http://www.canadians.org/index.html
The council is a privately funded "social watchdog" (if I may be blunt.) At the above site you will find all you could want to know about the council.
On march 8th I received an email from the council, it is summed up by the following quotation.
I felt it worthy of sharing.
AbitibiBowater NAFTA settlement has privatized Canadian water, trade committee hearsCouncil of Canadians Board member and trade lawyer Steven Shrybman presented to Parliament’s Trade committee today arguing that the record-setting $130-million NAFTA settlement with AbitibiBowater has effectively privatized Canada's water by allowing foreign investors to assert a proprietary claim to water permits and even water in its natural state. "It would be difficult to overstate the consequences of such a profound transformation of the right Canadian governments have always had to own and control public natural resources," said Mr. Shrybman in his presentation to the Standing Committee on International Trade, which is studying the AbitibiBowater NAFTA settlement from last August. The Council of Canadians feels strongly there is no place in existing or future trade agreements for such overstretching investment protections and has repeatedly called on the federal government to reopen NAFTA to remove the investor-to-state dispute process. The Council also recently joined several other Canadian organizations in writing to all members of the European Parliament urging them to reject the inclusion of NAFTA-like investment protections in the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, which could be signed by the end of the year. To read Shrybman’s full presentation to the International Trade Committee go here. To read the media release go here. |
I understand the concern here is that a precedent has been set which could put the government in the position of having to honor water/timber rights as if they were private property assets, but I suspect that the problem is much deeper than that.
Most water rights laws are quite vague in terms of determining what recourse someone has and the ability to claim such rights against prior usage becomes a problem as well. In other words, I believe that most laws of based on the idea that the "first" users have more protections than later users, so that the earlier users are assured that they won't loose the resource because of later developments.
I'm not sure if Canada also has a "use it or lose it" provision, since many of the states here, have some time period whereby they can rescind water rights if there is no honest effort made to use the resource based on the original claim. In other words, someone can't simply hold a water right as an asset that could be sold later, instead if they don't use the resource they have a permit for, they risk simply losing the right.
In general, I think this is an immensely important topic that barely gets any coverage, so I'm glad you raised the questions based on this lawsuit, because I suspect we'll see more of this kind of activity over the next decades.