The New Scramble for Canada’s Water and Minerals
Why geography can no longer shield Canada, and how water, critical minerals, and foreign interests are reshaping our sovereignty in the twenty-first century.
Canada isn’t the castle we imagine. In a century defined by water and minerals, abundance is vulnerability — unless we decide otherwise.
By Leni Spooner
Creator of Between the Lines
The Old Comfort Story Is Breaking Down
We’ve told ourselves for generations that geography keeps us safe. Oceans on three sides. The United States on the fourth. Trouble may sweep the globe, but it rarely crosses our fence line.
That story is running out of runway.
You can hear the opening bars of a different future already:
• Trump insisting the U.S. should “go as far as necessary” to take Greenland.
• Denmark expanding its Arctic military presence in response.
• Ukraine’s mineral rights floated as bargaining chips at peace tables.
• Ottawa folding the Canadian Coast Guard under the Department of National Defence’s umbrella — still civilian, but now formally part of the Defence Team.
Meanwhile, disputes over Arctic sovereignty sharpen, and debates about icebreakers and submarines sound less hypothetical by the month.
If the 20th century was the century of oil, the 21st will be the century of water and minerals — and Canada sits squarely atop both. Geography won’t protect us from what comes next. We are already a highly desirable square on a very real global Risk board.
The Wars We Already Lived Through
History offers blunt reminders of how fast the world can reach into our own kitchens.
In 1973, the OPEC oil embargo sent Canadians lining up at gas stations. What I remember more vividly were the grocery bills — suddenly, painfully higher as supply chains absorbed the shock. That was when it clicked: what happens abroad spills instantly into the aisles of the local supermarket.
The Gulf Wars made it explicit that access to oil was worth military intervention. But that was “over there.” Here at home, we carried on with domestic debates over budgets, taxes, and inflation.
Canada liked to imagine itself buffered. Energy-rich. Stable. A reliable supplier. Yet our abundance made us convenient, not independent. Washington’s old joke — that Canada was the neighbour with the gas can — was never really a joke.
Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program tried to assert Canadian control in 1980. The backlash was swift. Investment fled. Alberta bristled. Successive governments dismantled the program, and NAFTA later cemented U.S. access to Canadian energy on favourable terms.
And the pattern continues. In this year’s tariff talks, U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra openly admitted Washington wanted to push CUSMA much further — into critical minerals, defence procurement, and even lumber. Those ambitions are shelved… for now.
The Next Great Scramble: Water and Minerals
Canada holds nearly 20 percent of the world’s surface freshwater. One in every five glasses of water poured globally could, in theory, be Canadian.
Beneath the northern shield lie the minerals without which the modern world falters — nickel, lithium, cobalt, graphite, rare earths. Batteries, clean tech, defence systems: none of it works without the elements under our feet.
Demand is already fierce.
China is consolidating mineral supply chains.
The U.S. is scrambling to reduce dependence.
Water scarcity is destabilizing regions from California to the Middle East. When aquifers collapse, the pipelines of the future will not carry oil.
And here at home sits the Ring of Fire — one of the richest mineral zones in the world. Yet the majority of mining rights there belong to an Australian firm. A simple question follows: Is that really in Canada’s best interest?
A Memory From the North
I first heard whispers of the Ring of Fire in the late 1970s, long before it had that dramatic name. Working at a remote hunting lodge, I watched geologists map the rocks from floatplanes. They didn’t talk much, but you could feel the weight of what they were looking for.
Decades later, in The Quiet Road North, I wrote:
“The story of the Ring of Fire is no longer just about minerals. It’s about sovereignty, survival, and the quiet determination to protect what can’t be replaced.”
That was true then — and even truer now.
Mineral strategy is not a new debate; it has been simmering for two generations. But most Canadians only see it surface when Ottawa or Queen’s Park decides to fast-track development, often without fully grasping the geopolitical stakes.
The lesson is the same for water: abundance does not guarantee security.
What feels limitless at home can, under the wrong rules, become scarce here first.
The Cost of Short-Sighted Decisions
Canadians may someday face shower restrictors and water-saving regulations while multinationals export bulk water for world-market prices. Imagine paying more for a glass of wine in Thunder Bay than for a glass of water — because scarcity abroad, not abundance at home, dictates the price.
We’ve lived this pattern before.
The Avro Arrow is our permanent cautionary tale. A world-leading jet program scrapped. Engineers scattered. Blueprints destroyed. A generation of innovation — ours — handed away.
When I first understood the full story, it hit me like a betrayal. Sovereignty, once surrendered, is almost impossible to rebuild. The Arrow taught us that. Yet here we stand again, fighting the temptation to make decisions measured only by next year’s budget cycle.
Will we make the same mistake with water and minerals?
The American Factor
No Canadian resource story is complete without our southern neighbour.
Trump claims the U.S. doesn’t need Canada — and in the next breath muses about making us the 51st state. Nobody “takes over” something useless. Redundancy is leverage.
Across administrations, U.S. leaders have painted Canada as a source of drugs, crime, or terrorists “bleeding south.” These aren’t just campaign jabs. They normalize the idea that Canada is a security problem.
And when Washington sees a security problem, history shows it acts first and justifies later.
The rhetoric today — fentanyl, borders, trade grievances — casts Canada less as a partner and more as a liability. It’s the neighbour who sees weeds in your yard and then quietly shifts the fence line “to help.”
From Middle Power to Prize
Distance no longer protects us. Strong allies can no longer guarantee insulation.
Economic warfare is already underway.
Tariffs in 2025 have nearly pushed us into recession.
Cyberattacks probe our energy and defence systems.
Foreign state-backed firms circle our mineral assets.
China calls itself a “near-Arctic power.”
Russia flies joint patrols across melting northern waters.
And in September, U.S. plane-watchers spotted a rare Boeing E-3 Sentry surveillance aircraft over Ottawa and Quebec. Likely a training run — but nevertheless a reminder of how permeable our sky is becoming.
This is a new kind of colonialism:
not planting flags, but buying stakes, shaping supply chains, and rewriting the rules.
Indigenous communities feel the pressure first, as they always have. They will feel it again with us — a grim symmetry we haven’t reckoned with.
Preparedness at a Crossroads
Ottawa has promised better screening of foreign takeovers and long-delayed improvements to the Canadian Armed Forces. But readiness still lags.
Personnel shortages. Procurement delays. A force that remains highly professional but chronically under-equipped.
Cybersecurity is the new front line, yet intrusions persist. Trade wars can inflict damage without a shot fired. Canada is very good at showing up for other people’s emergencies and much slower at preparing for our own.
Picture What’s at Stake
Visualize this as plainly as a weather report:
• Armoured convoys guarding water pipelines
• Drones circling cobalt mines
• Aquifers mapped like treasure
• Canadians paying global market prices for water under their feet
• Indigenous lands burdened with extraction pressures — again
• Northern communities looking out at foreign icebreakers on their horizon
Today our glasses are full. Will our grandchildren say the same?
The Game of Risk We Didn’t Choose
When my kids were little, our neighbours would come over for late-night Risk sessions. Dice clattering, coffee cooling, small children asleep upstairs. Safe. Ordinary.
Then one morning, after staying up too late conquering imaginary continents, I saw a headline and felt the bottom drop out: Canada is in the middle of a giant game of Risk. Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee.
The post-WWII era of strong institutions is gone. So is the Canada cushioned by distance.
Covid shutdowns will look quaint compared to the fallout if the U.S., China, and Russia all decide our water or minerals are too valuable to leave unsecured.
And right now, loopholes still let foreign organizations make territorial claims — from mining rights to camping routes along the B.C. coast, like the controversial NOLS proposal now under review.
Contested doesn’t mean blocked.
Takeaways: We Live in the Condo, Not the Castle
We judge politics by the near horizon:
What does this policy mean for me today?
This year?
Next election?
But the world isn’t coordinated to our election cycle.
Sovereignty isn’t about which colour banner flies over Parliament Hill. It’s about whether Canada can hold its own in the room where the world’s decisions are made.
We are not a castle with a moat.
We are a unit in a global condo.
Our walls are shared.
Our security is collective.
And our neighbours’ choices spill directly into our living rooms.
That doesn’t mean despair. It means clarity.
We can insist that any government — blue, red, orange — defend our place in a turbulent world. We can demand that policies protect both the glass of water on our table and the sovereignty that keeps it there.
Hope begins with seeing the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. And remembering that in this century’s very real game of Risk, Canadians still get to choose how we play.
If this essay struck a chord
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A helpful essay. Thank you. I fear our greatest challenge is Canadians themselves. Until we Canadians recognize that the greatest threat to Canada is our southern neighbour, and until we start to act accordingly to protect our country, our risks won’t diminish. The problem, of course, is that as we more publicly prepare to defend ourselves, such behaviour will be labelled as ‘aggressive and hostile’ in the US. And it isn’t simply an issue of military defense. There’s no chance in hell that anything Canada might do in the next several years will insure a successful military resistance to invasion. As with the Ukrainians, all we can do is make the cost of that invasion spectacularly painful. What we do in a non-military sense is what matters most today. We need to maintain Canadian control of ALL our natural resources. We need to diversify our export destinations to the greatest extent possible, just as we should diversify our source of imports. Economic dependency is the greatest short-term risk, and we must be aggressive in reducing such dependency. We must also make an effort to become, to the greatest extent possible, food self-sufficient. We clearly can’t grow many fruits and vegetables, but we must grow more of those we can grow. 37% of Ontario’s corn crop is destined for ethanol production. Are we nuts? We should be aggressively expanding our generation of electricity from renewables. We should be electrifying our economy as fast as China is electrifying; instead we’re dancing around trying to pretend that we can deal with climate change by building another pipeline. Really? I’d add that our politicians are failing us when they let political considerations outweigh policy considerations. Carney should be addressing Danielle Smith’s anti-Canadian intransigence head-on. A great many Albertans think her nuts. Our current behaviour gives them no support. She wants to separate? Fine. Let Albertans have a vote. But kicking the can down the road as Carney is doing is chickenshit and unproductive. And it extends her runway. Leadership is not just about placating those with whom one disagrees. Sometimes it is about principle and integrity.
The true failure resides not in the resource abundance, but in the legislative machinery that surrendered control. The National Energy Program failed to secure its position before subsequent administrations dismantled it, chiefly via international trade conventions which bind the Crown's hands. One recalls the 19th-century debates on colonial mineral rights, where the mechanism of ownership often superseded the geography of the asset. The executive's temporary political will, alas, is a poor defence against entrenched economic reality.