a group for study. By the early 1920s, both The Wooten-Bowden Report and the International Joint Commission recommended the project. Although the Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was reluctant to proceed, in part because of opposition to the project in Quebec, in 1932 he and the U.S. representative signed a treaty of intent. This treaty was submitted to the U.S. Senate in November 1932 and hearings continued until a vote was taken on March 14, 1934. The majority voted in favor of the treaty, but it failed to gain the necessary two-thirds vote for ratification. Later attempts between the governments in the 1930s to forge an agreement came to naught due to opposition by the Ontario government of Mitchell Hepburn and the government of Quebec. In 1936, John C. Beukema, head of the Great Lakes Harbors Association and a member of the Great Lakes Tidewater Commission, was among a delegation of eight from the Great Lakes states to meet at the White House with US President Franklin D. Roosevelt to obtain his support for the seaway concept. Beukema and St. Lawrence Seaway proponents were convinced a nautical link would lead to the development of the communities and economies of the Great Lakes region by permitting the passage of oceangoing ships. In this period, exports of grain, along with other commodities, to Europe were an important part of the national economy. Negotiations on the treaty resumed in 1938, and by January 1940 substantial agreement was reached between Canada and the United States. By 1941, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Mackenzie King made an executive agreement to build the joint hydro and navigation works, but this failed to receive the assent of the U.S. Congress. Proposals for the seaway were met with resistance; the primary opposition came from interests representing harbors on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and internal waterways and from the railroad associations. The railroads carried freight and goods between the coastal ports and the Great Lakes cities. After 1945, proposals to introduce tolls to the seaway were not sufficient to gain support for the project by the U.S. Congress. Growing impatient, and with Ontario desperate for the power to be generated by hydroelectricity, Canada began to consider developing the project alone. This seized the imagination of Canadians, engendering a groundswell of nationalism around the St. Lawrence. Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent advised U.S. President Harry S.