Fixing Niagara Falls

Since the late nineteenth century, Niagara Falls has been heavily engineered to generate energy behind a flowing façade designed to appeal to tourists. Fixing Niagara Falls reveals the technological feats and cross-border politics that facilitated the transformation of one of the most important natural sites in North America. Daniel Macfarlane shows how this natural wonder is essentially a tap: huge tunnels around the reconfigured Falls channel the waters of the Niagara River, which ebb and flow according to the tourism calendar. This book offers a unique interdisciplinary and transborder perspective on how the Niagara landscape embodies the power of technology and nature.

"Since the late nineteenth century, Niagara Falls has been heavily engineered to generate energy behind a flowing facade designed to appeal to tourists. "Fixing Niagara Falls" reveals the technological feats and cross-border politics that facilitated the transformation of one of the most important natural sites in North America. Daniel Macfarlane shows how this natural wonder is essentially a tap: huge tunnels around the reconfigured falls channel the waters of the Niagara River, which ebb and flow according to the tourism calendar. This book offers a unique interdisciplinary and transborder perspective on how the Niagara landscape embodies the power of technology and nature."--

As the sustainability of our natural resources is increasingly questioned, Canadians remain stubbornly convinced of the unassailability of our water. Mounting evidence suggests, however, that Canadian water is under threat. Eau Canada assembles the country's top water experts to discuss our most pressing water issues. Perspectives from a broad range of thinkers � geographers, environmental lawyers, former government officials, aquatic and political scientists, and economists � reflect the diversity of concerns in water management. Arguing that weak governance is at the heart of Canada's water problems, this timely book identifies our key failings, explores debates over jurisdiction, transboundary waters, exports, and privatization, and maps out solutions for protecting our most important resource.

Winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction Canada Reads Selection (CBC), 2013 A landmark of nationalist fiction, Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes is the story of two peoples within one nation, each with its own legend and ideas of what a nation should be. In his vivid portrayals of human drama in First World War–era Quebec, MacLennan focuses on two individuals whose love increases the prejudices that surround them until they discover that “love consists in this, that two solitudes protect, and touch and greet each other.” The novel centres around Paul Tallard and his struggles in reconciling the differences between the English identity of his love Heather Methuen and her family, and the French identity of his father. Against this backdrop the country is forming, the chasm between French and English communities growing deeper. Published in 1945, the novel popularized the use of “two solitudes” as referring to a perceived lack of communication between English- and French-speaking Canadians. Content note: This book contains racial slurs that readers may find offensive or upsetting.

For four centuries, dykes turned salt marsh into arable land in the Bay of Fundy region of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. But by the 1940s, the aging dykes were in poor repair. Against the Tides is the never-before-told story of the Maritime Marshland Rehabilitation Administration, a federal agency created in 1948 to reshape the landscape. Agency engineers sometimes borrowed from long-standing dykeland practices, but they also disregarded local conditions in building tidal dams that compromised some of the region’s rivers. This vivid account of a distinctive landscape and its occupants reveals the push–pull of local and expert knowledge and the role of the postwar state.

It was a megaproject half a century in the making -- a technological and engineering marvel that stands as one of the most ambitious borderlands undertakings ever embarked upon by two countries. The planning and building of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project is one of the defining episodes in North American history. The project began with transnational negotiations that spanned two world wars and the formative years of the Cold War and included a failed attempt to construct an all-Canadian seaway, which was scuttled by US national security fears. Once an agreement was reached, the massive engineering and construction operation began, as did the efforts to move people and infrastructure away from the thousands of acres of land that would soon be flooded. Negotiating a River looks at the profound impacts of this megaproject, from the complex diplomatic negotiations, political manoeuvring, and environmental diplomacy to the implications on national identities and transnational relations.

Joined by award-winning Mexican journalist Luis Nájera, leading organized-crime author Peter Edwards introduces a motley assortment of millennial bikers, gangsters and Mafia whose bloody trail of murders and schemes gone wrong led to the arrival in Canada of the world's most dangerous criminal organizations: the drug cartels of Mexico. A man watching the Euro Cup on a restaurant patio is shot dead on a busy Sunday afternoon in Toronto. Another dies in a sidewalk ambush just outside a bus-tling college campus. Two men in a Vancouver hotel lobby are gunned down in an attack that sends an American soccer star scrambling for cover. In Mexico, a Canadian is killed at a Nuevo Vallarta coffee shop, his death barely registering amidst the terrifying death tolls of President Calderón’s war on drugs and the cartels’ response; while a Montreal cop is beaten within an inch of his life in a Playa del Carmen nightclub. An infamous heckler from an NBA Toronto Raptors game turns up dead in a bullet-riddled car in a midtown lane-way. Throughout the 2010s, these and other disparate acts of violence entered the public awareness like iso-lated tragedies—but there was nothing isolated about them. In this masterly investigation, veteran journalists Peter Edwards and Luis Nájera introduce readers to the common cause of a near-decade of chaos. Meet the Wolfpack, millennial-aged gangsters from across the spectrum of Canada’s underworld. Vying to fast-track their way into the criminal void left by the death of Montreal godfather Vito Rizzuto, the Wolfpack sought advantage in a steady supply of cocaine from El Chapo Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel, among the deadliest and most far-reaching of criminal organizations. The juniors had just stepped into the big leagues. This is the roiling landscape of The Wolfpack, a brilliant examination of a time of criminal disruption and rapid adaptation, when one gang’s unchecked ambition unwittingly gave away the most hotly contested corner of the Canadian underworld without a fight. Brazen criminal disruptors or entitled upstarts looking to get rich without paying their dues--whatever you think of them, you will never forget the Wolfpack.