Meet the American corporation that's planning to take your water...

It's called Sun Belt Water Inc. of Santa Barbara, California. Sun Belt is suing Canada because an earlier British Columbia decision preventing the company from exporting billions of liters of freshwater from B.C. to California. Water shipped abroad would be bought only by the few who could pay for it. Drought-stricken nations and the poor would be least able to afford it. Furthermore, countries that import Canadian water would be less inclined to find better, local solutions to their water problems.

Not long ago, Sun Belt made plans to send supertankers to B.C. to siphon off billions of liters of Canadian water for export to the States. British Columbia told the company it couldn't go ahead with the deal but Sun Belt wouldn't take no for an answer.

So now the company is suing our government of Canada. Sun Belt is saying, "Either give us your water or pay us more than $220 million in compensation.

In other words, if we want to keep control of our own Canadian water, we're going to have to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to some private American corporation.

Is that an outrage? You bet it is. But the threats to our precious fresh water don't stop there.

Last year, the Nova Group of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario applied for a permit to sell up to 10 million (l0.000.000) liters of Lake Superior water each day to Asia. Under public pressure, Nova agreed to withdraw its application, but this country came within a whisker of selling as much as six hundred million (600,000,000) liters of our precious water each year.

But that's not all.

Just months after Nova. made its application, another company _ McCurdy Group of Newfoundland _ sought permission to export a staggering 52 billion (52.000.000.000) liters of water a year from Newfoundland's pristine Gisborne Lake. (That's over 86.times as much water as the Lake Superior deal involved.)

The Gisborne Lake plan is still awaiting approval. Which means it could be signed _ and the water shipped _ at any moment...

Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy and Trade minister Sergio Marchi, should be urged to enact legislation prohibiting large-scale water exports from Canada.

So far, Canada has not allowed these exports. If we do allow them, it will be impossible to stop them. Canada is bound by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) , that clearly says that once we start exporting water we cannot stop.

Canadian and American corporations will have the actual legal right to come in and buy as much of our lake water as they want - without restriction.

If our government tries to pass a law prohibiting these exports, corporations can sue our government for lost business.

This is nothing short of an absolute outrage. Water shipped abroad would be bought only by the few who could afford to pay for it. Drought-stricken nations and the poor would be least able to afford it. Furthermore, countries that import Canadian water would be less inclined to find better, local solutions to their water problems.

Information from Ont. Coalition for Social Justice.