This morning, major U.S. news outlets led with a story about Mark Carney winning his bid for the leadership of the Canadian Liberal Party, replacing Justin Trudeau and his sunny ways. Storm clouds have been on the horizon between the two countries for a while now. The wind is picking up.
In his acceptance speech, Carney flatly stated that Canada would win the tariff war and compared it to a recently won hockey match between the two countries. Canadians are pissed off. Feelings of sovereignty and strength are on the rise. This change in mood may well affect the Columbia River Treaty, until now a cooperative agreement between the two countries.
Was it inevitable that the treaty would become controversial? The bilateral negotiating teams have worked tirelessly since 2018 to keep that from happening. Last autumn, they announced an agreement in principle. An imperfect compromise, to be sure. But then again, most compromises are.
Canada’s 15% of the basin’s geographic area holds 40-50% of the entire river’s volume, and the steepest elevation change. When Americans first approached Canada in the late 1940s about storing water upstream for U.S. interests, no major Canadian dams had yet wrestled with the titanic snowmelt held in the steep mountains of the upper watershed above the 49th parallel. The 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty, in effect at the time, said that water in Canada belonged to Canada, until it crossed the border, and then it belonged to the U.S. The 1964 treaty changed all that. Water is now stored at the top of the river basin in Canada, mostly to the benefit of the U.S. That’s the agreement in a nutshell.
What if the 1964 agreement had not overruled the 1909 treaty? Canada might be operating dams today, but instead, with its own interests paramount. Water at the top of the system would not be maximizing U.S. hydropower efficiencies, to the tune of many millions and billions and even trillions of compounded profits enjoyed by the U.S. economy over 60, reliable years. After flowing downhill across the border, water would become American. As would the responsibility of storing water to manage floods in the U.S., something that, to this day, U.S. dams do not appear to have enough capacity to provide for their own American communities.
Back in the 2010s, prior to the recent negotiation phase, I attended by phone a U.S. State Department “listening session” about the treaty, held in Portland Oregon. Business and political leaders were audibly unsettled with fear and uncertainty. What would happen if an updated treaty changed the flood control system? What would become of the airport, the shipping terminal and other industrial infrastructure, all build on Portland’s floodplain since 1964?
(Map by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)
People, like stock markets, prefer certainty. The U.S. and Canadian negotiating teams seemed to understand the threat of chaos. The current U.S. administration so far appears to have taken for granted the reliability that Canada has long shouldered. Theirs is a tributary of the main stem hubris embedded in the 1964 treaty: water will always be abundant; it will flow as dictated, when wanted, and how.
Well, the gig is up. Time for a reminder that the Columbia River deserves – first of all – our respect and gratitude. As do the rights of sovereign nations, be they Indigenous, or more recently imprinted on watersheds.
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