Canadian Coast Guard
<% else %>A History of the Canadian Coast Guard and Marine Services
by Thomas E. Appleton
Railways and Canals
On May 20, 1879, the Department of Railways and Canals came into being under the charge of the Hon. Charles Tupper who as premier of Nova Scotia, and one of the Fathers of Confederation, had led his Province into the Dominion of Canada. He became Minister of Works in the Dominion Government in 1878 prior to the division of that Department into the two portfolios of Works, and Railways and Canals, respectively. Later to be raised to the baronetcy, he would become Prime Minister of Canada for a period in 1896, and his second son, Sir Charles Hibbert Tupper, would be Minister of Marine and Fisheries from 1888 to 1894.
In making this separation of responsibilities, the government recognized a broad and rapidly growing divergence between the old assets of roads, bridges and buildings, and the coming business of transportation, essential to the new Canada, which now required a fresh approach. In the years succeeding Confederation, the vision of A Mari Usque ad mare was closely connected with completion of the trans-continental railway, and the main task of the new Department was to administer the legislative action of government, and to supervise the arrangements for construction of the Canadian Pacific line, which would be completed with the driving of the last spike at Craigellachie in 1885. At the same time, the canal system of the country was a highway in itself and, if somewhat behind the iron road in the economic priorities of the day, it was the means of carrying the growing traffic of the Great Lakes basin as, with the help of the railways yet to come, it would be for the wheat lands of the West.
We have seen how, by 1848, a chain of good canals, in the terms of pre-Confederation Canada, provided a channel from Lake Erie to the sea and how, by completion of the American works at the Sault in 1855, the waterway had been extended to the Lakehead. Now, however, the combination of water and rail, coalescing naturally from two transport systems to be developed greatly in the ensuing years, would become the roadbed of the national economy until it, in turn, was influenced by the advent of the air age.
By railway and canal the pattern of Canadian life was changed from that of a pioneer half continent, isolated by distance and the crippling limitations of climate, to a continuous production economy able to support the nation by the export of natural products from field, forest and mine. For the first time also, the settlers and ordinary travellers of the country could move at will, and ornate passenger steamers and comfortable railway cars, aided by the magic of the humming telegraph wires which lined the railway tracks from coast to coast, would replace the legends of the trapper and prospector with the lore of the railroader and canaller. When the airplane did materialize, it placed the movement of people in yet another amalgam of transport and, in the world of government, a family reunion between canals, shipping and air would lead to the formation of the greatest Department in the history of Canadian civil administration.
The canal task was one of enlargement; although the 1848 canals were a great step forward as a means of connecting the various lakes and rivers, their potential as an inland route from the sea was barely tapped. With a depth of only nine feet in the locks from Montreal to the Lakehead, the smallest ships could make the through passage, but it was virtually impossible to build ocean going vessels of such limited draft. The American locks at the Sault could take eleven and a half feet, and a pattern of development began to form, in response to the appetite of the steel producers on the American side of Lake Erie, by which intercommunication for ore carriers between the upper Lakes was in advance of the connections to the sea by way of the St. Lawrence canals. By the existing bottleneck, shipping on the Great Lakes separated very early into two types of vessel, those which could get out, and those unable to do so. This was certainly one stage better than not being able to get out at all, and a transhipment business began to flourish; in pre-Confederation days all ships were much smaller than they are today, and the differences in the two types were not as marked as they would later become.
By the time that the Department of Railways and Canals took over, the process of expansion had already started. The original Welland canal, which had opened the short route by way of Chippewa Creek in 1829, had long since disappeared. Financed in part from private sources, and partly from government
loans and grants of land, it had been unable to cope with the cost of enlargement and, at the time of the Union of 1841, the Legislature of Upper Canada had passed an act authorizing the transfer of the canal to public responsibility in return for an appropriate settlement. By 1887 the Welland Canal had been altered out of all recognition, and a depth of fourteen feet had been achieved.
Meanwhile the situation at the Sault had changed considerably. The Americans built a second lock in 1887 with a depth of seventeen feet. By this time, because of increased upper Lakes traffic, and in order to complete the chain of canals so that ships could navigate from the Atlantic to the Lakehead without leaving Canadian waters, it had been decided to cut a lock on the Canadian side, which was constructed through the Island of Ste. Marie and opened in 1895. The Canadian Sault was ahead of the times with a lock nine hundred feet long having a depth of eighteen feet over the sill. The full potential of this new lock was limited for some years by shallows in the natural channels of St. Mary's River.
The Canadian Lock at Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. 1895
(Notman Archives)
The problem now was to open the lower canals to match. By 1904 the Lachine and the connecting St. Lawrence canals were deepened to fourteen feet, and could take ships up to two hundred and fifty feet long. At that time the magic figure of fourteen feet was still the maximum for the Welland which was unable to handle the ships of hitherto unprecedented size which could pass the Sault. Now it was that the great division between canallers which could tranship grain to Montreal and the overseas loading berths, and the upper lakes of increasingly large size, which were entirely restricted to inland waters, came into being as a division of types. Looking back, we think of the canallers as small ships, which indeed they were, but they were the key to the situation for many years, and they were a great improvement on the first canallers, insignificant little vessels of nine feet draft, which preceded them. The change from nine to fourteen feet was a significant one, and the big lock at the Canadian Sault, wonderful at the time, could take one laker and two canallers of average dimensions in line ahead.
In 1913, the game of leapfrog passed back to the Welland, where a scheme was under preparation to raise it to the standard of the Sault. The improved Welland Ship canal, running from Port Colborne to Port Weller, suffered many interruptions before it was able to pass the first ships at the close of the navigation season in 1930, and before the official opening in 1932. This time the design called for a capacity to handle ships of seven hundred feet long, seventy-five feet beam, and a draft of twenty-three
and a half feet, although it was some time after the opening until the full capacity could be realised. With this enlargement, the biggest class of ship then employed in inland trading could pass from Lake Superior to Lake Ontario, and the possibility of eventual passage to the sea became a step nearer. This dream, for such it was for many years, had been simmering, with small hopes of realization, since the days of the nine-foot canals of 1848. The depression of the nineteen thirties when all Canada lay inert under a blanket of enforced ennui, and the second world war when the muscles of the sleeping giant were awakened to flex at full strength in other causes, were to pass before the dream would become a reality.
When the Welland canal of 1932 had been completed, Canada had spent some three hundred million dollars on the water route from Quebec City to the Sault, including expenditure on the St. Lawrence ship channel to the port of Montreal; during this time successive commissions, jointly representing Canada and the United States, had been dickering with the question of a seaway since 1895. Nothing much came of the early discussions until, in 1909, the International Joint Commission was formed, by treaty, to deal with boundary matters between the two countries. In 1920, the International Joint Commission appointed Mr. W. A. Bowden, Chief Engineer of the Department of Railways and Canals, and Colonel W. P. Wooten of the United States Corps of Engineers, to:
". . . . . take charge of the survey of the St. Lawrence River, Montreal to Lake Ontario, for the purpose of preparing plans and estimates for its further improvement to make the same navigable for deep-draft vessels of either the lake or ocean-going type, and to obtain the greatest beneficial use from these waters."
Of all the works so far, none were more imaginative in concept, for not only would this open the heart of North America to the sea trades of the world but, for the first time, that simple phrase "greatest beneficial use" included, not only the benefits of navigation, but the harnessing of power on a scale hitherto impossible.
W. A. Bowden is remembered for his part in the first serious engineering study of the St. Lawrence Seaway, and he brought to this crowning achievement many years of experience in the design, construction and operation of the public works of Canada. Born in 1872 at Melbourne, Que., he was a McGill graduate in civil engineering and, by the time he was appointed as design engineer of Railways and Canals in 1910, he had had many years of experience with private firms in the construction of railroads and associated schemes. Apart from the design work of the Welland ship canal, which he would not see come to fruition, he built the Hudson Bay Railway, the Prince Edward Island car ferry terminus, and the grain elevator at Port Colborne. He died in 1924. Today, the part played by the Department of Railways and Canals in preparation for the Seaway is largely forgotten in the speed and brilliance of subsequent construction, and we should treasure the efforts of public servants of an earlier day, such as Bowden, who gave of their professional dedication in the groundwork of far reaching engineering schemes, often with few of the resources and little of the incidental technical support which would now be available. The Hon. Lionel Chevrier, Minister of Transport from 1945 to 1954 and the first President of the St. Lawrence Seaway Authority (from 1954 to 1957), writes of Bowden, and of his colleague Colonel Wooten, that their report "was a masterpiece of its kind, a report of monumental detail and meticulous accuracy."
Many studies were to follow the work of Wooden and Bowden, and many official and informal discussions were to take place between Canada and the United States before, in 1951, two bills were placed before Parliament. The first was An Act respecting the Construction of Works for the generation of Electric Power in the International Section of the St. Lawrence River, while the second bill was to become the St. Lawrence Seaway Act. These bills received assent in December 1951 and January 1952 respectively. The progress of events now reaches outside the story of the Marine Services of the Department of Transport and, with the formation of the St. Lawrence Seaway Authority, Canadian participation, with the overall co-ordination of the International Joint Commission, passed from the hands of departments of government to those of a specially constituted crown company. It had been a little over a hundred years from the completion of the nine-foot canals, about fifty from the advent of the fourteen-foot draft canallers, and the crowning work of all, completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway, would be carried out and in operation within four years of commencement.
Although the story of the St. Lawrence route, and the eventual opening of the Seaway, lies at the heart of the economic development of Canada, it is far from being the only theme in the composition of canal history. Brief reference has been made already to the Rideau canal, the main link in the Montreal, Ottawa and Kingston route to the Lakes, which was built after the war of 1812 to provide a safe line of supply, well back from the frontier, between Lower Canada and the growing settlements of the Upper Province. The Rideau is the principal work of the group known as the Ordnance or Military canals, so named because they were constructed by the Royal Engineers, and were maintained by the Ordnance Department of the Imperial Government until transfer to the Provincial Department of Public Works, by Order in Council, in 1857.
The Ordnance canals originally comprised the Carillon, Chute a Blondeau and Grenville, as well as the Rideau canal. Today the system has been simplified somewhat, and a new Carillon canal replaces the old Carillon and Grenville, the connection between the Ottawa River and Lake St. Louis being made by the Ste. Anne canal, first opened in 1816.
The Rideau canal was built between 1826 and 1832, under the direction of a sapper officer, Lieutenant Colonel John By; not only did he supervise construction and much of the design work, he also arranged for contract and direct labour. The scheme involved technical difficulties in the construction of high dams, which were necessary to retain the waters of the Rideau and Cataraqui rivers and to avoid an excess of expensive excavation which would otherwise have been required. By solved these difficulties in an imaginative manner, the dam at Hogs Back and the retaining barrier of what is now named Colonel By Drive remaining as a testimonial to his professional ability. Before the coming of the great canals at Suez and Panama, and indeed the Seaway itself, construction of the Rideau ranked among the more ambitious civil engineering schemes in history. It is related that one of the engineers employed on the Rideau canal, a Scotsman called MacTaggart, went to have a look at the first Welland canal, then under construction by another early canal builder, William H. Merritt, which was characterized by timber sided locks. Comparing these unfavourably with the fitted stonework of the Rideau masonry, MacTaggart is said to have given the opinion that they would be swept away in the spring freshet like a lot of birdcages. The conditions in the two canals were very different and, if Merritt had fewer engineering problems to contend with, he also had greater financial difficulties and much less in the way of skilled men, and the Welland, by re-building and rerouting, was eventually conquered by different methods. However, to the credit of the Rideau, let it be said that, with generations of care and attention, the stonework of the locks is a monument to Colonel By and his masons. The Rideau route is one of the glories of rural Canada.
Although the Ordnance canals carried a steady traffic in lumber and produce for the first few decades of their existence, the ending of American tensions and the opening of the railway between Montreal and Kingston eventually negated the purpose for which they had been built, and, by the time that the Department of Railways and Canals took over, they were beginning to lose their original importance. Today, the Rideau route has gained a new and growing position of eminence as a tourist attraction.
Another of the classic routes of communication, around which much of our early history is centred, runs by way of the Richelieu River and Lake Champlain, and connects Montreal with the American canals leading by the Hudson River to the port of New York. While the original policy of the Rideau was motivated by reason of defence, the Champlain route, so often the side door for hostile expeditions against Canada, was the focus of peaceful purposes remarkably soon after the cessation of the war of 1812. The Parliament of Lower Canada passed a bill in 1818, by which they granted rights to a company proposing to build a canal connecting Lake Champlain and the Chambly basin. However, the financing of this scheme was beyond the capacity of the company to undertake and, after numerous delays, a start was made when the Board of Works of the United Provinces of Canada took over, completing the Chambly canal in 1843, and the lock and dam at St. Ours, in 1849. On the American side, the Champlain canal was started by the State of New York in 1817, and finished to a depth of four and a half feet in 1822. The St. Ours canal, originally built to a depth of six and a half feet, was deepened to twelve feet in 1932.
From the earliest days of settlement in Upper Canada, the pioneers had looked to a connection between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron, by way of the Trent River, Lake Simcoe and the River Severn. This was the route followed by Champlain when he discovered Lake Ontario, and had often been used in the intervening years by parties of Iroquois when raiding the Hurons. The Trent canal, a series of rivers and lakes interconnected by means of dams, locks, artificial channels and marine railways, was constructed in stages between 1833 and 1918, originally as a steamboat connection to the small settlements en route, and to handle the extensive lumbering business which once flourished there. With the depletion of the forests by the ravenous appetite of the steam sawmill, the Trent system became a freight carrying waterway until the nineteen thirties, by which time the advent of better roads and motor transport again changed the pattern and, as was the case with the Rideau, opened up a hitherto unrealized recreational prospect. One of the ingenious features of the Trent system is the twin lift lock at Peterborough, the largest of its kind in the world. W. A. Bowden, who later surveyed the Seaway route, designed much of the Trent canal.
Although the Trent canal opens into the sheltered waters of the Bay of Quinte, vessels bound to or from Lake Ontario had to round the promontory of Prince Edward County which, in the days of sailing schooners, would often involve a long and tiresome beat to windward. A short cut across the narrow Murray Isthmus had been provided in early days when the pioneers hauled small craft across by teams of oxen, and indeed the site had been surveyed for a projected canal as early as 1797, but nothing came of it. In 1882 the Department of Railways and Canals commenced the construction of a straight cut, just over five miles in length, which could take ships up to nine feet in draft. The Murray canal is without locks and runs in a straight line interrupted only by swing bridges. It was opened in 1889.
One further canal, that connecting the Atlantic Ocean and the Bras d'Or Lakes, was greatly improved by the Department of Railways and Canals. The St. Peters canal, in Cape Breton Island, was first built in 1854 to provide a protected passage from Sydney to the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia. The original works were designed to take vessels of thirteen feet draft but were deepened to eighteen feet between 1875 and 1881. In 1917 the lock was lengthened to three hundred feet and was big enough to prove of great benefit during the second world war.
In 1936 the Department of Railways and Canals came to an end. In the fifty-seven years of its existence it had opened the navigation of the Upper Lakes to modern standards, deepened the St. Lawrence Canals to fourteen feet and, by the work of Bowden and his associates, prepared the way for the construction of the Seaway which, by then, was simply a matter of time. In the nineteen thirties it was difficult to foresee the eventual economic pattern of the Seaway, particularly the use of electrical power in the depressed state of industry at the time. Bowden had concluded that a potential of four million horsepower could be realized as a by-product of the navigational advantages, but he warned that:
"the development of such a vast quantity of power is not an economic procedure, as a market to take this output is not now in existence, and cannot be expected to spring into being at once."
Today, the industrial progress of the country has been such that, even with an estimated potential of twenty-five to thirty million horsepower from all the waters of the St. Lawrence basin and their tributaries, Canada is now entering the age of generation of power from nuclear energy. As with other forms of natural resources, such as timber, which was once considered limitless, conservationists now point out that even in this great country there is a limit.
The Department, originally headed by the Hon. Sir Charles Tupper in 1879, had come under the successive control of distinguished ministers, including the Rt. Hon. Sir John A. Macdonald (1889-1891), and the Hon. C. D. Howe (1935-36). It was the latter who would carry the portfolio of Railways and Canals to a new administration in Canada, the Department of Transport.
The West Block
Headquarters of the Department of Marine and Fisheries in Ottawa from 1868-1919.
(Notman Archives)
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