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May 25, 1988
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Vol. 51, No. 20

cP targets | Water sellout looms

trade deal

-e:— | With Tory trade pact

Hewison acclaimed as CP leader

i i P’s 27th convention at York
Newly-elected Communist Party leader George Hewison addresses delegates to the C 2
University in Toronto Monday. He was unanimously backed as general secretary by the party's central committee and
“subsequently acclaimed as leader by convention delegates. Convention stories, page 3; banquet photo page 6.

TRIBUNE PHOTO — SEAN GRIFFIN

Tom McEwen: Unionists throw

a long life new light on the

remembered crisis in Panama
— page 2 —. — page 8 —

Canada could face untold environmental
damage, economic ruin and loss of sover-
eignty through the mass, unchecked export
of its waters to the United States — thanks
to the free trade pact.

Article 409 of the agreement allows this,
and specific exemption of water from the
article’s all-encompassing definition of
tariff-free goods appears to have been
removed just before the draft text of the pact
was made public.

So warn Canadians concerned about the
future of Canadian fresh water, and who see
in bulk shipments of British Columbia fresh
water by supertanker to the U.S. the thin
edge of the wedge for a wholesale sellout of
the precious resource.

A noon-hour meeting last Thursday in
Vancouver sounded that warning along
with another that, despite Ottawa’s claims
to the contrary, the controversial issue of
diverting the flow of northern waters
south ward is far from dead.

The Robson Square meeting, sponsored
by the B.C. Institute of Agrologists, heard
association president-elect Wendy Holm,
Council of Canadians secretary Ken War-
droper and University of B.C. economics
professor Tony Scott spell out the danger of
Article 409 of the draft free trade pact.

Article 409 prohibits the current and
future federal governments from turning off
the tap in any water deal, because it stipu-
lates that no one can cut off “normal chan-
nels of supply,” Holm said.

The free trade deal is written to conform
with the rules of GATT — the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade — that
has already been used against Canadian fish
processing and wine importing regulations.

GATT defines water as a “good” — and
the trade in goods is what the free trade pact
is all about.

Wardroper, a former ambassador to
Norway and senior negotiator. of the
Canada-U.S. Great Lakes Water Quality
Agreement of 1972, called the free trade
agreement “a continental energy policy”
and said Canada must “set the basis” for a
water policy now.

“The whole Canadian ecology is at
stake,” Wardroper warned.

Scott, a former member of the Interna-
tional Joint Commission -on the U.S.-
Canada Boundary Waters Treaty, and an
author on water rights and export policy,
said the U.S. federal government will face
increased pressure from its thirsty states to
strike a water import deal.

The southwestern United States face a
water crisis through industrial and urban
growth which is far outstripping the capac-
ity of their small water supplies. They are
not likely to consider curtailing growth, so

see B.C. page 12