Caught between Two Fires

Abstract

The St. Lawrence seaway and power project, built between 1954 and 1959, was the product of a half century of twisted and tortuous negotiations. It is one of the largest transborder projects ever undertaken by two countries and one of the greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century. The seaway runs 181.5 miles from Montreal to Lake Erie, including the Beauharnois and Weiland canals, and features a continual minimum depth of 27 feet, four dams (two of which generate hydroelectricity, including the massive power dam bisecting the international border near Cornwall, Ontario), and 15 locks with a depth of 30 feet.Nor was its importance restricted to its scale. The seaway matter was, as James Eayrs wrote in 1961, one of the difficult and most momentous issues for Canadian foreign policy.1 It was at the time the longest-running issue in US congressional history, and the authors of a leading text on Canadian-American relations declare that nothing represents the bilateral [North American] relationship during the cold war better than that seaway.2 The completed deep waterway was, according to another historian, comparable to a gigantic zipper pulling together Canada and the United States and accelerating the economic, trade, and defence integration of the two North American countries.3Nevertheless, the seaway is generally misunderstood, ignored, or viewed only as a successful model of Canadian-American relations and integration.4 However, although its construction and operation were examples of transnational and transboundary cooperation, the negotiations that resulted in the St. Lawrence seaway and power project reveal the asymmetrical bilateral relationship that characterized the Canada- U S relationship even in the early Cold War. This article is derived from a larger study that provides an in-depth analysis of the bilateral negotiations and contends that the Canadian government was not only serious about constructing an independent waterway but, along with the Canadian public, came to favour an all-Canadian effort.5 However, the US government, in conjunction with specific American regional and economic interests, considered an all-Canadian route to be an economic and national security threat, and used various means to thwart the Canadian plan and ensure American participation.The purpose of this article is two-fold. First, it provides an account of a seminal issue for Canadian- American relations in general and environmental diplomacy in particular: the negotiation of the St. Lawrence seaway and power project during the early years of the Cold War. Second, the history of the St. Lawrence negotiations engages an important issue in the study of Canada's relationship with the United States - the notion of linkage. The term refers to the attempt in diplomatic relations to connect the outcome of a policy issue to a different and unrelated issue. At base, linkage is about the willingness to threaten or carry through retribution in order to force a certain result. A number of prominent students of Canada- U S relations have concluded that the relationship was marked by the absence of coercive linkages during the first decades of the Cold War, going back to the likes of John Holmes and, more recently, Brian Bow.6HISTORICAL BACKGROUNDSerious governmental consideration of creating a comprehensive bilateral St. Lawrence deep waterway dates back to the end of the 19th century. In the years leading up to the First World War, both countries intermittently showed interest in a cooperative waterway, but without tangible results. The First World War increased governmental interest in a deep waterway and in the postwar decade engineering studies by the International Joint Commission (IJC) and the bilateral Wooten-Bowden commission recommended a joint St Lawrence undertaking. However, no bilateral agreement was made throughout the 1920s, largely because of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King's concerns about domestic political opposition. …