Brad’s Reviews > Boiling Point: Government Neglect, Corporate Abuse, and Canada's Water Crisis > Status Update

"Environmental matters are separated off into [departments] whose mandates and concerns are often ignored by the pro-development bureaucracies and big business interests that drive them. Water scientists have been muzzled and largely ignored."

Bureaucratic silos and funding for political snake oil at the expense of what technical experts insist is needed...but in a capitalist state, so it's not the system's fault!

Land grabbing is essentially control grabbing...What is at stake is the power to decide how and for what purposes land and water can be used now and in the future.

Many of the most aggressive land grabbing countries are facing severe water shortages at home.

"The water used to produce food is called 'virtual water', and when [food] is exported, the water embedded in it is exported too...
Canada is a net virtual water exporter...Our net annual virtual water exports would fill the Rogers Stadium in Toronto 37,500 times."

"Nowhere in Canada is opposition to the Energy East pipeline stronger than in Quebec. This is because three powerful movements -- students, First Nations and environmentalists -- came together to fight the pipeline...They remember the effectiveness of the student strike of 2012 involving a quarter of a million students over tuition hikes. The issue was critical in the defeat of the Jean Charest government that fall."

"It took Environment Canada more than 20 years to collect $2.4 million in fines under CEPA [the Canadian Environmental Protection Act], said Ecojustice, and compared this to the Toronto Public Library, which collected $2.6 million in fines for overdue books in 2009 alone."

As we collectively turn serious attention to clean alternatives to fossil fuels, we cannot assume hydroelectricity is a benign choice. Protecting air by endangering water and human health is not the solution to our climate crisis.