‘We need to be aware and get more aggressive’: Trump’s desire for Canada’s water runs deep, says AquaAction president
United States President Donald Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario and claim of “most of the Lake’s volume” should be a splash of cold water for Canadians about the importance of the country's freshwater resources and infrastructure, according to the head of a water tech accelerator.
"This should wake Canadians up to the strategic value of our freshwater because we've been complacent about it," said Soula Chronopoulos, president of AquaAction, a charity supporting entrepreneurs working on water scarcity and pollution. "We need to be aware and get more aggressive to protect it because water sovereignty is a national security issue."
Following the collapse in trade negotiations with Canada last month, Trump signed an executive order claiming that the U.S. "is the greatest protector of the Great Lakes, including the body of water currently known as Lake Ontario," and that without American security and investment, "this freshwater system would not be open for shipping, recreation, and responsible use to the same extent as it is today."
Alongside the historical and economic justifications provided for the name change, the order also asserts that "the United States claims most of the Lake's volume," citing the location of the lake's lowest point on the American side of the border.
Lake Ontario, the smallest of the Great Lakes at 19,011 square kilometres with a volume of roughly 1,640 cubic kilometres, reaches its deepest point in the Rochester Basin at 244 metres, just offshore of New York.
As a shared waterway, the lake is governed by the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty, which has guided Canadian and American use of shared watersheds for more than a century. It requires mutual agreement for any project or activity that would alter the natural flow or levels of boundary waters, and bars pollution that would injure health or property across the border. The treaty also established the International Joint Commission (IJC), with three members from each country, to prevent and resolve related disputes.
The 2008 Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact—signed by then-U.S. president George W. Bush and the governors of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—bans new or increased diversions of water outside the basin, with Ontario and Quebec signing the parallel Sustainable Water Resources Agreement.
"President Trump can say whatever he wants, but he cannot change international borders governed by the treaty or the IJC," Chronopoulos told The Hill Times. "The American side is deeper and may indeed contain more of the lake's physical water volume, but that's a geological fact, not a sovereignty argument."
Still, while "bathymetry [study of underwater depths] does not determine ownership," Canada should "pay attention to the words that are being used … it's not something he put out there in a vacuum," Chronopoulos said.
Trump has previously renamed the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Mount Denali, and recently mused about renaming the Strait of Hormuz after himself.
During a September 2024 campaign stop at a California golf course in the wake of that year’s devastating wildfires, Trump promised he could redirect “millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps in Canada” by using a “very large faucet,” a reference experts believed to be to the Columbia River system, which runs from British Columbia through the Pacific Northwest.
Hydrology expert Alain Pietroniro told The Hill Times that while the lack of both infrastructure and legal authority to divert water from the Great Lakes Basin or the Columbia River makes Trump's interest "moot," from a “water sovereignty perspective,” Canada needs to “step up a little bit."
"We don't manage our water all that well, nationally," said Pietroniro, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Calgary's Schulich School of Engineering. "Climate change, population growth, aging infrastructure, and now we're seeing these cross-border pressures; we need to be able to respond to these things proactively."
Pietroniro noted that Canada’s water management is a shared responsibility between the federal government and the provinces, but “without urgent action, we’re at risk of being caught unprepared as global water pressures mount,” adding that the Americans are already ahead in preparing for that future.
Earlier in 2024, before Trump's faucet comments, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Annual Threat Assessment recognized water scarcity as a national security threat, citing the intersection of climate change and geopolitical tension around water and food scarcity as a growing risk to U.S. interests. A 2023 report by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water predicted global freshwater demand would outstrip supply by 40 per cent by 2030, and another report by Bank of America Global Research warned that worldwide freshwater supply could run dry at current consumption rates by 2040.
Given American awareness of these pressures, Pietroniro said that while he’s “no trade expert,” he expects "some tit-for-tat with respect to trade and water at some level."
“We need to be able to be prepared to answer those kinds of questions, and that means being able to make some reasonable predictions about what's happening on both sides of the border,” Pietroniro said, adding that he is advocating for Canada to invest in a “North American water prediction system” as part of the new National Water Security Strategy.
Announced in March by Environment and Climate Change Canada, the strategy is being developed by the Canada Water Agency, which aims to co-ordinate freshwater protection and management efforts by federal, provincial, and First Nations governments.
"The strategy needs better prediction and forecasting capabilities," Pietroniro said, noting Canada currently monitors just a couple thousand of its hundreds of thousands of lakes, rivers, and watersheds.
"Instead of reacting to any water crises that come up, we need better strategies for looking at climate assessments to figure out what's going to happen in the future. That would allow both of our countries to manage our water better, and put us on a more even footing with the U.S.," he said. "It's not just about the science and geeky stuff; it's about national security, economic stability, and maintaining sovereignty over our most important resource."
Pietroniro said he raised these points at a roundtable consultation convened by AquaAction this past March, which was attended by water conservation executives, academics, Canada Water Agency president Mark Fisher, and Liberal MPs Wade Grant (Vancouver Quadra, B.C.), who is parliamentary secretary to the environment minister, and Terry Duguid (Winnipeg South, Man.), whose riding hosts the agency's headquarters.
Neither Grant nor Duguid was available for comment before The Hill Times’ publication deadline.
Chronopoulos said the one silver lining of Trump's order is its timing, which she hopes will spur Canada to keep treating the issue with the urgency those Liberals signalled earlier this year.
“I would say that what happened at that roundtable in March was that we moved from viewing water as an environmental issue to seeing it as an economic and national security issue,” Chronopoulos said. “We need the security strategy because fragmentation is a national security risk right now, but we're all slowly coming together and speaking the same language.”
Chronopoulos credits Fisher with doing "a lot to push this strategy forward and herd the cats" since his March 2025 appointment, but said that with the U.S. "ahead of us in many ways," Canada must quickly "move past just funding research and talking; we need to move into action now."
“We want to see the $100-million water tech fund that Mr. Carney promised in the next budget,” Chronopoulos said, pointing to the Liberals’ 2025 campaign promise to create a “strategic water security technology fund to advance Canadian R&D, AI, monitoring, and data tools.”
"That's what's missing to keep our innovators from leaving for the U.S. and other countries," Chronopoulos said. "We just don't have a way to keep them here, so we need to move rhetoric into action."
In a statement to The Hill Times, the office of Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin (Toronto–Danforth, Ont.) said that public consultations on the strategy will “launch shortly,” but directed questions regarding the promised water security fund to the office of Finance Minister's François-Philippe Champagne (Saint-Maurice–Champlain, Que.).
"Our government is developing Canada's first National Water Security Strategy to protect fresh water in Canada for our people, economy, and environment, all of which depend on it, now and for generations to come," wrote Chris Zhou, Dabrusin's director of communications, adding the work is being done with provincial, territorial, and municipal governments; Indigenous communities; and other partners.
Champagne's office declined to comment on the 2026 budget, but said pre-budget consultations are underway and welcomed industry input.
Chronopolous said she expects that mounting environmental pressures and geopolitical developments both south of the border and internationally will keep water security top of mind as Canada works to build up its economy, and particularly its domestic energy grid, roughly 60 per cent of which relies on a reliable water supply. The Great Lakes Basin provides the foundation for roughly 40 per cent of Canada’s economic activity, according to official government estimates.
“Water is economic infrastructure, and we realize its value only when it runs dry, but we can actually fix a lot of the issues we're having with access to fresh water if we make that connection,” Chronopoulos said. "We have the technologies, and we have the research here, too. We have everything we need."
The Hill Times