Matthew Evenden

Water and power have been central to the Canada-U.S. relationship. Before the twentieth century, the system of rivers, lakes, and canals that tied eastern ports to the interior of the continent structured the geography of North American political and economic development. While American settlement pressed westward along rivers like the Ohio, the Hudson, and the Potomac, Canadian westward development cleaved to the shores of boundary waters like the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. Canals built on either side of the border competed to improve rivers for navigation, overcoming cataracts and falls and, with them, the barriers to commerce and settlement. After Canadian Confederation (1867), as Canadians moved into the Northwest Territories to establish a settlement at Red River, they travelled to their destination by rail through the United States and then north by riverboat. At numerous points along the Canada-U.S. border, north–south trending rivers facilitated cross-border interaction, trade, and communications. The coming of the railroad began to diminish the importance of rivers as highways; yet, before the second industrial revolution, boundary waters provided some of the most crucial sites and spaces of interaction, where ships, goods, peoples, and ideas crossed and recrossed the line.1

Water began to take on a new significance after 1900 due to the expansion of irrigation agriculture in the West and water diversions and hydroelectricity in the East. Irrigation grew significantly in semiarid and arid sections of the western United States after 1840. Initially confined to valley bottoms and small projects, the scale of development expanded in the late nineteenth century. In 1902, the Reclamation Act transformed the U.S. federal government into a major developer of projects and water control infrastructure.2 In Canada, the pace of development was much slower and less significant, confined primarily to fruit-farming regions of British Columbia’s interior and mixed farming districts of southern Alberta.3 Most of the early irrigation projects in Canada either were peopled by immigrant American farmers or deployed the expertise of American engineers.4 Some exploited boundary waters. In the most southerly sections of Alberta in the late nineteenth century, for example, immigrant Mormon farmers originally from Utah took up land developed by the Alberta Irrigation Company and drew water off the St. Mary and Milk Rivers, both of which wended back and forth across the 49th parallel.5 Across the border in Montana, American farmers irrigated crops with waters drawn from these same rivers. As the downstream users, however, Montana farmers stood at a disadvantage. They could use only what was left behind by irrigators upstream in Canada.6 The resulting conflict modelled a larger problem: how to allocate shared waters for consumptive uses, where water taken out of a river or lake would not be replaced for uses on the other side of the border. In short, how could shared waters be developed, by whom, and for whom?

Irrigation agriculture raised one set of problems, urban water supply another. On the Great Lakes, the rapid rise of Chicago in the second half of the nineteenth century produced an intractable sanitation problem. The city dumped its wastes into the diminutive Chicago River, which faithfully carried the growing volume of sewage and industrial waste to Lake Michigan—from which the city also drew its water supply. To solve the problem, the State of Illinois empowered a newly formed Chicago Sanitary District to reverse engineer the problem. Because Chicago sat a mere sixteen kilometres from the watershed line between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi basin, engineers determined that it would be possible to divert water from Lake Michigan via a canal and control the outflow of the Chicago River, causing it to reverse its flow toward the west and south. These actions would effectively tip the polluted waters from Chicago into the upper Mississippi Basin and separate them from the city’s water supply. Completed in 1900, the Chicago River diversion created controversy in the downstream Mississippi jurisdictions, because of the introduction of pollutants to the river, but also raised concerns in the Great Lakes because of the potential volume of flow that would now be withdrawn on an annual basis, in perpetuity, and with unknown but potential effects on navigation and water development downstream through the whole Great Lakes–St. Lawrence system.7

In the same period, the expansion of hydroelectric technology in the eastern United States and Canada suggested a new era of water relations on boundary rivers and lakes. Hydroelectricity operates by turning flowing water into controlled canals and penstocks that deliver the kinetic energy of falling water into powerhouses, to be converted by turbines into electrical energy. The infrastructure required for hydro developments involves the transformation and training of rivers with dams, the creation of reservoirs, and the regulation of flows. Given the abundant opportunities for hydro development in the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence basin and the undesirable effects of water diversion on downstream users, both Canada and the United States considered how best to manage this new technological complex with a view to existing uses—e.g., transportation, tourism at Niagara Falls—while also protecting national interests. To facilitate but also manage the new technology, some kind of framework was needed to structure the diversion and use of boundary waters and to accommodate binational concerns.8

With a border stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic and cutting across a vast northern expanse, punctuated by some of the largest lakes in the world and major continental flows like the St. Lawrence, the Yukon, and the Columbia, the volume of potential areas of common interest or conflict was staggering. In its dealings with Mexico, the United States had been less troubled. As the upstream nation on north–south flowing rivers, the United States had pursued the Harmon doctrine, a simple and self-serving legal principle that asserted territorial sovereignty and allowed the upstream nation to divert and use waters as it saw fit.9 Pressed into service on the Canada-U.S. border, such a doctrine would benefit Canada perhaps more than the United States. Rivers flow south as well as north. The Great Lakes presented more complex problems than rivers like the Rio Grande or the Colorado. At a time of limited continental diplomacy, when Britain retained its central role in negotiating Canadian foreign policy, an International Waterways Commission (IWC) was established in 1903, at the prompting of the United States, to investigate how best to manage boundary flows. Following several years of study and negotiation, which involved the IWC morphing into the International Joint Commission (IJC), a treaty was concluded in 1909 and subsequently ratified.10

The negotiators who framed the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 could not have envisioned the scale and complexity of problems that hydroelectric development would bring. As Canada and the United States began to transmit power across the border, most significantly from Canada to the United States, electrical systems grew in size and scale.11 Dams were conceived as components of megaprojects—large-scale infrastructural investments that coordinated different water uses within the frame of river basins. When rivers crossed borders, so did the impacts of dams, as their reservoirs flooded valleys upstream and regulated water flows downstream.12 Power plants located on boundary waters also contributed to vast and complex networks of power transmission, sometimes reaching far from the border. During World War II, for example, as both countries laboured to develop sufficient electrical power to drive wartime production, electricity transmission systems diverted power across the border and local projects were made to interconnect with more spatially extensive grids.13 Thus, the particular and general contexts of boundary waters changed as flows came to be managed according to system demands over distance. By the mid-1960s, as Canadian provincial governments and power companies sought new opportunities for power sales in the United States, the links between Canadian hydro development and American markets grew more significant. Not only did American demands affect boundary waters, but, as U.S. utilities signed power contracts with Canadian utilities, they served to underwrite new development schemes as well, often located in the middle North at a vast distance from Canadian metropolitan centres and the U.S. border. North–south grids carried this power to market, while visions of a national, east–west grid in Canada foundered.14

The growth of irrigation agriculture across North America in the mid-twentieth century coincided with increased urban and industrial demands on water in the western states. Although some boundary waters were affected by this general trend, the more significant process was growing water consumption, marked by aquifer depletion and growing conflict over surface waters, sometimes at the local scale and sometimes across state boundaries, though rarely across the Canada-U.S. border. Periods of drought highlighted a looming problem, leading some to investigate new water conservation measures and others the promise of large water diversions, carrying surface flows from various northern Canadian rivers through elaborate canal and pipeline networks to dry regions of the western United States. With a breathtaking hubris about the capacity of modern technology to transcend environmental and social constraints, promoters conceived major manipulations of continental water systems.15 Water, from this perspective, was a valuable and transportable resource. Where it flowed, and from whence, mattered only insofar as it affected costs. Any potential undesirable social and environmental consequences fell outside of the frame.

Promoters of water diversion did not anticipate the extent to which diverse interests, both American and Canadian, would come together to denounce their bold visions. Canadian and American politicians from the Great Lakes region pressed back against the easy assumptions of massive water diversions and sought to enhance safeguards against further withdrawals from the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes system. As Canadian and American relations entered a new period of economic continentalization after the signing of the Free Trade Agreement (1988) and, subsequently, the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the linkages between trade and water came to be highly charged in Canadian politics. Canadian water advocates argued that any trade in bulk water exports to the United States from Canada would effectively open this resource to commercial trade under the terms of NAFTA. Although this claim has never been tested in practice or in the courts, the concern highlights both the new national and continental frames of water politics and the confluence of environmental and economic nationalist politics in Canada since the 1990s.16

As Canadians and Americans now face the challenges of climate change and ponder the links between global processes and regional climate systems, water and power take on renewed significance at the border. As glaciers recede in the Rockies and water levels decline in the Great Lakes, as the Ogallala Aquifer contracts with the years, how will the two countries respond to new challenges? What new political and technological pressures will be brought to bear on Canadian-American waters, at the boundary and beyond? What will the distribution be among different water uses both within national borders and across them?

The chapters that follow help us to consider the historical foundations of these problems. In “Dam the Consequences: Hydropolitics, Nationalism, and the Niagara–St. Lawrence projects,” Daniel Macfarlane examines the shared development projects that transformed the St. Lawrence River and Niagara Falls in the mid-twentieth century, exploiting waters for hydroelectricity, building locks to assist navigation, and engineering Niagara Falls to preserve the appearance of a visually impressive cascade. While Macfarlane explains the political give-and-take that lay in the background of these megaprojects and outlines the cooperation required to execute them, he also notes how these binational endeavours bore different meanings north and south of the border. Despite the close relations that Canada and the United States struck in the context of these binational projects, Macfarlane underlines the different interests that both national parties understood to be in play and the different levels of significance that different national communities attached to them.

Nationalist politics also inflect Frédéric Lasserre’s examination of the history of water export schemes and the particular position of Quebec politicians and companies in the debate. In chapter 5, “Quebec’s Water Export Schemes: The Rise and Fall of a Resource Development Idea,” he locates the origins of the water export idea in the mid-twentieth century, when massive schemes were envisioned to construct canals linking northern Canadian rivers to American markets. Considered alongside the St. Lawrence Seaway discussed by Macfarlane, it is not difficult to imagine how or why technological optimists and promoters conceived of such gargantuan schemes. In a period of surging postwar growth, megaprojects were viewed as achievable and desirable with a host of benefits. The sheer cost of continental diversion schemes, not to mention a rising chorus of nationalist criticism in Canada, headed off various incarnations of continental diversion, from the Great Recycling and Northern Development (GRAND) Canal in the late 1950s to the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) in the 1960s. Nevertheless, Lasserre reminds us that this was not and may not be the end of the story. Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa, who famously and proudly described himself as a conqueror of the North with respect to the James Bay hydroelectric projects, eagerly explored the possibilities of bulk water export sales to the United States in the mid-1980s.17 While Lasserre identifies some of the reasons why these efforts failed, and elaborates on the range of ways in which subsequent governments both in Quebec and elsewhere have sought to legislate against their possibility, he remains skeptical that renewed calls for water exports might not emerge again.

While the revisitation of the water export debate remains a possibility, the renewal of some dimensions of the Canadian-American water relationship is a certainty. The Columbia River Treaty, for example (struck in 1961 and amended with a protocol in 1964), lies today at the centre of a growing debate over how to adjust, modify, or eliminate some of its original terms—or, more seriously, how to cancel it. Created with a view to coordinating the flows of the Columbia River in order to manage the flood threat and optimize hydroelectricity at existing plants in the United States, the treaty contained a revision clause, Article XIX, allowing either signatory to exit the treaty after 2014, provided that ten years’ notice is given. Jeremy Mouat’s chapter, “Engineering a Treaty: The Negotiation of the Columbia River Treaty of 1961/1964,” does not attempt to outline the likely outcome of this emerging negotiation, but rather provides the context to understand how the original treaty emerged and, by implication, how its terms structure the current moment of reconsideration. Mouat makes clear that the original negotiation was complicated first by binational disagreements over its terms and the identification and assignment of so-called downstream benefits to Canada because of the improvements to American flood protection and hydro generation downstream. He also explains, however, the significant role of the Province of British Columbia because of its constitutional authority over waters and resources, which were necessarily implicated by the international treaty, and BC Premier W.A.C. Bennett’s ambition to harness the treaty to his own megaproject ambitions for the province’s northern Peace River. While the current goals of Canadian and American negotiators and sub-national politicians differ dramatically from those of the formative days of the Columbia River Treaty, Mouat’s analysis is nevertheless a timely reminder that cooperation on transboundary rivers has been hard-earned in the past and has both foreclosed other possibilities and come with costs as well as benefits.

Notes

1 A riverine perspective on North American development was most famously expounded by Donald Creighton in his classic study, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, 1750–1850 (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1937).

2 Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Donald Pisani, To Reclaim a Divided West: Water, Law, and Public Policy, 1848–1902 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992).

3 Matthew Evenden, “Precarious Foundations: Irrigation, Environment and Social Change in the Canadian Pacific Railway’s Eastern Section, 1900–1930,” Journal of Historical Geography 32, no. 1 (2006): 74–95; Christopher Armstrong, Matthew Evenden, and H.V. Nelles, The River Returns: An Environmental History of the Bow (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009).

4 Lawrence B. Lee, “The Canadian-American Irrigation Frontier, 1884–1914,” Agricultural History 40, no. 4 (1966): 271–83.

5 Andy den Otter, “Irrigation in Southern Alberta 1882–1901,” Occasional Paper No. 5, Whoop-up Country Chapter, Historical Society of Alberta, Lethbridge, AB, 1975.

6 N.A.F. Dreisziger, “Wrangling over the St. Mary and Milk,” Alberta History 28, no. 2 (1980): 6–15.

7 Louis P. Cain, “Unfouling the Public’s Nest: Chicago’s Sanitary Diversion of Lake Michigan Water,” Technology and Culture 15, no. 4 (1974): 594–613.

8 David Massell, “A Question of Power: A Brief History of Hydroelectricity in Quebec,” in Quebec Questions: Quebec Studies for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Stéphan Gervais, Christopher Kirkey, and Jarrett Rudy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 338–56; Daniel Macfarlane, Negotiating a River: Canada, the United States and the Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014); Daniel Macfarlane, “‘A Completely Man-Made and Artificial Cataract’: The Transnational Manipulation of Niagara Falls,” Environmental History 18, no. 4 (2013), 759–84; H.V. Nelles, The Politics of Development: Forests, Mines, and Hydro-Electric Power in Ontario, 1849–1941 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1974).

9 Stephen C. McCaffrey, “The Harmon Doctrine One Hundred Years Later: Buried, Not Praised,” Natural Resources Journal 36, no. 3 (1996): 549–90.

10 Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook, Canada: A Nation Transformed, 1896–1921 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1974), 174–77.

11 Janet Martin-Neilsen, “South over the Wires: Hydro-Electricity Exports from Canada,” Water History 1 (2009): 109–29.

12 Phil Van Huizen, “Flooding the Border: Development, Politics and the Environmental Controversy in the Canada-U.S. Skagit Valley” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2013).

13 Matthew Evenden, Allied Power: Mobilizing Hydro-Electricity during Canada’s Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015); David Massell, “‘As Though There Was No Boundary’: The Shipshaw Project and Continental Integration,” American Review of Canadian Studies 34, no. 2 (2004): 187–222; David Massell, Quebec Hydropolitics: The Peribonka Concessions of the Second World War (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011).

14 Karl Froschauer, White Gold: Hydroelectric Power in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999); Alexander Netherton, “The Political Economy of Canadian Hydro-Electricity: Between Old ‘Provincial Hydros’ and Neoliberal Regional Energy Regimes,” Canadian Political Science Review 1, no. 1 (2007): 107–24.

15 Benjamin Forest and Patrick Forest, “Engineering the North American Waterscape: The High Modernist Mapping of Continental Water Transfer Projects,” Political Geography 31, no. 3 (2012): 167–83.

16 Frank Quinn, Water Diversion, Export and Canada-U.S. Relations: A Brief History, MCIS Briefings No. 8, Program on Water Issues, MCIS, University of Toronto, 2007, http://powi.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Water-Diversion-Export-and-Canada-US-Relations-A-Brief-History-2007.pdf.

17 Bourassa made this claim in an interview included in the film Power, VHS recording, directed by Magnus Isaacson (Toronto: Cineflix Productions / National Film Board of Canada, 1996).