I. Introduction – “The Border Beneath the Surface”

In the dying days of his first term, Donald Trump floated the idea of buying Greenland. It was absurd—until it wasn’t. What looked like a punchline was actually a probe: testing for soft spots in the postwar order, gauging who would push back and who would stay silent. Now, as Trump circles is two months into his second term and openly talks of pulling out of NATO, another rumor has emerged—quieter, stranger, more dangerous.

This time, the border in question is underwater.

In early 2025, reports began to circulate among Canadian diplomats and U.S. environmental analysts: informal advisors in Trump’s circle were discussing the “renegotiation” of Great Lakes boundaries, water access rights, and binational shipping priorities. The pretext was familiar—America First—but the implications were tectonic. The Great Lakes, which supply drinking water to over 40 million people and power shipping corridors worth hundreds of billions, are governed by century-old treaties based on goodwill and handshake diplomacy.

Canada, so far, has said nothing. No press release from Global Affairs Canada. No security warning from Public Safety Canada. Not even a perfunctory statement from the newly formed Canada Water Agency, whose mandate is supposedly to safeguard national water policy.

The silence isn’t strategy—it’s surrender.

This isn’t just about clean water or shipping routes. It’s about sovereignty. If the United States, under a president who’s already sidelined NATO and flirted with annexing foreign territory, begins to unilaterally reshape the Great Lakes governance structure, Canada has no deterrent framework in place. No warships in the water. No fallback legal doctrine. No public red line.

The Great Lakes are Canada’s geopolitical Achilles’ heel. Our treaties are old. Our institutions are scattered. And if Trump redraws the map, there may be no one left to stop him.

II. A Fragile Treaty Order – “1909 Isn’t a Shield”

The Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909, signed between the United Kingdom (on Canada’s behalf) and the United States, was built for a world in which trust was currency. It created the International Joint Commission (IJC)—a binational body charged with preventing and resolving disputes over the use of shared waters, including the Great Lakes. The treaty is elegant in its simplicity: no diversion, obstruction, or use of boundary waters is allowed if it causes "injury" across the border.

But elegance is not enforcement.

The IJC has no standing military, no capacity for direct intervention, and no binding authority beyond the mutual goodwill of its participants. It cannot impose sanctions, authorize blockades, or defend infrastructure. Its power comes from being ignored as little as possible—not from being impossible to ignore.

The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA), originally signed in 1972 and most recently updated in 2012, expands on this cooperation, but only in the environmental domain. Its focus is on eutrophication, nutrient runoff, and toxic contamination—vital issues, but wholly disconnected from sovereignty, territorial integrity, or cross-border military force.

And while the Canada Water Agency (CWA) was announced in 2023 to coordinate national freshwater policy, it has no mandate to assess binational conflict scenarios. Its focus is restoration, sustainability, and climate resilience—not military threat modeling or strategic denial planning.

Here’s the problem: if a future Trump administration simply instructs the U.S. State Department to suspend cooperation with the IJC or withdraw from the GLWQA, there’s no legal recourse. The treaties contain no binding arbitration clauses. The IJC itself is not structured to survive unilateral abandonment.

Worse, the Rush-Bagot Agreement of 1817, which limits naval deployments on the Great Lakes, exists only as a diplomatic understanding. It prohibits “warships,” but the U.S. Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, and even the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have found ways around it through mission reclassification and Congressional authorization.

Canada, by contrast, has neither military presence nor a fallback doctrine.

The treaty regime is a diplomatic antique: symbolic, fragile, and utterly incapable of withstanding the kind of aggressive unilateralism that Trump has made his signature. If he decides the IJC is irrelevant, then by definition, it is.

III. Water as a Weapon – “From Lake Erie to Strategic Leverage”

Water doesn't need to be poisoned or stolen to be weaponized. It just needs to be withheld.

The Great Lakes aren’t just lakes. They’re arteries. Nearly 25% of U.S.-Canada trade moves through the region. Major industrial centers—Detroit, Hamilton, Windsor, Buffalo—depend on stable shipping lanes and uninterrupted water access. But these chokepoints are more fragile than they look, and Trump’s America has already shown a taste for coercion by congestion.

Start with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). It oversees the Soo Locks, which control all shipping between Lake Superior and the lower Great Lakes. USACE also manages critical dredging operations, shoreline protections, and lock maintenance on U.S. waterways. A decision to “pause” upgrades, delay dredging, or reroute contracts would not violate any treaty—but it would inflict massive economic damage on Canada’s downstream ports.

Then there’s Homeland Security (DHS). Under the guise of border enforcement or counterterrorism readiness, DHS could unilaterally stage “security exercises” that throttle water traffic near key crossings: Sarnia-Port Huron, Windsor-Detroit, and the Niagara River corridor. There’s precedent—Trump used federal forces in Portland in 2020. Why not Buffalo or Duluth in 2025?

The U.S. Coast Guard, under DHS control during peacetime, already patrols with armed cutters in all five lakes. These ships are not considered "war vessels" under Rush-Bagot—just “maritime security assets.” Loophole closed.

Canada has no equivalent deterrent. CBSA has boats, yes—but no parity with the U.S. Coast Guard. There are no Public Safety Canada protocols for responding to U.S. interference in cross-border water infrastructure. No contingency plans for hydroelectric disruptions. No simulation exercises with the Canada Water Agency (CWA) or Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) to assess what happens when water becomes leverage instead of lifeline.

And shipping routes are just one front. The U.S. could quietly tighten permit approvals for Canadian shipping. It could delay or restrict cross-border energy flows—many of which rely on cooling or intake systems based on lakewater. It could simply reclassify a strategic resource as a national security issue and enforce a “pause” while it “reviews” sovereignty claims.

None of that requires a shot. None of it violates a treaty. And none of it, apparently, has crossed Canada’s strategic radar.

Water doesn’t need to be stolen. It just needs to be slowed. Trump understands that.

IV. Canada’s Institutional Silence – “No Models, No Maps, No Plan”

There is no Canadian war game for the collapse of the Great Lakes treaty system.

Not publicly. Not privately. Not even hypothetically.

The Canada Water Agency (CWA), established in 2023 with fanfare and climate-friendly branding, has issued zero reports modeling what happens if the United States pulls out of the Boundary Waters Treaty or refuses to honor the International Joint Commission (IJC). Its mandate is climate change, clean drinking water, and Indigenous consultation—not geopolitics, deterrence, or sovereignty enforcement.

Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) tracks invasive species, algal blooms, and pollution metrics. They have excellent science. They do not have a crisis map. No red-line scenario planning. No binational modeling of U.S. force projection. No simulations of disrupted intake systems or naval escalation on shared water.

Global Affairs Canada (GAC)—Canada’s foreign ministry—remains married to norms-based rhetoric. Its strategic documents speak of “resilience,” “cooperation,” and “sustainable governance,” but never of threat, standoff, or leverage. It hasn’t released a single public-facing policy framework that imagines a hostile U.S. posture on water. There is no indication that one exists behind closed doors.

Public Safety Canada, responsible for national risk planning, has contingency frameworks for floods, cyberattacks, and wildfires—but nothing for treaty collapse or waterway disruption. Their national risk profile includes disease outbreaks and domestic terrorism but remains silent on binational chokepoints and infrastructure vulnerability in the Great Lakes basin.

The Department of National Defence (DND) has no known naval posture in the region. There are no operational plans for Lake Ontario denial, no readiness protocols for waterborne escalation, no drills involving CBSA, CWA, or provincial emergency responders. The only federal forces that even touch the Lakes are environmental science vessels and unarmed Coast Guard ships.

And yet, the United States has layered contingency mechanisms—USACE, DHS, U.S. Coast Guard, CBP, and state-level National Guard units. They can tighten, slow, or block water access in a dozen ways. Canada, by contrast, has nothing on paper.

If Trump or any future president decided to suspend treaty obligations tomorrow, the question isn’t whether Canada would push back.

It’s whether Canada would even know what was happening.

Silence is not neutrality. It’s vulnerability—by design, by neglect, or by fear.

V. Provincial Front Lines – “The Great Lakes as Domestic Collapse Vector”

Ottawa may control treaties, but it’s Ontario and Quebec that would pay the price of collapse.

Together, they border four of the five Great Lakes. They rely on these waters for drinking, shipping, power, and trade. Yet neither province has a documented contingency plan for U.S. treaty abandonment, infrastructure disruption, or port denial.

Ontario’s Ministry of the Solicitor General, responsible for provincial emergency management, has no public model for cross-border shipping collapse. Québec’s Ministère de la Sécurité publique doesn’t list U.S.-Canada tensions in its strategic risk matrix. No coordination drills have been published involving CBSA, DND, or Public Safety Canada at the provincial level.

And yet, the exposure is obvious.

The Welland Canal, connecting Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, runs entirely through Ontario and handles more than 3,000 vessel transits per year. Hydro-Québec’s water-dependent generation systems run along the St. Lawrence Seaway. The Port of Montreal, a strategic economic node, would be vulnerable to any upstream disruption or retaliatory U.S. customs posture.

Border towns like Windsor, Sarnia, Cornwall, Brockville, and Niagara Falls sit within literal kilometers of U.S. control points—most unguarded, most reliant on goodwill. There is no known intergovernmental exercise that links these municipalities to a coordinated binational emergency framework involving water denial or treaty suspension.

If the federal government loses control of the water narrative, the provinces won’t be able to fill the vacuum. They’re not built to.

And yet they’re on the front lines.

It’s not just that Ottawa hasn’t made a plan. It’s that Ontario and Quebec are flying blind, tethered to federal treaties that no longer guarantee protection. Without coordination, without simulation, without doctrine, a foreign policy failure becomes a domestic sovereignty collapse.

All it takes is one crisis. One ship stopped. One treaty ignored.

VI. Strategic Escalation – “Trump Doesn’t Have to Say the Word ‘Annexation’”

Donald Trump doesn’t telegraph his moves with policy briefs—he floats them like trial balloons. When he suggested buying Greenland in 2019, the world laughed. But beneath the bluster was a signal: the old rules don’t apply, and U.S. territorial ambition is no longer unthinkable.

Canada should have taken notes.

Trump doesn’t need to say “annexation,” even though he has, for escalation to happen. He just needs to create facts on the water. Delay a shipment. Reassign Coast Guard patrol lines. Declare a navigation emergency and route military logistics through shared waters. And if Canada doesn’t object—or worse, doesn’t respond—those facts become precedent.

The Great Lakes are uniquely vulnerable to this kind of “salami-slice” expansion. Unlike land borders, they lack clear defense infrastructure. Unlike the Arctic, they’re not anchored by NORAD. And unlike Greenland or Ukraine, they don’t evoke immediate geopolitical alarm.

Which makes them the perfect stage.

Trump has already proven he’s willing to walk away from NATO, abandon Ukraine, and override global treaties. He’s gutted U.S. State Department norms, weaponized Homeland Security, and blurred the lines between federal enforcement and political retribution. If re-elected, he won’t need to ask Congress for a war declaration to reassert U.S. “security control” over the Great Lakes.

He just needs to act—and let Canada’s silence speak for itself.

This is the scenario where the U.S., under Trump, asserts unilateral jurisdiction over shared waters under the guise of “national security modernization.” No tanks. No missiles. Just policy drift and infrastructure control.

If Canada hasn’t drawn red lines by then, why would the U.S. respect them?

You don’t need to annex what nobody’s guarding.

VII. Why This Isn’t Being Covered – “Our Press Doesn’t Understand Infrastructure”

The most dangerous thing about Canada’s Great Lakes vulnerability isn’t just the lack of planning—it’s the lack of public awareness. And for that, the media bears some blame.

Water, in Canadian journalism, lives on the environment beat. It’s algae blooms, pipeline protests, and the occasional puff piece about the Canada Water Agency holding a public consultation. You don’t see defense reporters covering port access. You don’t see foreign affairs desks analyzing the International Joint Commission as a collapsing pillar of soft sovereignty. You definitely don’t see hard questions being asked of Public Safety Canada, DND, or Global Affairs Canada about the militarization of binational water.

That’s not just a gap. It’s a void.

The U.S. has publications like Defense One, War on the Rocks, and Foreign Policy—platforms where national security, infrastructure, and climate convergence are actively debated. Canada has, by comparison, silence. Occasional coverage in The Globe and Mail or Toronto Star frames water threats as ecological stories, not sovereignty threats.

So when a scenario like this appears—where Trump asserts de facto control over water infrastructure in the name of security—it doesn’t get modeled. It doesn’t get debated. And by the time it gets reported, it’s already happening.

That’s how sovereignty is lost: not with a bang, but with editorial disinterest.

If your journalists can’t tell the difference between a shipping choke point and a wetland, you’re not ready.

If your institutions can’t either, you’re already losing.

VIII. Conclusion – “Redraw the Line, Before Someone Else Does”

Canada’s Great Lakes border isn’t peaceful because it’s secure. It’s peaceful because no one has challenged it—yet.

That’s not strategy. That’s luck.

The treaties are ancient. The institutions are fragmented. The silence is deliberate. And the next American president may have no interest in respecting what Canada hasn’t even defended. When Trump talks about NATO like a bad real estate deal or fantasizes about buying sovereign territory, we treat it like theater. But if he begins to remap the Great Lakes under the banner of “national security,” it won’t be theater. It’ll be policy.

And we have no counter.

There is no Canadian red line on water access. No interagency deterrence doctrine. No binational response framework. The Canada Water Agency, Global Affairs Canada, Public Safety Canada, and DND all work in isolation—or worse, denial.

Sovereignty isn’t the absence of crisis. It’s the ability to survive one.

This isn’t a call for confrontation. It’s a call for readiness. We don’t need to militarize the Lakes. We need to make clear that we understand what they are:

Infrastructure. Strategy. Border.

Water is the line. If we don’t hold it—someone else will.

And they may already be moving.