Monday March 22 is World Water Day. To mark the day, TVO Canada, Ontario’s public educational media organization, will air a week of water-themed programming featuring the world premiere of the Canadian documentary Water on the Table on March 24, 2010 (written, directed and produced by Liz Marshall), and encores of films that examine political, economic and environmental issues dealing with water quality and availability.
Is water a human right, or a commodity to be bought and sold like gold and oil? Thats the question at the heart of this timely new documentary Water on the Table by filmmaker Liz Marshall. Over the course of a year in Canada and the United States, the film follows Canadian activist Maude Barlow as she campaigns against the privatization of water and tries to bring attention to how industry is polluting the water table.
Maude Barlow is chairperson of the Council of Canadians and co-founder of the Blue Planet Project. She has written books on water, for instance Blue Gold (with Tony Clarke) and Our Water Commons. With cameras close on her heels, Barlow leads a hectic schedule of speaking engagements and frontline community actions that take her from the United Nations (where she meets Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockman, Nicaraguan freedom fighter, liberation theologian and 63rd President of the UN General Assembly), to the Alberta tar sands, to a protest by Aboriginal women in Simcoe County, Ontario, to stop a proposed landfill site on what has been named the purest water source in the world.
Many embrace Barlow as an “international water-warrior” and leader in the global water justice movement. Her opponents in Canada and the United States argue that water is no different from any other resource, and that the best way to protect freshwater is to privatize it. They argue that Canada is water-rich and propose that Canada make its freshwater available now and into the future, especially to the United States as it faces an imminent water crisis.
This Post is also available in: German