Trump’s musings on ‘very large faucet’ in Canada part of looming water crisis, say researchers [Video]

Water sharing between Canada and the United States has long been a contentious issue. 

In 2005, former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed warned against sharing Canada’s water supply with the United States, suggesting Alberta’s most important resource was water, not oil and gas.

“We should communicate to the United States very quickly how firm we are about it,” Lougheed said.

Lougheed’s concern didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It came in the context of a long history of water-sharing proposals, some more radical than others. 

Take the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), a massive, abandoned engineering megaproject that aimed to “replumb” the continent, diverting water from rivers in Alaska through Canada to the United States in northern Montana through the Rocky Mountain Trench.

Those proposals come and go, even if some researcherssee NAWAPA as something of a “zombie” project, always resurfacing, never dead. The actual history of water-sharing between the U.S. and …