It’s not all Lac St John or Trois Rivier. Quebec City is quite adorable!
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Unless you’re ace at selling your special salt direct to retail, you’re going to have to formulate minerals or something you like and maintain the stock loops that tend otherwise fill up with pipe debridement mulch, silts, and soluble chlorides. So finding the operating engineers, minerals and processes to agree without JVing too much with the other distributors can be precious. Or, what if state-led chemical hazard compliance were a thing (polyol products must be tested in the pthalate groundwater wells of manufacture, or such.)
Comic 160 page Canadian tensions in a GN while the @GreatDismal’s comics roll out issue by issue is very nice.
So you’re saying that you don’t like the imaginings of “We stand guard”? You don’t think the premise is acceptable/realistic/whatever? Gosh, what other science fiction plots do you find unacceptable?
But I agree. Fictional plots should always be feasible and within the line of what can really happen. It’d make everything so much easier.
/s
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Consider how much international water extraction is currently going on in Canada already for next to nothing… I don’t find it improbable… I find it very very feasible frankly. 
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Look. Do you want this 55 gallon drum of glass beads for the western half of Canada or what? They’re so shiny! So round! So glass!
Also, we’ve got these old blankets you can have for your journey elsewhere (for free, of course)…they smell a little and maybe don’t let them touch open skin, but they’re all yours!
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I think others have already addressed the issue of desalination being “cheap.” There are technologies on the horizon that may yet solve our freshwater problem, but like cold fusion they’ve been a decade away for the last fifty years. Often we exchange energy for freshwater, and energy is the one thing that we seem to be losing a steady supply of (thanks for the industrial revolution fossil fuels!) Listening to foreign policy and other experts talk about it, it seems that water is likely going to be the source of major resource conflicts.
I’ll grant you that the ME’s historic climate and fossil fuel/ammonia driven population boom is probably a bigger factor in such future conflicts. I wouldn’t disagree with you there. But I look at trends here in the US of privatization of water resources and deregulation around polluters as a sign that maybe we shouldn’t feel so secure about our water resources. In any case, the purpose of speculative fiction isn’t to be dead-on predictive. I will say that when it comes to resource wars, scarcity of water is a lot more urgent than scarcity of oil. You can live more than a few days without oil or electricity. You can even grow crops without oil or electricity.
Here’s the other thing I’ve been giving a lot of thought to. I think that between the advances in warfighting robotics and a volunteer military, Americans are increasingly willing to go to war not out of desperation, but to maintain a certain standard of living. We’ve already shown appalling apathy when it comes to the acquisition of consumer goods like clothing, after all:
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You can grow crops, but you cannot harvest them or distribute them without energy.
This is the problem with this level of speculative fiction. I get that it is speculative and that it is symbolic, but it is part of a mistake in thinking. People have this vision that water may become worth it’s weight in gold. We keep forgetting that water is a renewable. We may have “water problems”, but the earth is never going to reach a point where a gallon of water is literally a rare-earth commodity. People are not going to be trading hours of hard labor for a gallon of potable water.
When did the sun stop working? We have plenty of energy and all we need is the sun to desalinate water using technology that is literally centuries old.(Distillation)
True. Go back to before steam engines, and you go back to before sprawling cities. And a much smaller percentage of the crop ever left the farm at all.
This on the other hand isn’t as realistic. “Possible” isn’t the same as “viable.” And “viable” isn’t the same as “cheapest”, that that’s important.
Take hydrogen fuel for example. Clean. Produces only water vapor. Right?
In reality, if you want hydrogen in commercial quantities - and you do for hydrogen-powered cars - you won’t be using electrolysis because it’s the most expensive method to produce it. You’ll be using steam reforming, just like we do for producing hydrogen for rocket fuel and other uses. You start with natural gas, and in the process give off large amounts of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide
Desalinating enough water to support thousands of square miles of crops is technically possible. But diverting water from distant rivers is how it would be done, on cost alone.
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I’m looking at the premise of all this, and I’m thinking that, contrariwise, the Northern states are going to be wanting to join us soon enough - get Trump for president, and it will be sooner than later. I’m looking forward to Vermont as the 11th province… 
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Again with the Vermont thing.That’s the wrong side of the country!
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Start a movement on your side of the continent - there’s always room for a 12th (etc.) province.
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That’s little more than subsistence farming. Only a small percentage of the food grown leaves the farm.
To go back to that method you’d need to sacrifice every medium and large city. And all the people in them.
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Let this whistleblower be celebrated, not persecuted like Snowden
Classic Amazon - Canadian price is 50% higher even after adjusting for exchange 
You really, really, do not understand this issue. Like, at all.
You playing with words is entertaining me though. In the way it’s funny when a 5 year old draws an R backwards.
This is the problem with this level of speculative fiction.
Funny too that you would say that about speculation and fiction.
People have this vision that water may become worth it’s weight in gold.
Yeah, silly silly people and their… biases. That Plato was such a joker, and don’t even get me started on Adam Smith, what a card!
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I doubt that Amazon can do anything about it.
Almost a decade ago when the Canadian dollar hit par, my wife was working in the accounting closet of a Canadian book store chain. Books still cost far more in Canada, because the publishers were used to charging more in Canada and saw no reason to change.
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What’s interesting, though, is that it is much less expensive, easier on the environment in every way, and requires group participation to work.
Yeah, I’m very much a city person, I’m not trying to get rid of them – and acre for acre, they are more energy and water efficient than suburban and rural areas – but realistically speaking it could be a better/best choice scenario IFF (if and only if) the transition to regional or worldwide water-preservation was done more via diplomacy than by military might.
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