Emphasizing the role that vivid personalities – including engineers John Laing Weller and Alex Grant as well as contractors and labourers – played in the construction of the canal, Roberta Styran and Robert Taylor use archival sources, government documents, newspapers, maps, and original plans to describe a saga of technological, financial, geographical, and social obstacles met and overcome in an accomplishment akin to the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. A story of Canadian skill, courage, vision, and hardship, This Colossal Project details the twenty-year excavation of the giant channel and the creation of huge concrete locks amidst war, the Great Depression, political change, and labour unrest.

Cecilia Chen is a senior architect in Montreal.

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Janine MacLeod is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University.

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Astrida Neimanis is Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.

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"A remarkable edited and interdisciplinary collection of strong stories, critical essays, art installations, and poetry that destabilize, defamiliarize, and seek to rechart dominant ways of thinking about water." Resilience

"This volume is varied and engaging on numerous levels, balancing well the different types of contributions of art, poetry, and scholarship. The diversity in the contributors’ backgrounds adds to the richness and distinctiveness of the volume as a whole...[and] suggests the importance of interdisciplinarity when approaching a subject as broad and fundamental as water." The Goose

"A richly interconnected, interdisciplinary account of how diverse human cultures have valued and devalued, and lived with and against, the bodies of water that surround, course through and sustain them." Green Letters