Wasteful U.S.? Blessed Canada? Does the First Amendment cover such turncoat talk? Kennedy couldn’t leave bad enough alone. Oh no. He had to go into details.

Kennedy said out-of-control suburban sprawl in the southwestern United States, coupled with wasteful agricultural water usage in the U.S., is spawning a water crisis that will only worsen in the future. "We are in the midst of a water crisis that has no end in sight, and the place people are looking to solve it is Canada," Kennedy said. "If you talk to the engineers and the planning and policy makers in Scottsdale, Ariz., and Phoenix and Las Vegas . . . they’ll say, ‘Well we don’t have to worry about this because we’ll just get the water from Canada.’ "

As a proud resident of aforementioned Scottsdale, I have two things to say: First, I’ve never seen RFK Jr. in town, which makes me doubt the whole story, and second, I have spoken with many leading members of the community – real estate developers, public officials, people with big houses – and no one has ever said we have a water problem. Just the opposite, in fact: Nothing to worry about. One step further: Nothing to even think about. 

To verify this, I visited Scottsdale City Hall and uncovered pictures and documents that showed how the city fathers had planned a quarter-century years ago to create a spacious venue with plenty of elbow room for broad avenues and big cars, free of the annoying bother of subways and trains and buses and other evidence of mass transit, a spread-out community, where nobody had to walk. More specifically, a place where there was no reason to walk because there were no obvious destinations, such as neighborhoods, with neighborhood shops and restaurants and sidewalks and parks, a community free of community. “Out-of-control suburban sprawl?” Hardly. This was the plan, and it worked beautifully. Heraclitus said more than two thousand years ago that “Character is a man’s fate,” and it is the character of those who built and are still building Scottsdale and the southwest to keep their eyes on the prize, to build for today and let tomorrow take care of itself, to push and profit, demand and expand, and leave it to God or technology or their grandkids to figure out what to do next, long after they’re done raising money to run for office, long after they’ve filled up every corner of the desert with ever-bigger homes. But Kennedy apparently doesn’t want the next generation to fix it. He wants to throw a monkey wrench into the works.

Kennedy added it’s important for the Canadian public to make it clear funnelling water southward is not the solution. "It’s really important for us to be able to say, ‘Canada’s not going to give us the water.’" He encouraged Canadians to pressure local governments and opposition party representatives to take action on water management. 

Great. So Kennedy’s spilling the beans for our own good. Uh, it doesn’t work that way. Not in the real world. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Garry Keller, a spokesman for Environment Minister John Baird, said the government has made it clear that Canada’s water isn’t for sale. "Canada has tough laws in place to prevent the bulk export of water, and we will continue to protect Canada’s waters from bulk export."

We’ll see.