Canadian Coast Guard
<% else %>A History of the Canadian Coast Guard and Marine Services
by Thomas E. Appleton
Headquarters
The Hunter Building stands on O'Connor Street in Ottawa, a busy and cheerful thoroughfare, in a mixture of modern offices and older property where glacial cliffs of glass and aluminium contrast with Edwardian exteriors. These islands of the old leisurely Canada, housing at one time the prosperous and the near great, survive to harbour succeeding waves of shopkeepers and professionals until their graduation to better quarters before the dust and rumble of inevitable demolition. But the old Hunter Building stands aloof from the passage of time with an air of Olympian detachment. The entrance is guarded by massive pillars, set inconveniently close, which hardly prepare one for the stiffest swing doors in the capital, defying the efforts of all but the most devoted civil servants to gain admission to their daily toil.
One pushes through the entrance hall, surrounded by slabs of that singularly unattractive marble reminiscent of ancient railway stations in their more intimate recesses, to be confronted by two baroque elevators, one of which is usually in working order; an enormous notice board proclaims the style and title of the principal inhabitants, beginning with the Minister of Transport and ending with the nurse in charge of the health unit. Throughout the building, a peripheral scheme of gloomy corridors gives access to individual offices which house the headquarters staff of Marine Services, each with its varnished door and fanlight, reminiscent of the high schools of an older day.
Despite these first impressions, or due perhaps to familiarity of environment, the Hunter Building inspires a certain cosy affection on the part of its devotees, quite unrelated to their professional attachment to the central organism of one of the world's larger government marine enterprises. One can imagine a more direct pull on the emotions and loyalties of a sea administration; gilt portraits looking down, heroic figures no doubt, or models of splendid ships, a sledge runner from the farthest north perhaps, faded colours encased in glory, or at least uniformed figures bustling to and fro to lend a superficial air of briskness to an office world. Here such things are muted, not from lack of heroic figures or splendid ships but because, in the course of our growth from tangled roots to the tree of nationhood, the work of the department and its antecedents has been achieved by practical men to whom the day's work has been more obviously important than the telling.
In remedying this deficiency, the historian is faced with a difficult task of presentation; some three hundred years have no elapsed since the great intendant of New France committed the public purse to a Canadian marine purpose and, as governments changed or became established by evolution, unification, confederation and the normal process of democracy, shipping waxed or waned in response to the rise and fall of economic, political and social changes in the life of the country. It is not enough, therefore, to relate merely the actions of government in the field of shipping; all government actions are in faction reactions which, for their proper understanding, demand a knowledge of applied forces and the background against which they become apparent.
Marine history is coloured by the peculiar nature of the shipping industry, a mixture of conservative thought, inevitable after generations of experience in wresting a living from the unpromising sea, with a continuing process of trial and selection of some of the most advanced techniques known to modern business and technology. Like the country itself, governed partly by parliamentary statue but influenced also by a complicated structure of precedent and pragmatism, shipping is regulated by an act of parliament designed originally for an age in which the ship owner was the entrepreneur of the transportation world, the shipmaster his confidant and business manager, and the seaman a transient labourer to be protected alike from the most unscrupulous of his employers and the manifold temptations of his gypsy life. Today, the ship owner may well be the marine division of an industrial empire, the master too often a hard driven ship operator, and the crew a diminishing number of semi-skilled employees teetering on the brink of automation all are influenced by powerful unions.
The Canada Shipping Act is the undoubted and proper authority for government involvement in marine affairs, but the play and counter play of supply and demand, of industrial negotiation, of climate and natural phenomena temper that authority in the light of prevailing conditions. By the some token, we cannot remain aloof from the broad stream of international co-operation which, in shipping, transcends the bounds of race and ideology to form a pattern which might well serve as an example to the political negotiators of this troubled world. Government action is adjusted to these stimulations and, if you will search the Canada Shipping Act in vain for mention of employees' unions, it is hardly likely that a seaman will be mulcted one day's pay for failure to attend divine service on Sundays, as provided in the Act.
The Act itself, the bible of government shipping administrators, is something of a hotchpotch, typical of the Canada from which we are now emerging, combining modern technology, remnants from the social reforms of the Victorian era, and older legislation from which the curious may detect faint whiffs of far-off days. Genealogy may be traced through the Merchant Shipping Acts of the golden age of British shipping, some hundred years ago, to the long series of navigation acts which governed colonial trade in the eighteenth century, excited the passions of revolutionary America, and inflamed the heat of the seeming endless struggle between England and France whish was to cool and solidify as the new metal of Canada.
In Ottawa today, the regulation of shipping, in the narrow sense, forms only a part of the work of marine services headquarters, and an extensive field organization renders a basic support which only government ca provide. There are five branches dealing with public matters in the marine world, these being Operations, Works, Regulations, Shipbuilding, and Hydraulics. The title of 'Canadian Coast Guard' was introduced in 1962 and, in the strict division of responsibility in the framework of the Department of Transport, applies only to the Directorate of Marine Operations. However, in the broad sense, the cap fits all, for these directorates are the guardians of our marine heritage whether they operate Coast Guard ships, provide the aids to navigation and canals, administer the legislation of parliament, design and supervise the building of government ships, or study and conserve the natural forces which contain the biggest inland water system in the world.
Like the Act which it administers, the Department of Transport is a child of parents with a long and honourable family tree; as a newly constituted department of government, it came to life in 1936 to co-ordinate, among other matters, dome of the maritime affairs of the old Departments of Marine and Fisheries, and Railways and Canals, respectively. These two departments, whose activities had been intertwined after the coming of the federal government in 1876, could look back on a fascinating lineage of Upper and Lower Canada, the governments of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the British colonial administration, and eventually the government of New France itself. There is, then, a story to tell; its genesis lies on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
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