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For Immediate Release
August, 21 2008, 05:12pm EDT
Contact:
Dylan Penner, Media Officer
(613) 233-4487, ext. 249
Time for Harper to Stop Trading Away Our Water, Says Council of Canadians
OTTAWA
The Council of Canadians is blasting the Federal government for suppressing an Environment Canada report that warns of increased water shortages across the country. The Council of Canadians is calling on the Government of Canada to implement a comprehensive National Water Policy, as there is currently no national strategy to address urgent water issues and no federal leadership to conserve and protect our water. The Federal Water Policy is over 20 years old and badly outdated.
"There is a growing freshwater crisis in Canada, with causes including contamination, shortages and pressure to export water to the United States through pipelines and diversions," says Meera Karunananthan, national water campaigned for the Council of Canadians. "The suppressed report from Environment Canada demonstrates that the Harper government has known about the water crisis facing Canada and has suppressed the information in a startling lack of transparency and accountability. Instead of taking leadership to solve the water crisis, the Prime Minister has made it worse by pursuing a comprehensive strategy of undermining water protection in Canada."
"This Environment Canada report is further proof that successive Canadian governments haven't taken water seriously," says Maude Barlow, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, and author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. "The Harper government has bought the myth of limitless abundance, which this report on looming water scarcity in Canada indicates is clearly not true. He should release this report to the public in full immediately."
"The Harper government has consistently chosen corporate profits over the protection of water," adds Karunananthan. To address this misplaced priority, the Council of Canadians is calling on the federal government to adopt an immediate national water strategy in Canada that includes:
- Renegotiation of NAFTA to exclude water, ensuring Canadian water access.
- Abandon the SPP (Security and Prosperity Partnership), which aims at a fivefold increase of tar sands production, despite the already serious drain on local water supplies and related water contamination.
- An important step would be to revoke water licenses of tar sands companies.
- Stop TILMA (Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement), which puts water protection at risk by allowing corporations to sue local and provincial governments for protecting water, much like Chapter 11 in NAFTA.
- Call for the exclusion of water diversion in the Great Lakes Compact (GLC): The Great Lakes hold 20 per cent of the world's fresh water, providing drinking water to 45 million people. The GLC, currently being rushed through US congress, would allow corporations to start draining the Great Lakes, provided it is not done using containers that hold 21 litres (with no limit on the number of containers). The bottled water exception must be removed from the GLC and replaced with recognition of the water as a public trust doctrine.
- Reign in the bottled water industry by encouraging bans on bottled water wherever possible, including at the national level with enforced legislation to stop bottled water companies from extracting groundwater.
- Support water as a human right: The Canadian government is the only one in the world to oppose water being recognized as a human right at the United Nations
- Halt the use of lakes for the dumping of mining waste: At least a dozen lakes across Canada have been slated for destruction with mining waste.
"We have no idea how much virtual water we are exporting. A national analysis of this embedded water is long overdue." A recent study of virtual water consumption in the UK highlights the pressing need for such an assessment in Canada, notes Barlow.
Prime Minister Harper has remained silent on the water crisis. In the lead up to last year's SPP summit in Montebello, Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre said "bulk water exports are not on the agenda." Poilievre, is apparently the MP tasked with denying the government is interested in bulk water exports. Yet, ironically, he is also responsible for redrafting Canada's whistleblower protection laws, while the government has been suppressing the Environment Canada report that takes the government to task for ignoring the water crisis.
Founded in 1985, the Council of Canadians is Canada's leading social action organization, mobilizing a network of 60 chapters across the country.
Office: (613) 233-4487, ext. 249LATEST NEWS
Landmark Study Finds Trump’s Mass Deportation Agenda Is Costing Americans Jobs
"We see no evidence that employers increase wages to attract US-born workers to fill these jobs in the face of immigration enforcement."
May 19, 2026
A landmark study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research has found that President Donald Trump's mass deportation operations are actually costing Americans jobs, contrary to the White House's frequent claims that its anti-immigration agenda is helping US workers.
The NBER study, which was published last month and reported on by The New York Times Tuesday, claims to provide "the first national, causal empirical evidence on the labor market impacts of immigration enforcement in the second Trump administration," and finds that mass deportations have not resulted in more job offers for native-born Americans.
In fact, the study identifies "a negative and significant impact on employment of US-born male workers with at most a high-school education" who are working in industries that employ the most undocumented immigrants, including construction, agriculture, and manufacturing.
The study finds that instead of hiring more US-born workers in the absence of available undocumented workers—who may have been deported, left the country to avoid deportation, or have stayed home out of fear of immigration raids—employers are more likely to simply slow down economic activity altogether, which has a cascading impact on related industries.
"We see no evidence that employers increase wages to attract US-born workers to fill these jobs in the face of immigration enforcement," the researchers explain. "Instead, our results are consistent with employers reducing labor demand overall, including for jobs more often taken by US-born workers."
The NBER researchers also say that undocumented workers are more often than not complements to US workers, as they "are more likely than US-born individuals to work in jobs that are less desirable due to lower pay, on the job hazards, and irregular schedules."
University of Colorado, Boulder economist Chloe East, who co-authored the NBER study, told the New York Times on Tuesday that construction firms "view it as easier to reduce production, reduce the construction of new homes and new buildings in general, rather than try to increase wages for US-born workers."
East said that this would likely hurt efforts to build more housing in the US, telling the Times that "I assume we're going to see... a long-term shock to the construction sector" due to Trump's mass deportations.
Anirban Basu, chief economist at the Associated Builders and Contractors national trade organization, told the Times that he wasn't surprised by the finding that aggressive immigration raids shut down projects rather than open up new work for native-born Americans.
"Given high interest rates, given rising material prices and fewer people available to provide roofing, tiling, carpeting, and other flooring services," Basu said, "it renders fewer projects financially viable."
NPER's study echoes an analysis released last month by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which found that unemployment for US-born workers has increased since the start of Trump's second term, as the federal government has carried out its draconian deportation operations.
"Claims that mass deportations have helped US-born workers are simply inconsistent with the data," EPI wrote. "This is no surprise, given that economic research has repeatedly shown that increased immigration enforcement harms everyone in the labor market, including US-born workers."
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Trump-Musk Gutting of Ebola Prevention Remembered as WHO Warns Scale of Outbreak 'Deeply' Concerning
"Trump has deliberately left us the opposite of prepared by gutting Ebola and pandemic-preparedness infrastructure at home and abroad," said one public health advocate.
May 19, 2026
As predicted in early 2025, when US President Donald Trump unleashed the world's richest man Elon Musk to enact ill-informed and devastating cuts to key federal agencies and programs, those decisions would have real and deadly consequences for the nation and the world.
With a new outbreak of the Ebola virus already claiming over a 131 lives as it sweeps through the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, and with World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus hosting an emergency media Tuesday to stem the global threat, videos of Musk bragging about how Trump's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) targeted programs related to Ebola prevention efforts are resurfacing this week.
In February of 2025, for example, this clip shows Musk telling Trump's cabinet that DOGE "accidentally" cancelled Ebola prevention funding.
Elon Musk: "We will make mistakes. We won't be perfect ... so for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was ebola prevention." pic.twitter.com/bq4Ipp4Zvj
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 26, 2025
While Musk claims in his remarks that the mistake was quickly identified—"I think we all want Ebola prevention," he said—and that the funding was restored "immediately" and that there were "no interruptions" in the prevention efforts or program, later reporting found this was not the case.
As the Washington Post later reported, "current and former USAID officials said that Musk was wrong: USAID’s Ebola prevention efforts have been largely halted since Musk and his DOGE allies moved [...] to gut the global-assistance agency and freeze its outgoing payments."
Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency physician and professor at Brown University School of Public Health who worked on Ebola for more than a decade and responded to Ebola outbreaks in Africa, spoke about the issue with NPR at the time.
"I disagree fully, completely, wholly, that they recognized the mistake and put it back," Spencer told NPR.
Spencer described how officials with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) were no longer "allowed to go to meetings with the [WHO], something they would have done in every single outbreak of Ebola—or other viral hemorrhagic fever disease–to date," Spencer says. "From top to bottom, none of the things that they have canceled have been put back in place."
Elon Musk says DOGE accidentally cut USAID's Ebola prevention efforts but then they were restored with "no interruption."
That's an outright LIE.
The state of USAID plainly shows that any disease prevention efforts supported by the U.S. at this point are merely symbolic. pic.twitter.com/cOKk6wWGFK
— Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) March 1, 2025
Jeremy Konyndyk, the former lead of USAID's Ebola response team that handled an outbreak of the disease in 2024, said the same.
Konyndyk, now president of Refugees International, explained last year to NPR that nearly every member of highly-trained team focused on high risk outbreaks was "pushed out of the agency, and they have not been brought back."
"The whole disaster response capability at USAID no longer exists," he said. "All of those people are gone. The operation centers that they worked out of are shut down. They can't even access the Ronald Reagan Building where those operation centers sit. That lease has been handed over to Customs and Border Protection."
HealthDay News reported in March of 2025 that while USAID previously "had more than 50 staffers dedicated to outbreak response," the cuts enforced by DOGE "left just six people to handle Ebola, Marburg virus, mpox and bird flu" preparedness operations.
As Bloomberg reported Monday, the impacts of Trump's attack on foreign assistance and outbreak prevention likely had devastating consequences:
The Trump administration’s withdrawal of health funding that once helped support outbreak detection across parts of Africa represents the kind of cuts that contribute to the erosion of disease-surveillance systems.
Health officials say the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola may have circulated undetected for six to eight weeks in northeastern Congo before lab testing confirmed the virus.
By the time Ebola was identified, suspected cases and unexplained deaths had already spread across multiple health zones near the Ugandan border.
Such systems built with international aid often serve multiple purposes: tracking outbreaks, transporting laboratory samples and monitoring unexplained illnesses in remote regions. When funding disappears, those networks weaken quickly.
According to Leslie Dach, founder and chair of Protect Our Care and who served in the Obama administration as the Health and Human Services global Ebola coordinator, said Trump's failures are already plain to see and that the ongoing public health threat, whether abroad or in the United States, is dire.
“If history is any guide, the administration must be fully vigilant and prepared to deal with the potential of this deadly disease reaching America’s shores, or the situation could get ugly fast,” said Dach in a statement on Monday.
“Without proper procedures and guardrails in place, people could get very sick and die," Dach continued. "But Donald Trump has deliberately left us the opposite of prepared by gutting Ebola and pandemic-preparedness infrastructure at home and abroad. The CDC is now flying blind after Trump and Republicans shuttered USAID and cut themselves off from WHO’s global resources—destroying our disease surveillance and response capability just so billionaires could have another tax break."
"Whether it’s measles, Hantavirus, or Ebola," he said, "the deep Trump cuts to research, public health staff and infrastructure have left the nation ten steps behind–always putting out public health fires rather than preventing them.”
As Sen. Patty Murray said back in February of 2025: "If Ebola, Margurg, or any other infectious disease makes it to our shores, it will be thanks to Elon and Trump—two billionaires without a clue, who are positively smug about their own ignorance."
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Bolivian Government Charges Labor Leader With Terrorism as Police Crack Down on Protests
The leader of the country's main labor federation said officials were responding to protesters who have marched hundreds of miles in recent days with "militarization and repression instead of listening to the people."
May 19, 2026
A leader of Bolivia's main labor federation, the Bolivian Workers' Union, said late Monday that the country's public prosecutor is "trying to silence" mass protests that have included Indigenous communities, miners, peasants, and teachers in recent days, as the government issued arrest warrants for labor and grassroots organizers.
TeleSUR reported that State Attorney General Roger Mariaca confirmed his office was charging Mario Argollo, executive secretary of the union, known in Spanish as Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), with public instigation to commit crimes and terrorism.
“They will not subdue us in the struggle we have undertaken," Argollo said in a statement. "They are trying to silence us as leaders with popular actions and criminal charges."
Drop Site News also reported that the public prosecutor issued an arrest order targeting Justino Apaza Callisaya, a leader of the Federation of Neighborhood Councils of La Paz (FEJUVE), "an influential grassroots organization tied to urban protest movements and labor mobilizations."
The office is also reportedly investigating "several individuals" following COB's declaration of a general strike on May 1.
"The accused are being investigated for extremely serious offenses including: public incitement to commit crimes, criminal association, terrorism, financing terrorism, attacks on transportation security, [and] attacks on public services," reported Drop Site.
The mass mobilization has included dozens of road blockades across the country as the union and other groups have demanded the resignation of President Rodrigo Paz, whose administration ended a fuel subsidy amid an economic crisis; higher wages; and an end to privatization, including through Law 1720, which opponents say would allow the transfer of Indigenous and peasant land to corporations.
Protesters have spent days marching from their communities to La Paz, where thousands were met by riot police armed with tear gas canisters on Monday.
Al Jazeera reported that some protesters brandished "dynamite sticks and slingshots" as they arrived in the capital city.
An unspecified number of protesters were injured Monday as the government deployed the police and the military to try to break the road blockades, Al Jazeera reported. TeleSUR said that at least four demonstrators were reportedly killed. About 90 arrests were made.
The US State Department said Sunday that it supported Paz's efforts to "restore order for the peace, security, and stability of the Bolivian people."
COB said the government was responding with "militarization and repression instead of listening to the people."
"History will remember who defended the citizenry and who turned their backs. No force should be above the people or their rights," said COB.
The arrest documents and government investigations, said Drop Site, showed that "the Bolivian government is escalating its response to the protests by describing parts of the strike movement not simply as civil unrest, but as potential terrorism and organized criminal activity."
A student leader at the Public University of El Alto told Drop Site, "No matter what the Paz government attempts to do, repress the protesters or sanction us as terrorists... we will continue to uphold the sovereignty and rights of our peoples."
A former Altiplano mayor and Aymara social leader was direct about the betrayal: "This government was clearly elected with a mandate from the social movements and from indigenous peoples — who have been stabbed in the back the minute they entered office. They have attempted to… pic.twitter.com/tS80WqG1Zi
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) May 18, 2026
An Indigenous leader told the outlet that Paz's government "was clearly elected with a mandate from the social movements and from indigenous peoples—who have been stabbed in the back the minute they entered office. They have attempted to use the state to go after the very forces that got them to power."
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