Forget tariffs, Trump may be targeting the Great Lakes and Canada’s freshwater next

Thomas Kierans was stopped by a reporter in St. John’s, Nfld., on the occasion of his 100th birthday. Regarded around town as somewhat of a local treasure, he was dressed in a tan winter coat, a colourful knit scarf and a newsboy-style cap, and he was asked about some of his equally colourful and yet never realized ideas for mega-scale infrastructure projects.

For example, there was the Rock Arena, which the one-time engineering professor conceived of being built inside St. John’s iconic and rocky Southside Hills, as well as the fixed-link tunnel he imagined would connect Newfoundland to Labrador. Arguably, his most ambitious idea was conceived in the 1950s and was inspired by the Dutch method of dykes.

The Great Recycling and Northern Development Canal called for damming off James Bay and allowing the fresh water from seasonal runoff and the surrounding rivers to transform a saltwater body into a huge freshwater source.

All that freshwater would be annually recharged and channelled south to the Great Lakes and out to the Canadian Prairies and the American southwest, refilling depleted underground aquifers along the way while resolving any existential worries either Canada or the United States would ever have of running dry.

Kierans estimated the canal would cost $100 billion to build and it could be financed by charging the communities that drew from it, with 90 per cent of the water destined for export to the U.S.

“I think the good lord wants me to stick around for that one,” he told the reporter that day.

But the good lord had other plans for the elderly gent with the grand schemes, who was laid to rest a few months after his centennial and 12 years before a U.S. president started a trade war with Canada. Today, it’s