American Reacts to Canada: The World's Water Superpower 

Most Canadians know about our water dominance but would prefer to keep it our own little secret. We want to keep our part of the environment as clean as possible.

Canada has Oceans on THREE sides, not TWO.

I'm 51. My whole life I was told the Americans will come one day for our water. Always slightly joking but not really.

Water is more important than most of us think about. Living homeless for 6 mnts made me realize just how important having running and drinkable water is truly important in our every day use

Attention rest of the world. Our water is not for sale, so don’t ask.

Canada has MORE lakes than the rest of the world combined.

I am a retired teacher. One of my favourite (yes, that’s spelled right) parts of our grade 2 science curriculum is the water cycle. Grade 2! That’s 7-year-olds!

For the longest time 'Nestle' was taking huge advantage of Canada's water.... at one point the company was paying as little as $3 per 1 million gallons, then turning around and reselling bottled water for massive profit. A few years ago the Canadian gov't raised the cost of his endeavor and Nestle pulled its water operation out of the country.

This is why 'hydro' and 'electric' are synonymous in Canada. Most of our power comes from dams.

"Canada what are you doing with all this water" giving it away to Nestle 😂

Fun fact - Canada has over 2 million lakes... the most in the world!! We also have the largest coastline as well! ❤ from 🇨🇦

My geography teacher told us that one day there will be wars over fresh water..

Canada has to be very careful about choosing to export water to countries such as the US. Apparently, I recall that during free trade negotiations, they inserted a clause that stated we have to keep sending water at the previous year's level. So once we start, we will have a difficult time stopping or reducing the levels. We have to always manage our water, and sometimes there are droughts, and I don't like Canada having to hurt its environment just to comply with an agreement. Climate change has become far more serious since signing the free trade agreement.

it’s important to keep water as a resource, not a commodity. Just like air.

Tyler: "Oh, yeah, I remember. In Canada, you call electricity and power "hydro". Also Tyler: "Wow! I wonder if Canadians realize how much water they have." LOL Never change, dude.

The Nestle company is well aware of our water supply. You may want to look into that story.

Canada is home to over 2 million freshwater lakes

You do realize America is bleeding water and droughts are everywhere. Things like putting cities in the desert and wanting pools and lawns there take an enormous amount of water

Here from Canada, in school, Canadians are taught about the water table. The greenhouse effect, the water cycle and the three states of water. Ie. Solid, liquid, vapour. Start there! It's easy to understand. I think we learn it in grade 5!!!!

Fresh water doesn't only exist for humans to drink. All land creatures depend upon fresh water for drinking, you can't irrigate crops with salt water and all fresh water aquatic life, plants and animals, require fresh water. Canada is number 3 with the largest volume of fresh water, but is number 1 in the volume of fresh water that can be consumed without filtering and processing. Many countries throughout the world have water, but their water is no longer suitable for consumption by humans due to pollution and contaminants. Due to Canada's harsh northern climate, a relatively small portion of the land area is suitable for growing crops that need vast amounts of water. In contrast, the U.S.A. has a much larger agricultural area that requires the consumption of water for crops. In recent years, the southwestern states of the U.S. have suffered severe fresh water shortages, with many reservoirs drastically dropping in water levels and water usage restrictions were implemented. The mighty Colorado River, that used to flow south to empty into the Gulf of Mexico, no longer flows into the gulf. So much water is drawn from the Colorado River by cities and agriculture along its' path, that the river dries up to a trickle of water that now stop several miles before reaching the waters of the gulf. There are treaties and agreements between the U.S. and Canada to protect the Great Lakes, that prevent the waters of the Great Lakes from being piped to supply areas such as the American southwest states.

Hudson Bay is saltwater; we're talking here about fresh water supplies.

Tyler: 'Canada is pretty hospitable place to live'. Winter: 'Hold my Molson'.

Living in Africa for 2 years made me realize the importance of water and access to it is. I really missed all the lakes and rivers I grew up with in Canada.

I live in Calgary, Alberta. A huge watermain ruptured in our city on June 5th. It took a while for workers to find the source of the break, and they have been working on it since then. Our entire city is under water restrictions, meaning no outdoor watering of lawns, gardens, flowers, trees & shrubs. No outdoor pools or hot tubs, no washing outdoor surfaces, such as windows, exterior building services, sidewalks, driveways or walkways, no decorative water features, no washing your card in the driveway or street & no water for construction purposes, such as grading, compaction or dust control. We also need to turn off outdoor automatic sprinkler systems, using dishwashers & washing machines only when required & with full loads, limiting showers to 3 minutes or less, keeping baths shallow, turning off humidifiers & ice machines, scraping plates clean rather than rinsing, not running the tap for longer than necessary, and turning off the tap when brushing teeth or shaving. The other day, they found 5 additional "hot spots" which also need to be repaired, which will take 3-5 weeks to fix, taking us into the middle of July with the water restrictions. Also, there is a very real chance that one day when we turn on the tap, no water will come out, if people don't reduce their water consumption. Also, there is a fire ban in place, because a fire could jeopardize our water supply as well to put it out. Hoping the little amount of rain we get will get us through. I've never appreciated the significance of our precious water before this happened.

Most of our freshwater rivers and lakes get refilled by all the rain and snow we get in Canada

Rick Mercer did a Rant about Canada’s water several years ago. It is worth the watch.

I remember an American politician decades ago suggesting that the US could dig a big trench from Hudson’s Bay down through Canada to the US so that Americans could access the water. After all, it was only Canadians living in Canada, and we are totally unimportant, especially compared to Americans. Clearly this never happened, and the project was impossible.

In Canada, we also call water "Blue Gold", because it will become more and more valuable across the world, just like Oil is being called "Black Gold"

An oversight by the video I'm sure, but it's equally important to note we also have 83% of the world's clam juice.

Not a coincidence we call our electricity 'Hydro' - its hydroelectric power.

We have excellent drinking water that tastes great (sometimes better than bottled). Just did some traveling down to California and as much as their water is safe for consumption, it just wasn't that good, we ended up buying a case of bottled water for the time we were there. As soon as I got back home, drank a couple giant glasses of tap water. But as many others have said, we don't want to export lots and have our rivers and lakes depleted.

We are well aware America wants our water, it gets brought up every now and then. We don't sell our water, Nestle takes almost for free, then ships it out of the country.

We do not export water especially to the US. Because free trade agreement between our governments states that once we start we cannot stop

Having all this water could lead to a resource war in the future.

Canadians, for the most part, know about our amazing water supply. It gets replenished by not only rainfall, but snowfall, particularly the heavy snowfalls in the mountains. In spring, when the big melt comes, the spring runoff comes roiling down the mountains into the lakes and rivers and for a period of time, the water levels rise and we steer clear to avoid getting swept away in the spring currents.

Big corporations are actually taking Canadian water almost for free at the moment.

I love watching Tyler discover Canadian facts. This one really shows the education system differences between the US and CDN. Not knowing geography and enviromental science. It would be a great video to compare the curriculum of both countries Highschools. The US has some of the most prestigious Universities but the general population isn't getting access to STEM subjects.

we have a third coast up north, people don't remember .

On the news now, 1.5 million Calgarians under 5 weeks water rationing.

As a Canadian I’m happy an American is learning about Canada. A lot of Americans don’t give a shit about other countries

That's why every country should practice Water Management there's plenty of water for everybody as long as it's taken care of and used responsibly.

2 millions lakes in Canada.

The reality is, if water becomes a major commodity the US would not ask, they would take no matter what we Canadians say

The United States currently levies an illegal tariff on Canadian softwood, which costs Americans $10,000 and more per every single house in the entire continental United States. The reason is because a lot of these logs come from crown land. Almost all of Canada's fresh water is crown owned. I wonder at how the United States would deal with Canadian water. By the way, the softwood tariff is offset by US tax payers who have to pay Canada. All to protect an inefficient but powerful lobby in Washington.

I've been hearing this since grade 10 social studies in the 70's..

In the US, the south western states are always rationing water - heavily due to agriculture but person residences as well. Likewise, South Africa (the country), is has had a few drastic drought years. And the list goes on.... Canada, where I live, could offer solutions and ship water, but I hope not so people can continue to waste it in dessert regions for lawns and open swimming pools. In that instance, maybe we could refuse to sell them water until they become more conscious about not wasting it.

Hudson Bay is essentially ocean - it isn't part of Canada's freshwater supply. You mentioned Canada has oceans on both sides, it's actually got oceans on three sides. Water was a domestic issue for the federal govenrnment during the NAFTA negotiations back in the 80's because under the terms of the agreement, the signatory partners aren't able to turn off the tap, once it is opened. The tap has yet to be turned on... You should look at something about North American Free Trade Agreement for a historical bent on the current US/Canada trade situation.

The amount of water on Earth has and will remain stable. There's no new water being made. What we are doing is continuously recycling the same water the Dinosaurs peed in millions of years ago. What is changing is the distribution of water as lands rise and fall. But mostly the distribution of fresh potable water is changing with industrial abuses and pollution. Water is not diminishing, but fresh water is.

This is oversimplification but basically, water flows to the lowest point, oceans, then oceans evaporate and falls back in rain on the continents. Weather patterns and seasons determine where it flows.

We know the value of our drinking water resource and that's why we try to protect it as much as possible. Some companies tried to exploit the resource and export it without regard for the consequences, but we were quickly able to control the exploitation of our blue gold in order to avoid compromising the sustainability of our resource. The regeneration of water sources is a complex process that is subject to climate change. We must remain cautious.

Two things weren't highlighted: 1) as glaciers shrink, it decreases the availability of freshwater, and 2) the amount of freshwater that exists in aquifers. The NY Times did a comprehensive article recently on shrinking aquifers in the US Mid-West

Having all this water actually terrifies me. Eventually some future superpower country will want to take over Canada.

In addition to the river systems, Canada is very spread out and have a lot more nature that has not yet been effected by urban infrastructure and what not. Even extraction processes like fracking are banned in some provinces. This keeps the nature more pristine and allows for the supply to not be depleted so fast. As far as supplying water to other parts of the world; we do that already, but not on the scale of pipelines (for reasons too numerous to list here). But have had US companies like Nestle try to buy the rights to our fresh water to supply their products. This is a detail most people overlook, as that water is a key component in food production & processing, as well as other industries like manufacturing and paper manufacturing. This contributes to the overall consumption numbers.

It is widely agreed among global economic forecasters, that the key resource in the second third of this century will be water. As a result of climate change, oil, gas, and carbon minerals will become far less important. Meanwhile, the haves and have-nots among nations will be determined by which has sufficient water.

There was a project proposed by the Americans to pump water from Hudson’s Bay in the north, channel it through rivers and through the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi river. However Canada and my province, Québec, were always weary of the effects of such an agreament because, then, water wpuld become a commodity and could fall under free trade agreemants. Canada and the provinces concerned (ontario and Québec) would then be bound by the agreement and lose some autonomy and decisional power over the amount of water being sent to the USA.

We are especially conscious of selling our water at a ridiculously low price. In addition to selling water, we have numerous dams for hydroelectricity production. Our surpluses are sold in the United States (New York City among others). This is why the 1998 ice storm was so dramatic. The majority of homes in Quebec are heated with electricity. The St. Lawrence River in Quebec is also one of the most important gateways for internal maritime traffic in North America.

15:44 This is exactly what we do. We boat and swim and relax on the lakes. A nice American like you is always welcome to come hang out yunno. We just don't like the Americans who talk to us like we live in igloos. 😂

The time will come sooner than you think, water will be hard to get and more expensive

Some of that water comes from the spring melt. I'm near the middle of BC, and we regularly get 4 feet of snow. That all melts and runs into the water system. There is a lot more of Canada North of me than South. There are also parts of Canada that are south of me that get more snow by a couple of feet if you head east. Winterpeg is very south but gets about the same amount of snow per year on average.

Canada also has a northern coast.

This is a timely topic considering how Calgary is currently under water restrictions due to a break in the main pipe. It's been a rough week and it will likely be late next week before things are sort of back to normal.

A huge amount of Canada's fresh water is located in sparsely populated areas like the North and the Shield, making it difficult to build infrastructure to harvest those resources. That's why it remains undeveloped as of right now. Plus, there's the difficulty of harvesting water without damaging the local environment. Thise ecosystems are adapted to having access to that water, so removing a significant percentage of it could have negative consequences. So it's far from a simple solution to people's water/economic woes.

Most Canadians know about this, but selling our water is a contensious idea. Nestlé owns a significant amount of our water and i dont know anyone that is ok with that. Most people are of the opinion that its better to leave it be for nature and just in case it becomes an issue here.

I'll never forget when TRump wanted to funnel water from BC to California 🤣🤣🤣

Water from lakes and rivers is fairly replenishable from rainfall; but that is less true of groundwater. s

There have been think tanks about what could start a world war. Water was top of the list for some

Go two days without water, and you will know how valuable water is.

How many videos has Tyler been surprised to learn how many lakes are in Canada?!

You get the water back by the precipitations like rain and snow.

Canada has had a long running debate about whether or not water should be turned into a commodity. The US has been agitating for literal decades for mass water exports from Canada into the US (Look at the NAWAPA proposal from the RAND corporation/US army corps of Engineers starting in the '50s for a primer on scale of what the US has been planning). Canada has traditionally taken the view that water, being such an essential component to life, maybe should not be allocated based on who's got the biggest ability to pay, but should be distributed in a more equitable manner.

USA: AH! we have the biggest military in the world, you must do as we say!!! Canada: Cut the water supply at the faucet. USA + rest of the world: Can you spare a sip, our tears no longer flows! Canada: Waking up from a dream, thinking nah, we are way too nice for that and they'll thank us for it... right?

Congrats on having a fast growing channel. You do a good job

The prairies still have a ton of water. Especially Manitoba. Probably like 20% of the province is taken up by lakes😂.

So many previous videos talked about Canada having more fresh water than the rest of the world combined.

From what I understand the US sends up trucks to use natural water suplies in export to the US (Nestlie extracts 265 million litres per year). If we start charging the US a price then they have free acess to all the water at that price, no limits so we limit how much they can take at one time rather than charging them so they can't take as much as they want.

Canada has some 20% of the world's total freshwater resources.

Canada is the second largest country in the world in total area. Howere if you subtract all the area covered by fresh water lakes, Canada is only the 4th largest country in land area.

Bro! You’ve watched a lot of Canada in winter vids, right? Snow replenishes our water supply! Peace

Vancouver ISLAND, (pop .1M) has MORE lakes than all of California. Many major rivers and dams in the USA, are from the Canadian source of rivers and lakes. A lot of bottled product is made and exported from BC water regions.

He's making a big deal of the Great Lakes, but people forget about the thousands of small lakes and sloughs in Canada. They range from very small to the Great Bear Lake. When people do find out about those lakes, the first reaction is that they want that water! 'Why don't we sell it?' The answer is simple. While we might not use the water to drink, our wild life uses to live; water feeds our land. Water is not a just a commodity, it is our life blood. BTW Tyler that huge body - Hudson Bay - is salt water.

We're like Scrooge McDuck up here, literally swimming in the stuff! 🌊🌊🏊🌊🌊

Perhaps you should do a search to find out how much Nestle pays Canada for its water. About .50 for 100 ltr. If you're buying bottled water at the store, chances are you already buying our water.

One of the niceties of having long winters is all that snow that melts in spring. Rivers overflow, lakes are filled and we can spend a nice summer playing in water.

I live in North Western Ontario on the shores of Lake Superior. An old trapper told me probably 40 years ago, that in my area, you could fish a lake every day for 80 years and only fish the ones you can drive to… and that’s just in our area…. Something to think about…🇨🇦🇨🇦

We have almost all the water

That was an interesting video. I knew something of the subject, but I still learned a lot.

Canada has more than 2 million lakes and 8500 'named' rivers. Yup! we got water!

I strongly disagree with the Narrator ... Water should never be turned into a commercial resource... Knowing humans... Eventually it will become a corrupt industry at the expense of all Canadians. Water should never be sold in mass as a country's resource.

As far as replenishment goes, Canada has an abundance of rain, untold amounts of snow and multitudes of ice. We also have the Canadian Shield which throughout history has created 1,000's of small freshwater lakes. Our seemingly unlimited supply of glacier ice is, as well, a huge contributor to our supply of water.

Look at what happened to one Canadian river flowing south to the US, Canada had the agreement that 50% would pass through to the US, but since Canada didn't need 50% they let the US have 80% out of good will, but now that Canada needs their 50% the greedy US is suing and demand the 80% has to stay. So much for doing a neighbor a favor!

Remember, Dr. Evil is Canadian (Mike Myers) so people should be as nice to Canadians as Canadians are to them. Also, When you look at that map, and consider the spin of the earth, all water from Canada feeds down to and through the US.

Canada is currently exporting water and it really can't afford to. Right now, Canada's usage just about balances it's replenishment rate. Any more consumption will eat into the water reserves and they don't replenish nearly as quickly. The estimate is that the reserves take about a thousand years to replenish, but if you were to drain just 1% of the current reserves each year, the reserves would be gone in just a century, leaving us with no water, not even our current usage for the next 900 years. You really should know more about water, Tyler. Salt water is completely undrinkable unless it is desalinated (i.e., the salt is removed). Hudson's Bay (the second largest bay in the world) is saltwater and therefore doesn't count when figuring freshwater. Freshwater as it currently exists has 2/3rds bound up in glaciers (with the two biggest being the Antarctic ice sheets and the Greenland ice sheet) and only 1/3 as groundwater (rivers and lakes). The glaciers are not only melting, the rate at which they are melting is accelerating each year. There may well be no glaciers left anywhere on the planet within the next 50 years. When smaller glaciers such as the Columbia Ice Fields melt, they run off as part of the local groundwater. Once it runs off to the ocean, only a part of it returns (the sea level rises, so there is a little more evaporation which will return as rain, but more of it is beneath the surface where it can't evaporate as easily), meaning that within the next t0 years, our freshwater will consist solely of what groundwater there is and lakes will be the only reserves of freshwater that we have. In the U.S., the Colorado River basin has been in the news for the last several years. Newscasts have shown where the ground has sunk more than a man's height as the water table has dropped. Pictures of the river's surface water show it having shrunk by close to 50%. Most of that means that the river is just narrower and the banks closer together for most of its length, but there are places where the river no longer exists. The states of the basin have made a treaty between them regulating the use of the river, but consumption is still greater than can replenished, so the river continues to shrink. The worst of it is that as the water table lowers, the earth subsides, closing up the pocket where the water used to be. This means that even if you were to subject the area of subsidence to floods, the earth can't just soak the water up and raise the water table. That lost water is lost for good. You're never getting it back. And that is why Americans who live on the Great Lakes, in places like, oh say, Indiana are opposing suggestions from residents of the Colorado basin that a water pipeline be established to let them drain water from the Great Lakes into the Colorado. Not that a typical, average American is aware of the issue or likely to learn about it. Seriously, Tyler, you need to do some videos about your own nation, so you can say, "I never knew this about the U.S! I'm shocked! Shocked and amazed! Who knew about this?"

this guy is a blank slate. he made it to adulthood without any knowledge

All you have to do is look at a map of Canada to see it's covered in water.

You might be interested in looking into the export of Canada’s electricity to the USA.

In Canada there is a law that bans the export of fresh water in mass. Bottled water is allowed to be exported. There are a lot more thirsty people in the United States. Rain and melting snow and ice replenishes most of the water supply in Canada. Manitoba is full of large lakes and rivers. Winnipeg prepares for major flooding each spring as the winter snow melt drains into the Red River basin starting in the United States and flows up to Lake Winnipeg, through Winnipeg. In the 1950's Winnipeg built a massive floodway to redirect massive amounts of water around the city to save it from destructive flooding.

In Calgary, we get our water from the bow river, the melting snow pack from Banff. First stop for tourists in Banff is usually Bow Falls which feeds the Bow River right into downtown Calgary, great rainbow trout fishing in the Bow River too..

Meanwhile in China, 90%+ of the groundwater is unusable due to industrial and agricultural pollution.

I just discovered you. I enjoy watching you, very informative.

Canada has 20% of the world's fresh water. Canadian government issued licenses to Canadian companies in British Columbia authorizing the export of nearly 55.5 million cubic meters of water annually by ocean tanker. The Canadian companies with these licenses would then award contracts to foreign companies to export water from Canada. A Canadian company called Snowcap received one such permit, and awarded a contract to a U.S. company, called Sun Belt, to export water from British Columbia to California. However, due to public opposition to these bulk water exports based on environmental concerns, the government of British Columbia issued a ban on exports and rescinded the licenses. P.S. Research hydrological cycle (water cycle) diagrams online, it will explain the cycle of water on our planet.