Canadian Coast Guard

Canals

In the high days of the Canadian fur trade and the great canoes with their singing voyageurs, the bales of fur were essentially a luxury commodity with high value in relation to their bulk. Labour was cheap and continual transhipment portages and delays were the normal overhead of forwarding goods by packstrap and paddle. The vehicle which alone made the system possible, the birch-bark canoe, had evolved into the most marvellous light draft portable carrier in history before the advent of the scientifically designed inflatable boat. Now the country was changing, by immigration and settlement, from a frontier land towards a more settled agricultural and trading community. The produce of the old provinces, and the grains and feeds vital to the support of rural communities, had now to be exchanged for the manufactured articles of small towns and a growing importation from the industrial revolution of Europe. The tonnages far exceeded the maximum which could be moved by the laborious methods of old; packhorse, bateau and canoe were too small, and there were virtually no roads for heavy wagons. The answer lay in natures own roads, the waters of countless lakes and rivers which, by skilful digging of culverts and canals at strategic points, could be joined to traverse the entire settled areas of the country.

The classic route to the Northwest, through Ottawa River and Lake Nipissing to Georgian Bay, had reached a half in development, and men now looked to the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. As events turned out, Canada was to face serious competition in the realization of this imaginative idea. In 1825 the Americans opened the Erie Canal and, for the first time, the merchants and farmers of the upper lakes could barge their products to New York and beyond by way of the Mohawk and the Hudson.

If the pace of Canadian canal development had been slower than was desirable in face of this United States initiative, the period of gestation itself had been undeniably long and subject to some disorders. The first contract for construction of a Canadian canal had been awarded in 1700, when a canoe waterway and millstream was dug which enabled the Montreal flotillas to reach the Ottawa and the Northwest by way of Lachine. Little more was done until 1815 when the exigencies of war provided their customary stimulus to schemes previously considered uneconomic, and the Lachine canal project was given serious thought; unfortunately it collapsed with the coming of peace and tight money. A contribution from the Imperial Government quickened the idea and the Lachine canal was opened in 1825 with locks of 100 feet in length.

There had been various small canals above Lachine, built in the eighteenth century to by-pass the Cascades but, although these were the germs of the St. Lawrence system, real progress was not achieved until the opening of the Cornwall in 1843 and the Beauharnois in 1845. Compared to the Erie Canal, which was shallow and presented no great engineering difficulties, the rapids which the St. Lawrence system was designed to avoid were serious obstacles. Worst of all, the Niagara Peninsula, at the far end of Lake Ontario, required a portage of some eleven miles to overcome an abrupt change in level to Lake Erie.

The economic progress of Canadian canals was also affected by the military strategy of the Imperial Government which, until the gradual subsidence of nervousness about the American border, was influential in the sequence of events. The Rideau system, for example, which provided a more easily defendable route to Upper Canada, well back from the St. Lawrence, had been completed and was in use by 1832. In the case of the Welland canal, it had been advanced by strategists after the 1812 war that a connecting link with Lake Erie would avoid the necessity of a naval squadron there additional to the one in Lake Ontario. Despite the conclusion of the Rush Bagot Treaty in 1817, it is possible that some such view accelerated the pace of economic consideration, for the first Welland canal was opened in 1829.

Perhaps, in our present day enthusiasm for the marvels of the St. Lawrence Seaway, and a tardy realization of the technical accomplishment and romantic history of the Rideau canal, we have tended to lose sight of the struggles associated with the early Welland. It lay in country which was far from the lush pastures of the hub of Upper Canada and, as it was completed before the St. Lawrence route was opened, traffic was American rather than Canadian; it was in this period that the ports of Cleveland on Lake Erie, and Oswego on Lake Ontario, reaped the early benefits of through navigation. The Welland canal was not deep and it handled rafts more easily than ships; there were, as yet, no specialized lake ships designed for the prevailing conditions. This was to come in the ensuing two decades, when the typical lake schooner with a flattish bottom, centreboard, short bowsprit and all her gear inboard, would start the path of development and design which would eventually lead to the marvels of modern inland shipping. More praise then to the foresighted men who started these great ventures. The Welland was financed by Upper Canada, Lower Canada, and the Imperial Government; alone among the Canadian canals it also attracted American venture capital at a crucial stage of financing.

When the schooners Ann & June and R. H. Broughton passed through the Welland canal in November 1829, navigation to the Lakehead was impeded by the difference in level between Lake Huron and Lake Superior, a matter of some eighteen feet, and the complications of the Sault. The old Northwest Fur Company had cut a canal there in 1797, with a lock to lift part way, but the upper lift was negotiated by dragging their bateaux, by means of ox teams, over a further sluice-way. The lock is believed to have been the first in North America. The Sault was eventually overcome by the Americans in a scheme approved by Congress in 1852. It places the evolution of history in a proper perspective to reflect on a remark of Henry Clay in this connection: he said "it is a work beyond the remotest settlement of the United States, if not the moon". How soon are mans predictions confounded.

Development of the lower canals had produced, by 1848, a Canadian waterway which, for the first time, surpassed the potential of the Erie Canal as the main outlet for the trade of the Great Lakes basin. The canal route to New York would eventually decline in importance, and even the attractions of that great port could no longer impede the development of Montreal, which would become the premier port in Canada as well as a stage between tidewater and Lake Huron. These canals of 1848, although of only nine feet in depth, marked a notable stage in our economic progress at a time when Canada was still scattered, thinly populated, and very limited. Many of the settlers had come, in one way or another, as a result of the wars between Britain, France or the United States, and could remember them clearly. It was only thirty-six years since the 1812 war had started, the year which saw Napoleon drag the Grande Armée from the gates of Moscow. Already, that must have seemed a bygone age and, looking forward, who could have imagined that another nineteen years would see the Confederation of Canada and that, well within a lifetime, the great canals of Suez and Panama would re-route the shipping of the entire world. In 1855, when the Americans completed the lock at the Sault, the shape of modern Canada had begun to emerge.

From 1841, when Upper and Lower Canada united, the Department of Public Works was responsible for most of this development. Two chief engineers of the Board of Works held appointments in this time. Samuel Keefer until 1853, and John Page thereafter. Samuel Keefer was earlier connected with the story, for his father had been closely associated with William H. Merrit who largely promoted the Welland canal. Later he became Deputy Commissioner of Public Works and erected the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa before retiring to private practice and building the Niagara suspension bridge. In much of the canal work Samuel was assisted by his half-brother Thomas, a very distinguished hydraulic engineer.