A century of sharing water supplies between Canadian and American borderland communities

Finally, I am grateful to Robert Stewart for the linguistic revision of this document and to the support received from members of the Canadian Water Issues Council, especially to Frank Quinn, Ralph Pentland, Owen Saunders, to Joanna Kidd for editing, and to Adèle Hurley, Director of the Program on Water Issues at the Munk School of Global Affairs. [...] At the academic level, researchers have published a voluminous literature on the commodification of water, its legal status, the impacts of a precedent, and the capacity of Canada to restrict water exports within the context of NAFTA. [...] By 1948, the City of Blaine was supplying water to individual households in Surrey near the border.3 An institutional agreement was reached on January 24th, 1949 between the District of Surrey and the City of Blaine to provide water for the Douglas area home development, located east of the King George highway, "for inter alia the sale of water by the City and the purchase of water by the District [...] At the time of the 1957 expansion, the young municipality did not extend the water distribution network to service residents living near the border because it was deemed to be too expensive (Corporation of the District of Surrey 1980, 6), especially since most of its population was (and still is) located in the northern part of the municipality. [...] The decision was based on the assumption that the water removal made no material difference to the flow and level of the Detroit River as the water would then be piped back into the river.