The Line Aquatic

The dominant narrative of Canada’s biggest waterway, the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River, has been that of empire building, nation building and, more recently, globalization. As historian Donald Creighton boldly asserted in his classic The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence—quoted in the new anthology Border Flows: A Century of the Canadian-American Water Relationship —“the dream of the commercial empire of the St. Lawrence runs like an obsession through the whole of Canadian history.”

First, there were the canals—the Lachine, Welland and Erie, followed by the mega-scale St. Lawrence Seaway, allowing a burgeoning array of products to move across this ever-expanding infrastructure. In 1957 CBS newscaster Walter Cronkite described the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway as “the greatest engineering feat of our time … conquering nature on a scale and in a fashion never before attempted.” Then there were the hydro projects, harnessing the kinetic...