’s fed up with environmental groups slowing mega projects that could diversify Canada’s energy exports from the US to expanding Asian markets. The Minister of Natural Resources says in this press release: “They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest. They attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources.  …They do this because they know it can work.”

Canadian Senator Don Plett even suggested that if environmental organisations would be willing to take funding from martians (yes, you read that correctly, perhaps he was thinking of ET?), then they might also accept support from Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

Conservative Senator Percy Mockler called a number of environmental charities “evil” and “bad”, including the David Suzuki Foundation, Sierra Club and Greenpeace Canada.

In a counter-move Tides Canada, a Vancouver-based grant-making environmental organization, threw open its books stating that it received (CDN) $10.9-million in foreign funding in 2011 — 45% of the group’s total revenue.

Northern Gateway Pipelines project

Many environmentalists argue that millions more are spent in Canada each year on lobbying by foreign business interests than on funding environmental groups. And most groups think the clamp down is tightly linked to the current proposal to build the Northern Gateway Pipelines Project.

The government is fed up because public hearings have been delayed as so many people want to have their say.

Concerningly, the company promoting this pipeline proposal, Enbridge, is being investigated in America in relation to a 3 million litre oil spill in July 2010 in the Michigan river that will cost around 700 million to clean up. It faces 22 alleged violations and received a Notice of Probable Violation (NOPV) from the US Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) on July 2 2012. Testimony from the investigation into the spill suggests that disorganization and chaos reigned in the control room – it took employees 17 hours to shut the pipeline down.

This isn’t an isolated case. Artist and environmentalist Franke James outlines some of the risks associated with pipelines stating that “Alberta’s pipelines have spilled a whopping 28 million litres of oil” in the past six years alone. Greenpeace claims that Alberta has experienced three major spills in the past month and has set up a ‘pipeline spill tip line’ so people can call in anonymously to report on spills.

If the pipeline were to go ahead, the crude oil would run along pipes from the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta to Kitimat, British Columbia (BC), where it would be loaded onto tankers to carry it to Asia. There are big risks with shipping the oil up and down the sounds along the BC coast. “300 km of tricky navigation in waters distinguished by fog, storms, and quite amazing tidal currents” is how the former federal deputy Minister of Industry Canada and Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, Harry Swain described it. As a result, Swain recommends a less risky route to the industrial Port at Prince Rupert.

Tanker traffic would pass through channels of the Great Bear Forest – one of the biggest tracts of temperate rainforest in the world and the project would require over-turning the current federal-provincial moratorium on oil tanker traffic on the British Columbia coastline, which has been in place for decades.

Elizabeth May, Leader of the Green Party of Canada points out that Canada’s biggest energy union would prefer to refine the crude oil in Canada rather than lose the jobs to other countries refining it elsewhere. This would also solve the problem of having to pipe the crude oil 1,177 kilometers across western Canada.

Obviously there’s a lot to debate. Many think this crackdown is really about silencing environmental critics at this critical phase of the project.

The government says it: “…is introducing measures to ensure that charities devote their resources primarily to charitable, rather than political, activities, and to enhance public transparency and accountability in this area.”

Perhaps the Canadian government took its cue from Africa, where this approach has been adopted before. In 2009, the Ethiopian government adopted a law governing the registration and regulation of NGOs which stops NGOs receiving more than 10% of their funding from foreign sources from engaging in advocacy or human rights activities.

It’s quite some role model for the Canadian government to aspire to.