If you put it in a tank, it becomes a good. But to get real, serious amounts of water diverted, you need to divert a river, and rivers and aquifers are not goods. OIl in barrels is a good; the tar sands in the ground are not.

It costs money to put water into bottles or tanks and ship it miles away. If American consumers are stupid enough to pay large sums of money for bottled water shipped thousands of miles, then — to some extent — I say let them! Yes, there is a global cost to the energy consumed, but I would rather they ship the water from Canada to the US than from e.g. Switzerland or Fiji to the US.

I also don’t understand how the US consumers would get the water advantageously over the Canadian consumers. If water is at all like in the US, some of the rights are owned privately but the bulk is owned by municipalities. The governments can elect not to sell it, just like Canada is not obliged to grant logging rights to public land. Meanwhile, if an Albertan cow farmer decides to sell his/her water rights to Desani instead of watering cows with it, fine. The same amount of water comes out of the river, but it goes into a truck instead of a cow. I’m okay with that. (I don’t think that the amount removed from the ecological water cycle is at all significant compared to the amount of water used in agriculture.)

What I read about the Bolivian privatization wasn’t about shipping water from Bolivia to elsewhere, it was about a messup privatizing the local water distribution (and presumably also wastewater treatment) utility. This is very different. If you have other links, I’d be happy to look at them.

Again, I look to oil. NAFTA hasn’t make oil unavailable to Canadians; the recent spike in oil prices had to do with the demand being higher than the supply — on a world-wide level. I never heard Canadians say, “That oil should be going to Canadians!” I heard more discussion about how the high price of oil was a *benefit* for Canada.

Water Exports and the NAFTA, David Johansen, Law and Government Division, Government of Canada, March 8 1999
Selling Canada’s water, CBC News Online, August 25, 2004
Canada: Losing Water Through NAFTA, Stephen Leahy, Centre for Research on Globalisation, September 23, 2007

The concern is that if water becomes a trade good under NAFTA and/or becomes a private property for American investors then American interests will be privileged over Canadian consumers. Once water exports start, it is not clear what conditions would have to be met in order to decrease or stop exports (national emergency, maybe). A drought could be created in Canada by American investors cutting production while US customers enforced their rights to uninterrupted supply – NAFTA would clearly privilege American consumers of Canadian water over Canadian consumers.

If this were all a potential fiction (see James Bond: Quantum of Solace) that would be one thing, but we have examples of where it has already happened and the results: The (IMF-enforced) privatization of water in Latin America (see Bolivia) has been a boon to foreign investors and a disaster for locals.