CANADA: Put Up or Shut Up

This week in Washington, the vast, controversial St. Lawrence seaway project was back in the news. The seaway, a $935 million plan, which would open the North American heartland to ocean shipping and release a mighty flow of new electric power, has been kicked around between planners, engineers and hard-boiled lobbyists for half a century. Now President Truman is sending his top men (headed by Secretaries Acheson and Marshall) to make a positive case for the project before the House Public Works Committee. Reason: the seaway’s vital importance to Western defense, and, incidentally, to U.S.-Canadian unity.

The chance for congressional approval of a 1941 Canadian-American agreement for joint construction of the project looks better than usual. But it is far from assured. The anti-seaway lobby is still deeply entrenched on Capitol Hill. Meanwhile, Canadian patience is wearing thin. Said External Affairs Minister Lester (“Mike”) Pearson in Ottawa last week: “The Americans say we are dragging our feet in world affairs. The biggest and longest dragging of feet I have known in my entire career is that of the Americans on the St. Lawrence seaway.”

Ports & Power. Seaway opponents have long tried to write the project off as a white elephant, but most unbiased investigators have concluded that it makes such obvious economic and engineering sense that its construction some day is inevitable. If & when it is built, the seaway will:

¶ Extend the North American seacoast by 8,000 miles, transforming such cities as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Toronto into deepwater ports, where inland shipyards could be located in wartime.

¶ Provide a low-cost inland route for shipment of iron ore to Midwest steel mills from the rich new deposits being developed in Labrador.

¶ Speed overseas shipment of U.S. and Canadian farm products (notably wheat), which now must be transshipped twice.

¶ Pump 3,400,000 h.p. of urgently needed electric energy into the booming industrial complex of New York, Ontario and Quebec.

On the point of Labrador iron ore alone, Western strategists shudder to think of total war with no seaway. With the great Mesabi deposits inexorably running out, Labrador is the only known alternative source that could be made completely safe from submarines. This has lined the Pentagon up in earnest support of the seaway. It has also won over the Midwestern steel companies, many major manufacturers (including General Motors, Nash-Kelvinator, Ford) and some influential Senators—notably Ohio’s Taft.

Jobs & Lobbies. The main St. Lawrence bottleneck is a 120-mile stretch from Montreal to Ogdensburg, N.Y., where there is now a system of locks and canals providing a channel 14 ft. deep. Under the 1941 agreement, this would be replaced by a 27-ft. channel (deep enough for 80% of the world’s shipping) through construction of seven new locks. Additionally, five dams would harness the International Rapids to spin 36 turbines at Barnhart Island. The project would cost Canada $412 million, the U.S. $523 million. It would take six years, provide 15,000 jobs, consume 150,000 tons of steel and 7,300,000 barrels of cement.

For North Americans, even such a massive undertaking as that is no real obstacle. The real block to the seaway, through 50 years of weary debate since it was first proposed, has been the anti-seaway lobby. Its members include railroads fearful of losing traffic, coal and power companies fearful of low-cost competition, seaports from Boston to Galveston that would lose some shipping. The coalition has managed to frustrate the efforts of every U.S. President since Wilson and every New York governor since Al Smith to push the seaway through Congress.

This time, if the lobby wins again, its victory may cost the U.S. dear. Canada is ready to tackle the seaway alone if the U.S. is still undecided by the end of 1951. An all-Canadian route would be somewhat more difficult to build, but the extra cost would come to only $30 million. Canada could finance the whole project if it had to, and there is no impossible problem of engineering or supply. U.S. business in the end would have to pay most of the bill through toll charges, and U.S. shipping might be hurt by discriminatory rates.