What are some of the global threats that Canada faces today? Is Canada well-equipped to handle any such threats?

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Canada and Global Threats

The Canada-U .S . environmental relationship appears to the casual observer as a series of crises separated by times of complacency . Often the crises received so much attention - Great Lakes water quality in the 1970s , acid rain in the 1980s , the Pacific salmon dispute of the - 1990s that , indeed , other issues paled by comparison and appeared at the time to be nonissues . However , the reality is that there is virtually never a time of calm and

complacency in the environmental arena . At any one time politicians and bureaucrats on both sides of the b are dealing with myriad issues involving air quality , water quality transfer of water , species and habitats , impacts of development projects , and changes in the structure of mechanisms for dispute resolution (such as the International Joint Commission . This hidden reality is a tribute to the smooth but complex relationships between the two neighbouring countries , which have evolved over the twentieth century to prevent , minimize , and resolve environmental disputes before they become newsworthy

Perhaps the oldest still-functional environmental management system in the world for shared water resources is the Canada-U .S . International Joint Commission . This body , created by the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 , has a proud record of ninety-one years of fact-finding and dispute resolution . Although the commission can , in theory , be used by either of the two to work on environmental issues anywhere along the more than 5000 miles of b between the two countries , the majority of its work has focused on the Great Lakes (DFAIT . Western states and provinces and the northeastern U .S . and Maritime Provinces of Canada have occasionally been sites for IJC studies and reports , but this has been infrequent . In fairness , neither government has made much use of the commission 's potential in the management of shared water resources outside the Great Lakes Basin

Inasmuch as water is a replenishable resource , it might seem that we would never face a water shortage-or , if we did , it would be merely a local or regional problem . But that assumption is wrong . Shortages of water loom even in the United States , in the fast-growing desert states of the Southwest . There , the core problem is that so much fresh ground water is used for large-scale irrigation of farms in the desert

Of course , other parts of the world already face much more severe water shortages . According to Water for People (a private organization funded through foundations in Canada and the United States , more than 1 billion people do not have access to secure , hygienic and abundant drinking water "Nearly 3 billion people " the WFP maintains "lack adequate sanitation facilities . Every day , 11 ,000 children die of water-related diseases-a No nation is safe from potential water shortages , certainly not the Persian Gulf States , which sit on huge oil reserves

An intriguing , if possibly unwieldy , suggestion is trading clean water for oil . North America in general and Canada in particular are blessed with an...