Myth of Water Abundance in Canada

One of the greatest threats to Canada’s fresh water supply is our belief in its absolute abundance. In fact, a limitless supply of water in Canada is a myth.

The reality is:

• Economic growth is already constrained by scarcity in parts of Western Canada
• 25% of Canadian communities experienced water shortages during the latter half of the 1990s
• While the volume of fresh water sitting in Canada’s lakes accounts for about 20% of all the water in the world’s lakes, Canada has only 6.5% of the world’s renewable water supply, behind Brazil (12.4%) and Russia (10%) and just ahead of the USA (6.4%)
• Most of our water is inaccessible – 60% of Canada’s water flows north
• Only 2.6% of the world’s fresh water is available to southern Canada where most of the population lives
• Canada has 7% of the world’s land mass and about the same proportion of the world’s renewable supply of water – meaning we have just about enough water to meet the ecological needs of our land mass

“The lesson here is that we have to be careful not to make ourselves vulnerable by making political decisions based on false assumptions about how much water we actually have.”   -- Robert Sandford, author of Restoring the Flow: Confronting the World Water Woes