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The Trump administration has suspended Columbia River Treaty negotiations with Canada as trade tensions heighten with a 25 per cent tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum exports that takes effect today.
The continued belligerence from the U.S. has spurred British Columbia to prepare for “circumstances where the United States might take unilateral action” related to the Columbia River Treaty, B.C. Energy Minister Adrian Dix said Tuesday.
Dix told reporters the B.C. government is “concerned and ready for any action the U.S. may take.”
The 61-year-old treaty regulates flood control, electricity generation, water flows and salmon restoration in the Columbia River basin on both sides of the border. After years of discussions, Canada and the U.S. announced an agreement in principle on a revamped treaty last July, but the changes were not finalized before U.S. President Donald Trump took office in January.
During a call with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in February, Trump reportedly called the treaty unfair to the U.S. and demanded changes. Trump previously suggested Canada has a “very large faucet” the U.S. could activate to alleviate American water shortages.
As the once-friendly relationship between the U.S. and Canada continues to crumble, what lies ahead for the Columbia River Treaty? Can Trump really cancel it? And what would happen if he did?
In 1948, the Columbia River flooded, causing extensive damage in B.C. and destroying Vanport, Oregon, leaving 18,000 people homeless. Seeing the widespread damage, Canada and the U.S. signed the Columbia River Treaty, ratified in 1964, to provide reliable electricity generation across the Pacific northwest and control flooding in northwestern states.
To hold up its end of the treaty, B.C. built three dams on the Columbia River: the Duncan, Keenleyside and Mica dams. The reservoirs behind the dams inundated 110,000 hectares of forests and other land on the Canadian side of the border, flooding communities and important Indigenous sites and damaging sensitive ecosystems — including salmon-bearing waterways. The U.S. built the Libby Dam on the Columbia, which also flooded land north of the border.
In return, the treaty created what’s known as the Canadian Entitlement — billions of dollars in compensation and a share of revenues from U.S. hydroelectric dams on the Columbia.
The treaty has no end date, but it gives either country the ability to unilaterally terminate the agreement after September 2024, provided 10 years notice is given.
But there’s a catch. Another treaty — the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty — allows either Canada or the U.S. to give one year’s notice of its intent to withdraw. And that treaty covers 13 cross-border river basins, including the Columbia. (Wait, what? More on this in a minute.)
Tricia Stadnyk, a professor and Canada Research Chair in hydrological modelling at the University of Calgary, said the underlying principle of the Boundary Waters Treaty is the Harmon Doctrine. “[It] essentially says, amongst a lot of legal speak, that wherever the water originates, the person that has the water within its territory gets to decide what happens to it and that no other jurisdiction has control over it,” Stadnyk told The Narwhal.
For the Columbia River, the headwaters is Columbia Lake, in B.C.’s Selkirk Mountains.
Cross-border discussions about how to modernize the treaty began in 2018. B.C.’s priorities for a new Columbia River Treaty included ecosystem restoration, more flexible water management and input from First Nations.
The agreement in principle, announced in July 2024, includes less revenue for B.C. from U.S. hydroelectricity generation. But it gives the province more flexibility to manage water levels on the B.C. side of the border and financial compensation for protecting U.S. states from flooding.
It also requires more water to remain in the river to protect ecosystems during the driest months of the year, according to Stadnyk.
Stadnyk said she’s not surprised Trump has suspended talks.
“Since the Trump administration took over on January 20, unfortunately, a lot of signs were heading in this direction,” she said in an interview.
Stadnyk said the new U.S. administration signalled it was not invested in some of the new agreement’s provisions.
“There were two executive orders that seemed to immediately contradict the new agreed-on terms of the Columbia River Treaty … the Putting People Over Fish executive order and the Unleashing American Energy executive Order,” Stadnyk said. “The Putting People Over Fish order is essentially saying exactly what the title implies — that water is going to go to people first and not to the ecosystem.”
The Unleashing American Energy order emphasizes the importance of domestic U.S. electricity production.
“Canada wanted to decrease the amount of [water stored by the Columbia River’s dams] at certain times of the year to allow for more flood fighting capacity,” Stadnyk explained. “Of course, that reduces the amount of hydropower that the U.S. can generate.”
Maybe nothing. With the modernized treaty in limbo, an interim agreement to manage the Columbia River was confirmed in late 2024. According to Dix, some of the provisions outlined in the interim agreement could be in effect through 2044.
Dix said a pause in negotiations would not be cause for concern under normal circumstances. Treaty negotiations were on hiatus for several months after former U.S. president Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration. But Trump has changed everything.
“What’s different here is the vicious anti-Canadian attacks that have been made on us on all these issues and they do cause concern,” Dix told reporters.
“The treaty itself continues to be in place,” Dix said. “There’s no time limit on the treaty, and it would require 10 years to end the treaty.”
However, Stadnyk noted the Boundary Waters Treaty allows either party to give only one year’s notice of intent to exit the agreement.
“That said, there are other agreements that are peripheral to the Boundary Waters Treaty, such as energy and hydropower generation agreements,” Stadnyk added.
Untangling the U.S. and Canadian electricity grids could be costly and complicated for both countries.
While most of the Columbia River basin runs through the U.S., its headwaters are located in the Columbia ice fields. If B.C. wanted to retaliate, the province could hold back water from flowing into the U.S., dropping water levels and reducing hydroelectric generating capacity south of the border. Increasing the flow, on the other hand, could create significant flooding south of the border.
But the Columbia isn’t the only river that crosses the U.S.-Canada border, Stadnyk noted. If B.C. decides to violate agreements involving the Columbia River, she said the U.S. could retaliate by withholding water from one of the rivers that flow north into Canada, like the Milk-St. Mary river system that Alberta and Saskatchewan share with Montana.
Breaking the Boundary Waters Treaty could also put the co-management of the Great Lakes at risk.
“That’s a very complicated system … it’s really difficult to say whose water is what within the [Great Lakes],” Stadnyk said. “Right now, the lines are drawn through the middle. But of course, if we get rid of the Boundary Waters Treaty, we open the door to negotiating the Great Lakes as well.”
If B.C. decided to get aggressive about the Columbia River’s water, the province could dredge up a long-shelved scheme from the mid-20th century that proposed diverting the Columbia into the Fraser River watershed, where it could help support B.C. agriculture.
“Push comes to shove, we can certainly put that diversion back on the table and use a greater percentage of that water through diversions in other drier parts of Canada,” Stadnyk said.
Dix told reporters the province continues to be focused on reaching a final agreement with the U.S. on the revamped treaty.
“We believe that there’s strong interest in the United States in pursuing this treaty,” he said. “It’s in both countries’ interest to renew the treaty.”
As Ontario Premier Doug Ford put on hold his province’s plan to impose a 25 per cent surcharge on energy exports to the U.S., Dix maintained a similar tax by B.C. would be counterproductive.
“It would hurt us, in other words, more than it would hurt them,” he said. “I don’t think the effective strategy when people are threatening your country, threatening your sovereignty, is to punch yourself in the face … There are things that we believe we can do with our electricity system that we’re absolutely reviewing, but the idea of the surcharge for us didn’t make sense.”
The B.C. government plans to hold a series of public meetings in Columbia basin communities in the coming weeks to update residents about the unfolding situation. A virtual information session is scheduled for March 25.
Dix told reporters he does not believe the U.S. will walk away from the nearly completed new treaty. He said B.C. intends to continue working toward a final agreement.
“We’re going to defend our interests every single day and no amount of bluster is going to change that,” he said.
Stadnyk hopes the U.S. and Canada can continue to manage cross-border water systems in a co-operative way and avoid going to war over water, as other countries have.
“Canada and the U.S. have been the envy of the world because of the Boundary Waters Treaty and it’s largely worked extremely well because we’ve always taken a mutually beneficial approach,” she said. “I really hope that that continues.”
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