Roll On Columbia

North American Strategic Resources (2) Water

Preamble

This assessment is part of a continuing series that addresses key political issues affecting strategic resources in the Americas. The first assessment, which deals with energy and rare earth elements (REES), is available here. Subsequent assessments will continue to be available on the Kirsch Group website.

Top Line

  • “Canada as the 51st state” remains an important component of American political rhetoric. 
  • The current US administration has adopted a proprietary attitude towards Canadian water.
  • Successive executive orders reference the need for “readily accessible” and “reliable” supplies of fresh water.
  •  In particular, the administration’s stated intention to bring about an “American AI Revolution” will require vast amounts of water for cooling and power generation, especially in high “water stress” parts of the country. 
  • America’s plan to achieve complete energy and resource independence has profound potential economic, political and environmental implications for Canada.

The Scarcest Resource?

In the province of Nova Scotia right now, a litre of gasoline costs about $1.40 at the pump. A litre of water, purchased in the same gas station, easily costs double that, sometimes more. Water is, without question, one of the rarest and most valuable resource-based commodities in the world. In North America, drought and wildfires are now “normal” components of the annual weather cycle, even in regions, like the Atlantic provinces, that historically experience heavy precipitation year-round. Water is something that people will fight and die for. Globally, the number of armed water-related conflicts, both between and within states, has been increasing steadily over the past decade, with the biggest jump – from 231 events to 347 conflict events – occurring between 2002 and 2023 (the last year for which statistics are available). 

To Have and to Have Not…Redux

Despite the “new normal” alluded to above, Canada remains one of the world’s largest renewable reservoirs of fresh water. The United States, meanwhile, is experiencing severe water shortages, particularly in the West and Southwest, large swathes of which (Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and most of Southern California) are essentially desert. Cities like Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles, to say nothing of regional agriculture and industry, are only possible through extensive water diversion projects and reliance on severely depleted underground aquifers.

A Very Large Faucet

Even before being re-elected for the second time, President Trump claimed that the water crisis in the American Southwest could be solved by turning on a “very large faucet,” thereby releasing “millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps in Canada and all.” This fails to acknowledge either the generations of water overuse and mismanagement on the American side, or the formidable engineering and logistical challenges of turning on that “very large faucet.” But it is a strong indicator that the United States, and this administration in particular, has adopted a proprietary attitude towards Canadian water.

Borders, Tariffs and Treaties

The American preoccupation with Canadian water is largely overshadowed by both the public and political fixation on tariffs. But in a February 2025 conversation with then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, newly re-elected President Trump said that the International Boundary Treaty, which established the border between Canada and the United States in 1908, was invalid.  Trump said essentially the same thing about the International Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909, aimed at preventing and resolving disputes over water and waterways shared by Canada and the United States. He also threatened to tear up more regionally focused instruments, like the Great Lakes – Saint Lawrence River Basin Sustainable Water Agreement, which place limitations on the movement and transfer of water between American states and Canadian provinces. 

Of course, threats do not necessarily equal action, and President Trump has long made it clear that sowing uncertainty among his opponents is one his key negotiating tactics.  But it is important to watch US signals closely. Earlier this year, for example, the United States pulled out of negotiations to update the Columbia River Treaty. The treaty was initially ratified in 1964 to allow for joint management of flood control and hydroelectric power generation on the Columbia, which rises in British Columbia and meets the Pacific at Astoria, Oregon (not, as Mr. Trump has asserted, Los Angeles, California). The President’s “very large faucet” refers specifically to the Columbia, and Trump called the treaty “unfair” during a conversation with former Prime Minister Trudeau. So, this pause in negotiations may well be a form of brinkmanship designed to extract key concessions from Canada around water use and sovereignty throughout the critical Columbia basin. 

Not As Weird As It Seems

Superficially, there appears to be a large element of science fiction inherent in any question of diverting large amounts of Canadian water southwards. Whatever metaphor the President chooses, it is not as simple as turning on a faucet. But American contingency plans in this regard go back to at least the 1950s when the US Army Corps of Engineers (which is responsible for water management in the United States) proposed the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), which would involve construction of a so-called “Rocky Mountain Trench” to  divert water from rivers in the Yukon, British Columbia, and Alberta to the Southwestern United States. 

Apart from sovereignty issues, Canadian objections to NAWAPA have been rooted in existential questions around ecosystem damage and aboriginal land use, to say nothing of the drowning of entire BC communities. But the idea underlying NAWAPA has never quite died, earning it the sobriquet “zombie water apocalypse.”  

In President Trump’s January flurry of post-inaugural executive orders, two standouts are entitled, respectively, Unleashing American Energy and Putting People over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California. While neither mentions Canada (or NAWAPA) specifically, the former states that American economic and national security and military preparedness require a “readily accessible supply of reliable energy in every State and Territory.” People Over Fish, meanwhile, alludes to “a reliable water supply” for the State of California.

Why This is Important: Water, AI and Us

Terms like “national security” and “military preparedness” are often used in ways that are intentionally vague, at least until they are not. In July, 2025, the White House released Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan. The plan states unequivocally that “the United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence,” with particular emphasis on the associated “broad economic and military benefits.” The action plan envisions a massive investment in AI-related research and development; the construction of high-security data center facilities for military and intelligence use; and vastly expanded AI chip and semiconductor manufacturing infrastructure.  

These executive orders, as well as the action plan, have huge potential economic and political consequences. But what none of them addresses are the environmental consequences. America’s thirst for Canadian water goes far beyond agriculture, drinking water and keeping the golf courses of Scottsdale and Las Vegas green. 

Amidst the nightmarish I, Robot, scenarios that underlie any discussion of AI, something that is often ignored is its massive demand for water. AI servers and data centers consume significant amounts of water to run heat dissipating cooling towers. Recent estimates by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory  suggest that in 2023, US AI data centers consumed about 17.5 billion litres of water, or 0.3% of the American public water supply. That level of consumption is expected to quadruple by 2028. 

This is compounded by the fact that many US AI facilities are situated in high “water stress” regions, like Southern California and Arizona. And these figures do not account for the use of hydroelectric power to keep the facilities themselves running, or the indirect water usage of AI consumers. A single Chat GPT “text output” of 150-330 words, for example, uses a total of about 17 millilitres of water.  Prorated over the estimated 800 million weekly users of Chat GPT globally, this adds up, at the very least, to 14.5 million litres of water just to keep Chat GPT – one element of the vast AI ecosystem - running for a week.   

In a country where even deniers of climate change admit that the water is running out, it is not difficult to see where the water so desperately needed to bring about American AI Revolution, which President Trump has compared to the Industrial Revolution, is going to come from. For years now, America has signalled its intention to achieve complete energy and resource independence, no matter what the cost. It is increasingly clear that a critical part of that cost is likely to be borne by Canada.