Is Alberta Opening the Way to Privatizing Water?

Why not? They’re doing it for health care as well.

Thanks to William Munsey over at the Berry Patch for highlighting this threat in his latest post. He focuses on the ever-increasing plight of family farms, threatened by agri-business and indifferent government. The Green Party is certainly on the side of the small- to medium-sized farms and has an extensive policy to support them and make farming rewarding, financially as well as spiritually.

What concerns me here, what becomes an issue for the whole country, is the threat of NAFTA. As soon as we allow one jurisdiction to commoditize water we open the door to MNCs under NAFTA and our various free trade agreements.

Once we do that, we can kiss our right to water good-bye. Personally, I don’t want to live in a country where we have the most abundant freshwater resources in the world but we can’t access them, where they are no longer part of the Commons.

Let’s hope that the Council of Canadians and the Green Party hop on this bandwagon and rallies support to stop this move by a short-sighted, oil sands-obsessed government.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2010 at 5:40 pm and is filed under Canada, Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Is Alberta Opening the Way to Privatizing Water?”

  1. Sheila M Says:
    March 30th, 2010 at 12:59 pm

    Hi Vanessa,

    Thanks for this post – I thought you and your readers might be interested in checking out the Got Thirst? campaign by the Sierra Club Prairie. It is looking at the present review by the GOA on water allocation and raising some serious concerns with water markets and the lack of protections of water as a human and ecosystem right.

    keep up the good fight!
    ~sm

  2. Vanessa Says:
    March 31st, 2010 at 8:47 pm

    Thanks Sheila, is there a link that we could follow.

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