The Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network (QAHN) each year presents, via Zoom, a series of online "Heritage Talks" on different topics relating to Quebec history.

On February 16, 2023 at 1:30 p.m. (Eastern Time), Mark Gallop, a noted historian, will speak on "The St. Lawrence Waterway Project: From Colonial Canals to the St. Lawrence Seaway".

Registration for this online lecture is required.  You must sign in here to join the Zoom call.

A public livestream (no registration needed) of this presentation will also be broadcast simultaneously on www.facebook.com/QAHNCanada/ 

A summary of the lecture is as follows:  The 1959 opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway as “the world’s longest inland deep draft marine highway” forever changed Quebec’s geographic, economic, and political landscapes. It was one of the great engineering projects of the 20th century, displacing more than twice as much earth as the building of the Suez Canal did a century before. But the Seaway was not just a post-war initiative. Inter-governmental discussions for the “St. Lawrence Waterway Project” dated back as far as the 1890s. The desire to access the interior of the North American continent with ocean-going vessels started centuries earlier. In 1689 François Dollier de Casson, a Sulpician priest, was the first to start digging to circumvent the Lachine Rapids. With a focus on both geography and biography, this tale will be told through the diverse and driven personalities who worked to reshape the rivers and lakes of Quebec and beyond for navigation.