Canada Letter When Canada Stared Down Washington—and Got Its Way By IAN AUSTEN It was one of the largest and most costly cross-border project ever undertaken by Canada and the United States. But the 60th season opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway this week passed largely unnoticed.

On board the Algoma Equinox as it passes under the international bridge in the Thousand Islands section of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Sara Fox for The New York Times

This year, the seaway opened with the arrival at Montreal’s St. Lambert lock of the Federal Kumano, a ship registered in the Marshall Islands that was laden with titanium chloride — an event that surely lacked the glamour of Queen Elizabeth’s appearance at the grand opening in 1959. While the seaway itself has largely faded from Canada’s imagination, its effects on Canada’s economy and landscape remain. The whole project is a remarkable contrast to how both megaprojects and cross-border relations work today. To begin with, Canada got its way. Canals appeared on the Great Lakes in the 19th century but after World War II, Canada — particularly the American-born, Liberal cabinet minister C.D. Howe — was seized by the idea that economic growth lay in effectively giving the world’s ships access to the Great Lakes’ ports. The vision was an aquatic variation of the expressways starting to be built in North America at the time. Robert Bothwell, the University of Toronto historian who is Mr. Howe’s biographer, said in an interview this week that the Eisenhower administration in Washington was far less keen on the project. The then-powerful American railways industry along with ports along the East Coast of the United States heavily lobbied against it. “It was the threat that Canada would go it alone that was the final stimulus for Eisenhower,” Professor Bothwell said. “We actually had the economic means, we were prepared to go though with it.”

A cargo ship passing through the Iroquois Lock in Eastern Ontario.

Getty Images Once the agreement was reached, the speed with which the seaway was built seems like the stuff of fantasy; today, expanding a pipeline in Western Canada, and building a single bridge over part of its route are both trapped in legal quicksand. Less than five years after the two countries cut a deal, ships were sailing along its result. Nine communities were flooded out of existence, highways and roads were moved, numerous bridges, locks and hydroelectric dams sprung up and channels along its 3,700 kilometer length were dredged to accommodate oceangoing ships. Excluding the hydro projects, Canada spent 3 billion Canadian dollars, adjusted for inflation, and the United States contributed what would be $1.1 billion today. Combined, the two countries spent another 5.2 billion Canadian dollars on dams used to adjust water levels and generate electricity. “It came in the aftermath of the Second World War so national interest was still a very powerful argument,” Professor Bothwell said. “The idea of emergency powers was still very fresh. The flooding would not be impossible today but it would be very difficult.” Today, of course, there’s not much of a movement in favor of dumping environmental reviews or giving people like Mr. Howe, “the minister of everything,” sweeping authority to disrupt thousands of peoples’ lives.

Construction on the St. Lawrence Seaway sometime between 1957 and 1959.

Howard Sochurek/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images Ultimately the seaway was not an economic miracle. The unforeseen move toward sending merchandise around the world in containers made it more attractive to unload ships onto trains in Halifax or Montreal. And as the Great Lakes region turned into the rust belt, many plants that were heavy users of shipping, like steel mills, closed up. The port that was built in Toronto to handle the expected surge of ships is now largely a wasteland that Google, in a proposal that has attracted widespread questioning, wants to transform into a data-centric city of tomorrow. The seaway peaked in 1979, when 79 million metric tonnes of cargo sailed through it. Last year, which was a comparatively good year, it handled under 41 million metric tonnes in shipments. And it’s also created environmental issues. During the 1980s quagga and zebra mussels arrived in ships’ ballast water and began gobbling up the Great Lakes’ phytoplankton, the foundation of their food web, and clogging water intake pipes. The seaway did fulfill some of its promises. For grain from prairie farmers, it remains a shortcut to the seas by way of Thunder Bay, Ontario. Last year, the system handled 12.3 million metric tonnes of grain. And while heavy industry has declined around the Great Lakes, it hasn’t vanished. Those flooded villages? A selection of their buildings became Upper Canada Village, one of Canada’s most evocative recreations of its past. And even if its ships are likely carrying prosaic cargo today, as someone who grew up along the seaway, I still feel a bit of thrill when I see a ship from a distant port chugging past the shoreline.