What Trump’s tinkering around with water at the Canadian border could be about

WASHINGTON, D.C. — While Canadians have been focused on Donald Trump’s hounding them about becoming the “51st state” and squeezing their cross-border trade, the U.S. president has been quietly fiddling around with the rules for waters along the Canada-U.S. border.

In late April, the president signed House Joint Resolution 140 into law, rolling back a Biden-era mining moratorium on more than 200,000 acres of U.S. federal lands near the Boundary Waters watershed in Minnesota that drains into Canadian waters.

Proponents are keen for the development of minerals and geothermal energy in the region, but critics fear mining will undermine water protections. 

The rollback is a one-off, and scholars of the border waters treaties between Canada and the U.S. think it’s unlikely that Trump plans to renounce the long-standing agreements. But he has raised boundary waters as a bone of contention before.

In 2025, the president reportedly threatened former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with cancelling the 1908 treaty demarcating the U.S.-Canada boundary, while also saying he wanted to revisit the countries’ sharing of lakes and rivers. That water-sharing regime is governed by a number of treaties and conventions, with the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty (BWT) the main foundational agreement for U.S.-Canada boundary waters.

Where threatening the treaties could be useful to Trump is trying to introduce them again as a bargaining chip for other negotiations, said Daniel Macfarlane, a professor at Western Michigan University’s School of Environment, Geography, and Sustainability.

Making it easier on him is the fact that the pacts are vulnerable because they feature a notable lack of enforcement mechanisms.

“He likes to make threats, like ‘I’ll end the Boundary Waters Treaty’ that he perceives as important to Canadians,” said Macfarlane. “It’s just another weapon in his ‘art of the deal’ when it comes to maybe a trade agreement or something.”

But he notes that there’s no indication that Trump sees the treaties as an obstacle to his bigger priorities, the way he sees Canadian imports as a threat.

“It’s not bugging him too much, I don’t think, because it’s not blocking the things he wants to happen, as we see with him approving the mining,” Macfarlane added. 

Even if Trump wanted to withdraw the United States from the BWT, doing so would be politically and diplomatically consequential and jeopardize interconnected pacts, such as the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, putting both countries at risk. 

“Politicians of all stripes and colours threaten a lot of things. Whether they actually do it in the end, I would think that you don’t want to cut off your nose to spite your face,” said Richard Paisley, director of the Global Environment Facility International Waters Governance Initiative at the University of British Columbia.

Undermining such agreements would hurt both countries by weakening a system that prevents one side from harming the other through water diversions, flooding, or pollution.

Riley Denoon, co-director of the International Waters Governance Research Initiative, also doesn’t think Canada-U.S. water co-ordination will be undone by Trump. 

While Trump’s comments can inflame public anxiety and nationalist reactions in Canada, Denoon said it’s unlikely to fundamentally derail U.S.-Canada water co-operation. 

“Ultimately, a lot of the co-operation on these water courses is really ingrained, and really sits a lot of the time at a local level,” he explained, noting how several different bodies have been created under the aegis of the BWT that create points of contact between the two countries. 

“These are co-operative mechanisms, which foster a lot of goodwill between the parties, especially at a local level.”

Still, the BWT’s power, Macfarlane explained, is mostly conditional on political goodwill.

Established in 1909, the BWT was an agreement between the United States and Great Britain acting on behalf of Canada to prevent and resolve disputes over water usage by the two countries and to address other transboundary water concerns. It established an institution called the International Joint Commission (IJC), a cooperative, technical, and advisory body of six commissioners — three from each country — that has operated ever since. 

Some think the IJC’s authority has been greatly diminished over time and that the original mandate did not equip it to handle today’s complex challenges.

Paisley called the IJC “anachronistic,” because it was designed a century ago, long before today’s environmentalism and the recognition of climate change. 

“It’s hard to design institutions a hundred-and-however-many years ago …  they had no idea about climate change,” he noted.

Also, the IJC generally works by consensus, meaning both countries have to ask it to investigate an issue concerning them both. That is great for binational co-operation, but it undermines the organization’s ability to take decisive action over urgent matters.

When asked to do so, the IJC investigates concerns over water matters and pollution, and it makes recommendations but has no authority to insist they are adopted. In recent years, both sides have been reportedly reluctant to send disputes to the IJC because they do not want rulings that would constrain economic activity, manufacturing, or agriculture.

A more muscular BWT, however, never would have been possible,  say those who know its history.

“I don’t think the problem’s with the treaty,” said Macfarlane. “It’s with governments — because you couldn’t have passed a treaty back in 1909 that had more teeth. It never would’ve been politically feasible. It would never have passed the U.S. Congress.”

So far, the IJC hasn’t gotten involved with Trump’s ending of the mining moratorium because it hasn’t been asked to, said Pierre Baril, a Canadian IJC commissioner and chair.

“If Canada and the U.S. ask us to dig into the mining situation, we will do it,” he said.

Baril declined to comment on Trump’s politics or treaty threats, stressing that the IJC does not weigh in on political decisions and operates independently of changing governments. He said the commission continues to function through regular co-operation and consensus, and he expressed confidence that both the IJC and the BWT remain strong and durable.

“We are quite immune,” he said. “We still operate independently, whenever the Liberals or Conservatives in Canada are in power or the Democrats or the Republicans are in power in Washington.”

In this case, Denoon said the BWT really becomes more relevant only if there is actual transboundary harm or a project with clear cross-border effects. So far, no mining has begun near the Boundary Waters watershed.

“Until there’s actual transboundary harm, there wouldn’t be much the IJC would do,” he said.  And both countries would need to ask the IJC to look into the matter.

Until then, any real damages, according to Paisley, would have to be sorted out through private litigation.

National Post

tmoran@postmedia.com