History of the St. Lawrence Seaway

Early navigation

The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 saw the fulfillment of a project that had been envisaged from the times of the earliest settlements in Canada. A waterway from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes was the obvious route for opening up the interior of North America, but various natural obstacles had prevented its realization. Efforts to sail into the heart of the continent date from 1535, when the French explorer Jacques Cartier, seeking a northwest passage to the Orient, found his path blocked by the Lachine Rapids, southwest of what is now Montreal. The digging of shallow St. Lawrence canals for bateaux and Durham boats (long, tapering boats with flat bottoms and auxiliary sails) in the early 1780s, the construction of the Erie Canal from Buffalo, New York, to the Hudson River from 1817 to 1825, the opening of the first canal around Niagara Falls in 1829, and the completion of the first lock, at Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan, in 1855 all fostered the dream of a navigable waterway into the continental interior.

The United States, however, proved a reluctant partner in a venture, pursued by Canada from the beginning of the 20th century onward, to open the Great Lakes to sea traffic. The U.S. Senate rejected the Seaway Treaty of 1932. The United States signed a second treaty in 1941 to include hydroelectric power development on the International Rapids section but allowed it to remain unratified for eight years. Faced with the likelihood that Canada would proceed alone, the U.S. Congress finally approved participation in the seaway project in May 1954. The Canadian government undertook to raise the standard of the waterway to a 8.2-metre (27-foot) navigation depth between Montreal and Lake Erie, and the United States agreed to carry out other works, including the bypassing by canal and locks of the Barnhart Island–Cornwall generating dam at the foot of the Long Sault Rapids.

Construction of the seaway

The seaway project was one of the largest civil engineering feats ever undertaken. Construction began in the summer of 1954 and took nearly five years to complete. Over its course the project employed some 22,000 workers and utilized enough cement to build a highway 1,609 km (1,000 miles) long and enough steel to girdle Earth. About 6,500 people living in riverside communities had to be relocated, bridges were raised, and tunnels, dikes, and roads were constructed. Locks had to be constructed in the seaway and modernized in the Welland Canal to raise and lower large ships a total of 170 metres (557 feet), making it the world’s greatest waterway lifting operation. It takes about seven minutes for water to pour in or out of a seaway lock; the average locking takes about half an hour. To overcome the navigational hazard of the swift-flowing 69-metre (226-foot) fall of the St. Lawrence River between Lake Ontario and Montreal and to develop its hydroelectric power potential required an investment of more than $1 billion.

For the navigation portion of the project, the Canadian government built two canals and five locks around the Cedar, Cascades, and Lachine rapids and three seaway dams, and the U.S. government built two locks, a 16-km (10-mile) canal around the International Rapids, and two seaway dams and cleared shoals from the Thousand Islands section of the river. This series of operations created a waterway 8.2 metres (27 feet) deep, replacing six canals and 22 locks that had been limited to a depth of 4 metres (14 feet).

In order to make the seaway operational, a number of other projects had to be undertaken as well. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers deepened the Straits of Mackinac, between Lakes Michigan and Huron; the St. Marys River, between Lakes Superior and Huron; the Detroit River, Lake St. Clair, and the St. Clair River, between Lakes Erie and Huron; and many Great Lakes harbours. In addition, between 1913 and 1932 Canada had built seven lift locks of seaway dimensions in the Welland Canal, which overcame the 99-metre (326-foot) plunge of the Niagara River and Falls, between Lakes Erie and Ontario. The seaway became operational in April 1959.

To tap the considerable energy of the river’s tumbling waters, the seaway project included construction in the International Rapids section of the Iroquois Control Dam near Iroquois, Ontario, and the Moses-Saunders Power Dam near Cornwall. The project created the 48-km- (30-mile-) long Lake St. Lawrence. Generation of hydroelectric power began in July 1958. The generating capacity is shared equally by Ontario and New York state.

Financing the seaway

For the price of approving seaway legislation, the U.S. Congress required that the seaway project be self-liquidating; the Canadian government also adopted this as a national policy. Tolls were to be assessed at a rate sufficient to pay back the cost of the project in 50 years, to pay annual interest on the funds borrowed to build it, and to pay all operating costs. The two nations jointly established a system of tolls, with each nation collecting tolls in its own currency. This resulted in a split of about three-fourths of the revenue to Canada and one-fourth to the United States.

Revenues from tolls in the early years of the seaway’s operation consistently fell far short of annual operating costs and interest payments, putting the seaway deeper in debt. Neither the St. Lawrence Seaway Authority (now the St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corporation), operating Canada’s installations, nor the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation, running U.S. operations, was able to increase tolls to keep pace with higher operational costs until the late 1970s, when a new Joint Seaway Tariff of Tolls agreement was accepted by both countries. Tolls were again increased in the early 1980s. Annual shipping tonnage had reached its peak in 1977, however, after which a gradual decline ensued. Thus, despite the increase in tolls, revenues generally continued to fall short of expenses.

In the mid-1980s the U.S. government assumed the financial obligations of the American seaway corporation. The tolls that were collected (the American share by this time had been reduced to 15 percent of the total) were returned as rebates to the seaway’s users, and the federal government provided direct subsidies to the American corporation. The Canadian authority, meanwhile, continued to operate as before and to charge tolls. The incentives to shippers offered by the rebates, however, helped stabilize seaway traffic by the end of the decade.