Melting Point

An hour south of Lethbridge, Alberta, and twenty minutes from Montana, Milk River is one of the last Canadian towns before the border. The one-block downtown is Prairie minimalist: a Chinese restaurant near a lonely stop sign, beyond it a bank, and across the highway, yellow and green grain elevators. Just west of town, the pavement peters out to a gravel range road, and to the south the Milk River surges with flood water. From the Rockies to Medicine Hat, this usually dry country, where researchers scour barren coulees for dinosaur bones, was awash in six days of uninterrupted rain. Pincher Creek declared an emergency; High River faced its namesake. Though troubling, this spring’s wet weather provided an ironic counterpoint to my objective: to find the century-old Spite Canal, an artifact of Canadian-American history born of drought and embodying the enmeshed nature of the two countries’ relationship with water.

Looking north across treeless hills, I saw a conspicuously straight line emerge from the rain. My rental car vibrated over a Texas gate, and minutes later I scrambled up a grassy embankment. Beyond it was a ditch about two metres deep that followed the contour of the land northward. This crude trench—unmarked, largely unremembered, and now crumbling back into the prairie—is the physical fact on the ground that induced Teddy Roosevelt’s chest-beating America to sign a treaty with Canada that is still lauded today.

Its origins can be traced to the late 1800s when settlers north and south of the forty-ninth parallel relied on two rivers: the St. Mary and the Milk. Both flow from Montana into Canada before diverging; the St. Mary carrying on to Hudson Bay, the Milk turning back into Montana after looping 250 kilometres through Canada. Rising high in the mountains, the snow-fed St. Mary ran strongly all summer; the Milk, born in the foothills, often dried to a trickle. That led the Americans to launch a plan in 1901 to divert water out of the St. Mary and move it across the foothills to the Milk and their ranches in Montana.

Alarmed Canadian homesteaders turned to Ottawa, but Roosevelt ignored Canada’s plea to halt the plan, so the Albertans fought back. If the Americans were going to “steal” water and divert it to the Milk, they would take it back as it flowed north, drastically reducing water levels before it turned back into the United States. In 1903, the Albertans began digging a canal to recapture the disputed water. Washington finally paid attention, and in 1909, the two countries signed the landmark International Boundary Waters Treaty. The International Joint Commission the treaty created had as its first task settling the St. Mary-Milk River dispute, which it did by dividing the water equally.

But all that has not earned the ditch that brought a bumptious young America to heel any credit, or even a wayside historical marker. Back in the car, I rumbled over more Texas gates in search of a local to confirm my findings. Ten minutes later, I came across a house sheltered in a stand of cottonwoods where an elderly gentleman in a plaid shirt and suspenders answered the door. Named Jay Snow, he’s a retired rancher, and he told me the land for kilometres around has been in his family since his Mormon grandfather came north from Utah in the late 1800s. I asked him about the Spite Canal. “I take umbrage at the name,” Snow replied. “There was no spite involved. They were dead serious.”

Canadians are still “dead serious” about water. Coureurs de bois and the ghost of Tom Thomson haunt the misty lakes of our collective subconscious. The effect, too often, is to dissolve reasoned debate about the subject in a solution of mythic imagery infused with implied threats to our identity. A reflexive “aqua-nationalism,” clothed in environmental righteousness, is hostile to any suggestion that Canada’s water could ever become a tradable commodity. The animus is all the more implacable if the discussion involves trading water with Americans—an idea close to treason in some eyes. In this atmosphere it’s easy to ridicule visionaries who dream of replumbing the continent. Nonagenarian Newfoundlander Tom Kierans’s scheme to dike James Bay and pipe water to the US Midwest through the Great Lakes invites a check of the old man’s sanity, and it hardly surprises that right-wing American anti-Semite Lyndon LaRouche is behind a plan to reroute water from the Peace and Liard rivers from northern BC deep into the United States.

But our hostile reductionism is going to become difficult to sustain as greenhouse-gas emissions continue to heat up the planet. New patterns of wind, humidity, and ambient temperature are already dramatically altering the weather map. Some parts of the country are receiving more rain than ever before; other regions are drying up.

In particular, the cold heart of our mythic element—quelques arpents de neiges, as Voltaire called it—is melting. From winter snowbanks to mountain glaciers to northern permafrost, the “cryosphere”—the portion of the earth covered in ice and snow—is thawing. The implications go beyond winter sports and alpine sightseeing. Canada’s multi-billion-dollar investment in water infrastructure was designed to withstand the weather patterns of the past. It will not be able to either contain the massive floods or ameliorate the droughts of the future. A growing number of scientists believe Canadians must begin now to discuss the possibility that major rivers may have to be diverted to rain-starved regions and that massive dams will have to be built to contain runoff from rain in the Rocky Mountains that no longer freezes into snow and ice. “We probably have a decade in which to make a difference, to in some way preserve the economy and social benefits and prosperity that we’ve got,” says Robert Sandford, the Canadian chair of the United Nations Water for Life initiative. “The clock is ticking.”

Floods and drought do not respect borders. As radical as the idea sounds, Canadians, like the pioneers on Milk River a century ago, will have to share their water with the US, through bulk transfers and the management of river systems. Tentative steps toward integrating the North American watershed have already started, with proposals to divert water from Lake of the Woods in northwest Ontario to the Dakotas, and from Shuswap Lake in central BC to the increasingly dry Okanagan, from which it would flow to the US through the Columbia River. One of the largest proposed diversions would reroute water from the Nelson River in northern Manitoba to the US border, earning the province $7 billion annually in export royalties.

Former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed believes the issues surrounding water—both how to share it within Canada and with the US—will soon turn into a weather-driven political crisis. “At some stage of the game in four or five years,” warns Lougheed, who is now a member of the Trilateral Commission, a think tank on emerging international issues, “Washington is going to read the small print, interpret the Free Trade Agreement (fta), and think they have a claim over our fresh water. It’ll be a huge issue. It’s coming.”