Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump announced an idea late last week to help alleviate California water shortages — and it involves British Columbia.
“So you have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps in Canada and all pouring down,” Trump said at a press conference at his Los Angeles golf course.
“And they have essentially a very large faucet. And you turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it. It’s massive.”
Werner Antweiler with the University of British Columbia Sauder School of Business said Trump’s idea is actually not a new one.
“The idea seems to be in the heads of people that Canada has all this wonderful water,” he said.
“Can we not just get it down to where we need it, where we have drought conditions, as in California? But of course, the business logic is that it’s all way too expensive to do so, and there’s just no realistic business model for that.”
Antweiler said there is a treaty that exists between B.C. and the U.S., which is called the Columbia River Treaty.
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“That actually regulates how much water is flowing across the border and what it’s going to be used for,” he added.
“In fact, we’ve actually had less water because of climate change that’s going south. And so there has to be some adjustments made. But also the water is used for hydro dams. It’s used for maintaining the fisheries in the Columbia River all the way to the coast, all the way through Oregon primarily. And so there is just no spare water here, frankly, shipping it anywhere.”
Trump told reporters that “all of that water goes aimlessly into the Pacific.”
“And if they turned it back, all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles,” he added.
Antweiler said B.C. and Canada needs its own water and there is no more to reroute in bulk to other countries.
“It’s unrealistic for ecological reasons as well as commercial reasons. And it would actually require a treaty and we would not negotiate a treaty that would be to the detriment of Canada. We would only want to negotiate a tree that would be beneficial to us,” Antweiler said.
“In fact, that is exactly what the Columbia Treaty is doing.”
Trump said that if B.C. would turn the faucet then “farmers would have all the water they needed.”
Antweiler said it’s best to take comments like this one with a grain of salt.
“I’m sure Mr. Trump has never studied hydrology or the economics of water management and the actual, the needs of California, because what California needs is mostly local water,” he said.
“They need to actually manage their own water much better. They actually have water, but they’re mismanaging it for a number of reasons.”
Antweiler added that there is a lot that California can and should do to manage their water sources, including the use of water in agriculture.
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