To celebrate my son’s birthday, our family recently enjoyed Rango, a top-grossing animation feature about a chameleon in the American southwest. “If you control water,” says the Mayor of Dirt, “you control everything!”

News this month confirms the aquatic wisdom of the mayor. In Quebec, because of groundwater contamination worries, the provincial government has called a halt to hydraulic fracking, a process that involves injecting a mixture of water and chemicals into shale rock to release natural gas to the surface. (In southwestern Ontario, the Star has broken a story that an Alberta company has purchased 22,495 acres in Kent and Lambton county for possible fracking.)

In Alberta, a scientific panel has backed research (initially denied by the provincial government) that oilsands development is releasing contaminants into the Athabasca River. In Toronto, merchants buying and selling live Asian carp were convicted and fined with breaching the law on possessing such live invasive fish (Asian carp were imported to the U.S. decades ago and are making their way into the Great Lakes), and the International Joint Commission, too, released a report on March 9 that water quality in the Great Lakes is declining with phosphate-produced algae returning to Lake Erie.

Water is critical to the health of citizens, communities and the economy. The IJC Report, for example, writes about “the vital ecological link between watersheds, tributaries, wetlands, groundwater and offshore waters of the Great Lakes.”

Water touches every part of our daily lives. Protecting and conserving it should, therefore, be among our country’s highest priorities. To that end, a host of community groups, educators, and citizens came together to organize Canada Water Week, to promote public education about water and suggest ways for better conservation.

This effort will be capped off on March 22 with a high-level expert group meeting chaired by former prime minister Jean Chrétien on the “Global Water Crisis: Addressing an Urgent Security Issue.” Adele Hurley, director of the water issues program at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, who is co-hosting the event, writes that the best way to protect Canada’s and the world’s freshwater resources is to “keep water in its natural river basins, treat it with respect, and use it efficiently.”

There are many ways to assess the importance of water. But a prism that I find most useful is to view water as a national security requirement. We should be asking the same question Johnny Depp’s chameleon poses in Rango — is our water secure? Karen Bakker, director of the program on water governance at the University of British Columbia, defines water security as “sustainable access on a watershed basis to adequate quantities of water of acceptable quality to ensure human and ecological health.”

If that is the goal, we are far from achieving it: one-quarter of all Canadian communities experienced water shortages during the last half of the 1990s, water quality in a thousand remote rural communities is as bad or worse than in many developing countries, and 100 First Nations live with continuing boil-water advisories.

To determine our security level and need, we have to start with determining what our reserves are. Here, too, we are living in a fool’s paradise. Almost 9 million Canadians, a third of our population, rely on groundwater (wells and aquifers) for domestic use, but we have not even mapped these resources in a systematic way.

The Council of Canadian Academies reported in May 2009 that Canada has little information on the extent and condition of its groundwater resources. At its current rate, Natural Resources Canada will not complete its mapping until 2030, while the United States, in comparison, has completed extensive aquifer mapping along the Canada-U.S. border. The United States has realized, as Canada has not, that security and water are intricately linked.

Safe, secure, clean water is a legacy we must pass on to future generations. By regarding it as a national security issue, it might at least get the attention it deserves. It certainly should be one of the primary issues in the next federal election, for as Rango says, ultimately, water is everything.

Thomas S. Axworthy is president and CEO of the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation, organizing partner of the InterAction Council High Level Expert Group meeting to be held March 22-23 at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.