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  • Negotiating a River: Canada, the US, and the Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway by Daniel Macfarlane
  • Stephen Azzi
Negotiating a River: Canada, the US, and the Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Daniel Macfarlane. Vancouver: ubc Press, 2014. Pp. xxx + 356, $95.00 cloth, $34.95 paper

The fiftieth anniversary of the St Lawrence Seaway and Power Project was marked with modest celebrations in 2009. The undertaking was lauded as an outstanding feat of engineering, a provider of electricity to more than one million people, and an example of cooperation between Canada and the United States. In striking contrast, Daniel Macfarlane provides a highly critical view of the project in Negotiating a River: Canada, the us, and the Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Macfarlane describes the negotiations and construction effort that produced the impressive transportation and hydro-electric power project. Built from 1954 to 1959, the seaway is a system of canals, channels, dams, dykes, and locks that allows navigation from Montreal to Lake Erie and generates more than 1800 megawatts of power. Still, the author insists that “the project should be considered a mistake” (207).

Macfarlane is deeply sceptical about the motivation of the seaway’s proponents. He sees the project as the result of high modernism – the belief that society can be reordered and improved through technological progress and human control over the environment. But Macfarlane pushes further, developing a concept that he calls “negotiated high modernism”: while pursuing a high modernist agenda, governments involve people in the process to “mediate and legitimate” the state’s authority and to manufacture consent. “The St. Lawrence project,” he [End Page 451] asserts, “was fundamentally about control” (228). It was less about the interests of the people than “a socially and ecologically imperialist undertaking that followed the dictates of industry, big business, and modern capitalism” (178).

For the power project, a large area of southeastern Ontario was flooded. West of Cornwall, about 6500 residents were relocated, as were 225 farms and eighteen cemeteries. The entire town of Iroquois was shifted, as was part of Morrisburg. Nine villages or hamlets were completely submerged, and their residents were moved to the new, rationally planned towns of Ingleside and Long Sault or to one of several new subdivisions in the area. East of Cornwall, the construction of the seaway required 1500 Ontario and Quebec residents to be displaced. On the US side of the river, another 1100 people and 225 farms were moved. In Macfarlane’s view, the politicians, officials, scientists, and engineers who planned and built the project had a misplaced faith in progress, viewing “nature as something to be controlled and ordered through technology with little to no consideration of the wider environmental impact” (224). He repeatedly uses the word hubris to describe their attitude. Yet it is not clear if Macfarlane thinks that Ontarians should have reduced their consumption of hydro-electric power or if a new power-generating project should have been built elsewhere.

For Macfarlane, the problem was not just that governments were exploiting the people for the benefit of big business but also that us officials were taking advantage of their Canadian counterparts. After almost fifty years of trying to convince the Americans to help develop the seaway, Canadians decided to proceed alone. Macfarlane’s research shows that Canadian officials were sincere and were not bluffing, as some earlier accounts have suggested. Eventually, the Americans decided they had to take part in the project, even threatening to block Canadian efforts to proceed unilaterally by refusing to authorize the construction of necessary dams.

Among specialists in Canada-us relations, there is scepticism that the two countries linked distinct issues to gain an advantage in negotiations. For instance, Canadian officials did not threaten to reduce exports of oil to the United States when the two sides were negotiating over softwood lumber. Yet Macfarlane shows that the government of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent was reluctant to proceed with an all-Canadian project for fear of damaging his country’s friendship with the United States. Canadians perceived that the Americans linked the seaway to other issues, but it is less clear whether the Americans had explicitly done...

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