By: Tom Axworthy
Toronto Star , Sunday, December 17, 2006

Stéphane Dion's Red-Green alliance was powerful enough to win over the Liberal party. Can it do the same with Canadian voters?

Sustainability has always been favoured by Canadians in theory, but it has never been an electoral wedge issue. The success of Dion depends on making it so.

Roger Ailes, a master of the political game, had, as his first commandment: "Communicate or die." Dion's Red-Green alliance must take this to heart. The numerical complexities of sustainability and the detailed findings of science must be put into human terms that every voter will understand.

Two necessities of life are the air we breathe and the water we drink. Both are under threat.

Poor air quality in our cities is affecting our health. Coal smoke in London killed 4,000 people in one week in 1952 - nothing in Canada is as dramatic as that environmental disaster. But 15 per cent of Canadian children age 4-11 suffer from asthma. Asthma sufferers as a whole number 2.5 million Canadians. Smog not only exacerbates asthma, it may also be a cause (active children breathing polluted air are more at risk). Dion must communicate a very simple point - breathing dirty air will make your kids sick.

Water quality is as crucial to health as air quality. In Ontario in 2000, seven people died of E. coli because of poor water treatment. In 2001, 7,000 fell sick in North Battleford, Sask., due to parasite-infected water; in 2005, residents of Kashechewan, a Cree community, were forced to evacuate because of water contamination. ]But despite the media attention to these tragedies, communicating the centrality of water quality is difficult because Canadians believe we are blessed by abundant freshwater resources. We are, but our vast resources are not where most Canadians live. The supply is in the North, but most Canadians live in the South. We have a major disconnect between perception and reality.

Three organizations are in the forefront of educating Canadians about water issues.

The Council of Canadians has long called for a national water policy, the International Joint Commission in August 2006 issued a major report calling for a new Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement between the U.S. and Canada, and the National Water Research Institute has produced two excellent studies, Threats to Sources of Drinking Water and Threats to Water Availability.

Canada has 7 per cent of the world's land surface and 7 per cent of its renewable fresh water. But according to the National Water Research Institute, "our apparent abundance of fresh water is relative rather than absolute." Two-thirds of our fresh water flows north toward the Arctic or Hudson's Bay, but one-third of Canadians live in the Great Lakes- St. Lawrence basin.

Canadians use 1,650 cubic metres of freshwater per capita each year, double the rate in Europe. The Prairies suffer from drought, receiving less than 500 millimetres of precipitation annually, compared to the Pacific Coast's 1,400.

David Schindler, a renowned freshwater scientist has published a study showing that rivers and lakes in the Prairies are drying up.

In the past century, the South Saskatchewan River has declined by 80 per cent and the Peace and Athabaska Rivers in Alberta have declined by 40 per cent and 30 per cent, respectively. And this is before oil sands development kicks into high gear. Across the country, 20 per cent of Canadian municipalities already report water shortages.

Our wetlands are disappearing too, a 70 per cent decline in southern Ontario alone. Wetlands prevent floods by modulating discharge and recharging groundwater acquifers.

The devastating flood caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, for example, was vastly intensified because Louisiana had allowed its coastal wetlands to become suburban subdivisions.

The Council of Canadians has got it right on water - the bulk export of water must be banned. Period! We must have national standards on clean drinking water. We must invest in new municipal infrastructure.

We must stop selfish communities from dumping raw sewage into our rivers and lakes, or in the case of the City of Victoria, polluting the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Clean air and clean water are staffs of life.

If Dion can make a connection in voters' minds between sustainability and these two necessities, he will continue to astound.

Thomas Axworthy is chair of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Queen's University.