<b>By ANN HINCH<br>
Assistant Editor</b> </p><p>

LANSING, Mich. — Ostensibly, the proposed Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact is a stronger version of a 1985 good-faith agreement – the Great Lakes Charter – that eight states and two Canadian provinces jointly entered into to protect the freshwater from their bordering five Great Lakes and connecting waterways from being diverted outside the Great Lakes Basin (the region in which rainfall drains into the waterways).<br>
That, and the compact, are made up of the parties of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, Ontario and Quebec. “What we generally think of as diversions to the South, or Arizona, or those other states, would not be permitted,” said Ken DeBeaussaert, director of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s Office of the Great Lakes.
This was hardly the first such agreement; in 1909, the United States and Great Britain (for Canada) signed the Boundary Waters Treaty “to help resolve disputes and to prevent future ones, primarily those concerning water quantity and water quality along the boundary” between the two countries.<br>
In 1986, Congress enacted the Water Resources Development Act, which, in part, was to prevent the unwanted diversion of Great Lakes water by requiring that all eight governors approve any move to do so in any one state. But in 1998, an Ontario businessman applied for – and received – a bulk permit through his government to ship tankers of Lake Superior drinking water to poor regions of Asia: 158 million gallons per year. Journalist Peter Annin, author of The Great Lakes Water Wars, wrote that when news of the permit hit the papers, “it spread rapidly through the Great Lakes Basin, prompting an extraordinary and heated anti-diversion debate.”<br>
“It illustrated a lot of problems at the time,” Dave Naftzger, executive director of the Council of the Great Lakes Governors, told Farm World.<br>
He said there were similar proposals at around the same time that “rang alarm bells” for the states and provinces – such as diverting water toward the Mississippi River to raise its level for barge traffic, or toward the Great Plains states to replenish their dwindling Ogallala Aquifer, or even to carry coal slurry in a pipeline for the Powder River Basin.<br>
“There’s always been this kind of need to protect the Great Lakes from this kind of diversion,” DeBeaussaert said. “(The water is) key to our economy and quality of life.”