Trump Faucets & the Holy Spigot

It has been cold and snowy in our part of the world and while this is Canada and winter we've been lulled into thinking that this sort of weather may be a memory rather than a present seasonal reality. Waterways are frozen and while we're warned that "no ice is safe ice" the ice huts abound and lakes have become roadways for snow machines. This is one aspect of the abundance of water in this country, While the notion of the Trinity as liquid, vapour, and ice hasn't caught on as a metaphor, it suits our climate.

We might do some fervent praying to God-in-Three-Persons given that President Trump is enamoured of the water resources in Canada, the sovereign country he has taken to describing as the 51st state. While it's heartening to see Canadians rallying together to resist his arrogant and insulting rhetoric it's not as though we didn't see the warning signs during his election campaign. In September 2024 he mused:

“You have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps and Canada, and all pouring down and they have essentially a very large faucet,”...“You turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it, and it’s massive, it’s as big as the wall of that building right there behind you. You turn that, and all of that water aimlessly goes into the Pacific (Ocean), and if they turned it back, all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles...”

That supposedly aimless water is flowing along the Columbia River and Trump, expert hydrologist that he is, figures that sending it from snow-capped Canada to drought-stricken areas of the States makes sense. Sure, this sounds bizarre to us Canucks, but each cray-cray idea has to get in the queue with this self-proclaimed genius. At the time of the faucet comment I said to long-suffering Ruth that I wouldn't be surprised if Trump was serious. 

The CBC just shared a worthwhile article about the long history of water agreements between Canada and the US and how these pacts are more important than ever as the climate change Trump denies results in droughts and uncertainty. The piece begins: 

Water sharing between Canada and the United States has long been a contentious issue. In 2005, former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed warned against sharing Canada's water supply with the United States, suggesting Alberta's most important resource was water, not oil and gas. "We should communicate to the United States very quickly how firm we are about it," Lougheed said.

Well, Loughheed got that right. There have been proposals for continent wide water diversion since the 1950s and none of them came to fruition. 

I've mentioned attending a week-long residential seminar at Ghost Ranch Centre in the high desert of New Mexico back in 2015 called Water and the Baptismal Life. I was the only Canadian amidst 30 participants as we considered how water has been reduced to a resource and commodity, along with its symbolic and sacramental nature for Christians. These few days were stimulating and I appreciated the leaders and the other attendees. I was also keenly aware that the "big straw" extended northward from states suffering from water scarcity. 

I'm going to revisit my notes from that week and the document issued by a dozen Roman Catholic bishops in Canada and the US in 2001 called The Columbia River Watershed: Caring for Creation and the Common Good. The bishops offer these wise words in the introduction:

. . .because we have become concerned about regional economic and ecological conditions and the conflicts over them in the watershed...We address this letter to our Catholic community and to all people of good will. We hope that we might work together to develop and implement an integrated spiritual, social and ecological vision for our watershed home, a vision that promotes justice for people and stewardship of creation.

For all of Trump's wild claims about massive faucets, I'm with the wisdom of the bishops. Perhaps the president could haul in some icebergs from Greenland instead. 

As I write about faucets a hilarious scene from the film Four Weddings and a Funeral comes to mind. Rowan Atkinson plays a nervous, newby priest who makes endless mistakes through a marriage ceremony, including blessing the couple with "in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spigot." 

May the Holy Spigot shower us with blessings us and be our raincoat of protection from the Orange Menace, a false faucet if there ever was one.