A fresh look at a young country

In Building Canada, historian and storyteller Jonathan Vance takes an imaginative look at the architecture, transportation, and icons that made Canada what it is today. Filled with unusual stories and fascinating characters, Building Canada brings to life important but overlooked episodes in this country’s growth and shows how major building projects such as the Trans-Canada Highway, rural electrification, and the Centennial performing arts centres helped foster a strong and unique national identity.

Original and engaging, Vance’s story of twelve far-reaching projects that helped build the Canada we know will bring a whole new appreciation of the infrastructure that has shaped the nation’s life, culture, and identity.

Handshakes Across the Water

Almost every transportation project undertaken in this country has had to deal with the fact that Canada has an awful lot of water. Indeed, crossing the countless rivers, streams, creeks, and lakes that make up nearly a sixth of some provinces’ surface area proved to be one of the biggest challenges in transportation. Settlers tended to follow the waterways and established fledgling communities along rivers and streams. But settlement was rarely confined to one bank of a waterway, and as communities grew, the split became more problematic; the very waterways that provided the only access to the interior often separated two communities on opposite sides of a river.

This was certainly the case with Quebec City, separated from the growing town of Lévis, on the south shore, by the St. Lawrence River, and Montreal, which sat on an island in the middle of the river. Boats of all shapes and sizes crossed regularly in the summer, but winter made the trip much more perilous. Passengers sat or lay in the bottom of an immense dugout canoe, which was pushed out into the river by ten or twelve paddlers. They looked for open water, zigzagging or circling around when ice blocked the path. If there was no way past, all of the men got out and hauled the canoe to the next patch of water. It could take hours to cross the river, and travellers rarely landed exactly where they wanted to on the opposite shore. It was such an ordeal that contemporary accounts tell of passengers who died of fright during the crossing.

Canada’s first major bridge project, however, had more to do with politics than the safety of residents. In the early nineteenth century, Upper and Lower Canada were entirely separated by the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers—without a fixed link, could there be any prospect for unity between the Canadas? In May 1824, the surveyor-general of Lower Canada, Joseph Bouchette, toured the colony and returned to Quebec with a recommendation that a bridge be constructed across the Ottawa River. The importance of such a project, he reported, could scarcely be overstated: “[T]he communication between this Province and Upper-Canada would, thereby, become uninterrupted, certain, and secure; and must, necessarily, consolidate and strengthen the Canadas.” Fortunately, another major project would give added weight to Bouchette’s recommendation. The British government had decided to build a string of locks along the Rideau River, to make it navigable between Wright’s Town, on the Ottawa River, and Kingston, the main British military base on eastern Lake Ontario. Wright’s Town (renamed Hull in 1875) was a bustling community of eight hundred souls on the north bank of the Ottawa River, across from the proposed north end of the canal, with all the necessary mills, smithies, stores, and workers’ accommodation. But to raft supplies and labourers across the river every day was a time-consuming and expensive operation. It made much more sense to take up Bouchette’s suggestion and build a bridge.

Compared with almost every other Canadian infrastructure project, this one was decided in the blink of an eye. On 26 September 1826, the governor of Lower Canada came to Bytown (then little more than an encampment on the south side of the Ottawa River) to turn the first sod for the Rideau Canal Waterway. After the ceremony, engineers raised the bridge idea with him; he approved the plan and ordered work to begin on the 28th. The key men on the job were three: Colonel John By, the British engineer in charge of the canal project; John Mactaggart, who was both an engineer and an antiquarian with an interest in the bizarre; and Montreal stonemason Thomas McKay, whose Ottawa mansion, Rideau Hall, later became the residence of Canada’s governor general. The designer, the engineer, and the stonemason got along well together and held each other in high regard. (Mactaggart later confessed to being particularly impressed with By’s ability to eat raw pork.)

After a single day of surveys, By picked a spot near the Chaudière Falls, where the river was dotted with islands and rocky outcrops. There they could build a series of seven short bridges from island to island, rather than a single long span. The first was a stone arch from the north shore to the first island. It was finished in just three weeks, and on 31 October 1826, the workers gathered to witness its completion. In a structure like this, the stonework was built around a wooden frame arch; when everything was in place, the wooden frame was to be removed in a process called striking the centre, and the stones would settle firmly into place. But when workers struck the centre, the span promptly collapsed. Clearly, speed in construction hadn’t been a virtue. By mid-January 1827, the bridge had been rebuilt, and the next span was completed in the summer of 1827. The four bridges from the south bank were constructed of wooden trusses; simply engineered and rapidly built, they were also in place by that summer.

That just left the biggest gap, some 212 feet long, over a treacherous stretch of water called the Big Kettle, at the foot of the falls. A rope suspension footbridge would be used as a platform from which to build the permanent bridge, an elegant truss frame that By had modelled on a design by the great Italian architect Andrea Paladdio. But how to get the ropes across in the first place? Mactaggart recruited a local artillery captain, who hauled a bronze cannon to the riverbank, lashed a rope to a cannon ball, and then fired the ball across the river. On the first two tries, the force of the detonation broke the rope, but the third attempt was a success. Workers used the first rope to pull across two heavier ropes, each of which was attached to trestles on either side of the Big Kettle. They laid down planks crosswise and anchored them to the ropes, and then nailed boards lengthwise on the planks. With ropes on either side to serve as handrails, the temporary bridge was ready for use.

The next step was to reinforce the footbridge with chains, a process that led to tragedy when one of the chains snapped, hurling a work crew into the river. Three men were swept to their deaths. John By then decided to anchor two large scows in the Big Kettle under the bridge site; these would act as supports while the wooden trusses were assembled. But after some weeks of work, another chain snapped, and then a third. This final mishap was fatal to the structure, and the half-completed truss bridge plummeted into the river. The colonel was not easily put off, and he ordered immense chains with 10-inch links from the naval stores in Kingston. Within five weeks, the operation was complete: by October 1828, the Ottawa River was bridged by a series of spans that could support 6 tons. Because it had been built with government money, By declared that it should be a toll bridge—one penny for every person or animal, two pennies for every vehicle. The real profit, however, was made by the toll collector, who regarded himself as a border official outside the jurisdiction of either colony: his shaky grasp of constitutional law didn’t stop him from operating a kind of duty-free shop that sold cheap liquor to anyone who passed by.

The Union Bridge was on the cutting edge of the science of bridge building, or perhaps it was just over the cutting edge. Mactaggart’s assessment—“There it stands, and likely will for a length of time”—was hardly a ringing endorsement, and within a few years of its completion, the bridge over the Big Kettle had started to deteriorate. In 1834, military engineers installed heavy chain cables for added support, but on 5 May 1836 the bridge had to be closed to vehicles. Just thirteen days later, it collapsed into the river. A new Union Suspension Bridge was built within a few years and it stood the test of time better, though it lacked the charm of By’s elegant if unstable design. The important thing was that the gulf between Upper and Lower Canada had been bridged, at least in a physical sense, by what one traveller called “a solid step to the union of the Provinces.” The process of building a nation with bridges had begun.

As a result of its versatility and availability, wood had been the material of choice for the majority of bridges in Canada for decades, but, to many forward-thinking engineers, it was fast becoming a thing of the past. In 1779, architect T.M. Pritchard and iron-founder Abraham Darby had constructed the first iron bridge at Coalbrookdale, England, setting in motion a revolution in bridge building. By the 1850s, structural iron had arrived in Canada and was ready to cross gaps that would make the Big Kettle seem little more than a puddle.

Montreal in the mid-nineteenth century was the largest and wealthiest city in British North America, home to fabulously rich entrepreneurs who dominated Canada’s financial, industrial, and transportation sectors. But by the 1840s, the city’s location was becoming its Achilles heel. Situated on an island in the middle of a river that was frozen for part of the year, it was losing ground as the U.S. canals and railways that spread through New England and siphoned off trade wherever they appeared.

This fact was painfully clear to the Grand Trunk Railway. Running from Portland, Maine, to Sarnia, Canada West, the Grand Trunk aspired to be one of the world’s great railways, but a bottleneck at Montreal stood in its way. There, goods had to be transferred across the river by ferry, a process that the railway found inconvenient and that shippers hated. But bridging the St. Lawrence was a different proposition entirely from the one that had faced John By in Ottawa. The Big Kettle was a little over 200 feet wide; the St. Lawrence was over 8600 feet wide at Montreal, had a current running to 7 miles per hour, and frequently saw ice jams that reached the height of the houses on either side of the river. Any bridge would need piers strong enough to withstand the force of the shifting ice, and it had to be high enough to allow sailing ships to pass underneath and have spans long enough that huge timber rafts could pass between the piers. It was the kind of challenge that Victorian engineers relished.

They submitted design after design for consideration, and in 1852 the government of the Canadas asked a British engineering firm, Peto, Brassey, and Betts, to examine the plans and come up with a recommendation. They gave the file to engineer Alexander Ross, who eventually produced a design with the help of Thomas Keefer and Robert Stephenson, the son of George Stephenson, builder of the world’s first steam-powered railway engine, The Rocket. The three men envisioned a bridge, to be located above the entrance to the Lachine Canal, that would be over 6000 feet long and consist of twenty-five spans resting on piers spaced across the river. Each pier would be flared outward on the upstream side, so that sheets of ice drifting downriver would be forced up the piers and break under their own weight. Because the distance between piers was nearly 250 feet, close to the tolerance of the structural iron available at the time, the designers decided to use a square tube, to give each span greater stability and strength. All of the wrought-iron plates to make up the tubes were imported from Birkenhead, England, and assembled at the river’s edge like a giant child’s toy. The central span alone consisted of 10,309 pieces held together by nearly half a million rivets. Remarkably, the pieces were so well made that they fit together without a single alteration or new rivet hole being necessary.

Not that the project was easy. According to supervising engineer James Hodges, the first construction season in 1854 was “a period of disaster, difficulty, and trouble.” The English engineers had little experience in the Canadian climate, and didn’t cope well with the short working season. Nor were the labourers, more than three thousand of them over the life of the project, happy. Brief strikes happened regularly—“it is almost a custom in Canada for mechanics and labourers to strike twice a year,” wrote Hodges—and cholera swept through the living quarters that had been built near the site (one such building is now the groundsman’s hut at the Beaconsfield Golf Club), sometimes felling up to a third of a two-hundred-man work gang at a time. The English labourers, imported at great expense, were rarely willing to work more than four days a week, when they bothered to stick around at all, and managers from other projects frequently visited the bridge to poach workers with offers of better wages.

The first winter, engineers surveyed a path across the frozen river that corresponded exactly to the course of the bridge. The approximate pier sites were marked, and holes were drilled through the ice so surveyors could take depth soundings to determine exactly where a pier should be sited—a flat slab of rock on the river bottom was ideal. For each pier, a wooden cofferdam had to be built; it was anchored at the pier site, the water pumped out, and the masonry put in place. Building, sinking, and pumping out the cofferdams was such a long process that it was usually August before the masons could begin on the stonework. Because freeze-up started in November, they had to work at a feverish pace.

As the piers were being built, ironworkers were assembling the bridge tubes, which were put in place and riveted together as each pier was completed. The final pier was finished on 26 September 1859, and the final tube installed shortly after. The last thing to be erected was the sloping wooden roof, covered with tin so that snow and ice would slide off. Hodges even finished ahead of schedule—but would it stand the test of use? To gauge its strength, engineers lined up a 520-foot-long string of railway flatcars, long enough to extend over two tubes of the bridge, and loaded them with boulders. When they were pushed across the span, the first tube deflected less than an inch, well within the safety margin. With that, the bridge was declared open for traffic.

On a cold afternoon in December 1859, nearly a thousand passengers boarded a Grand Trunk Railway train in Montreal. There was the usual noisy hubbub—the scramble for seats, shouts of recognition as old friends spotted each other, a temporarily misplaced child, the piercing whistle of the conductor—and then the train was on its way. The journey took them south, and as they reached the St. Lawrence River, the passengers were suddenly plunged into darkness. Soon, black smoke from the engine began to filter into the compartments; a few of the passengers lifted handkerchiefs to cover their mouths. The minutes ticked by—two, three, four, five—and still they were in darkness, the smoke in the carriages growing ever thicker. A child began to wail, and one woman announced that she felt faint. Then, just as suddenly, the train emerged into the light again after nearly eight minutes in the gloom. The travellers could barely contain their excitement and amazement: they were the first members of the public to travel through the great Victoria Bridge, already dubbed the Eighth Wonder of the World.

Its official opening, however, would have to wait until 25 August 1860, when the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII would drive in the last rivet to finish the bridge that was to be named after his mother, Queen Victoria. It was an occasion like nothing the city had ever seen. Eight triumphal arches, made of wood, canvas, and stucco and ornately decorated with flags, gilding, painted paper and cloth, and gaslights, marked the route of the royal procession to the bridge site. Souvenir sellers had a field day, hawking special flags, the Victoria Bridge Medal, Victoria Bridge perfume, the Victoria Bridge pipe. The ceremony itself was followed by a grand ball featuring some specially commissioned tunes, such as “The St. Lawrence Tubular Bridge Mazurka Polka,” “The Victoria Bridge Gallop,” and “The Grand Trunk Celebration Waltz.”

Even with the abundance of local luminaries and foreign dignitaries on hand, the bridge itself was the star of the show. There were a few grumbles about the $7-million price tag, but as the longest bridge ever built, it enchanted journalists: “one of the noblest works of engineering in the world and in its way perfectly unique,” “the greatest example of engineering at present extant,” “the most magnificent work of its kind in existence.” It soon became a magnet for curious visitors, who were keen to see for themselves the structure that resembled, as travel writer W.H. Withrow put it, “a gigantic centipede creeping across the flood.”

In the wake of the grand opening, much was made of the amount of freight carried over the bridge in its first five nights of operation—11,723 barrels of flour, 1552 barrels of pork, 170 tons of iron, 39,000 feet of lumber, 140 bales of cotton, and 644 tons of general goods—but the bridge’s impact was as much symbolic as it was commercial. For the Duke of Argyll, who visited Montreal in 1878, it represented imperial solidarity: “the traveller in crossing the mighty stream feels, as he is borne high above it through the vast cavern, that … its iron girders and massive frame … stand, spanning the flowing sea, as firm and as strong as the sentiment of loyalty for her whose name it bears.” It was the Times of London, however, that seemed most impressed by the bridge’s impact on Canadian unity: “The provinces of the North American Union are now so intimately connected by iron lines that all that was wanting to bring the Union into close communication with Canada was to span the St. Lawrence, and this has now been done … by the very poetry of engineering.”

By the time of Argyll’s visit, however, the days of iron bridges already were drawing to a close. English inventor Henry Bessemer had discovered a process for making steel in 1856, and in the 1860s this new material, stronger and more durable than iron, was being used in bridges across the United States. When businessmen and railway barons set their sights on a permanent connection between Quebec City and the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, steel was the material of choice.

A bridge at Quebec had been considered at the same time as the Victoria Bridge was being designed—producing sketches for such a project was something of a hobby for engineers of the period—but not until the late 1880s did a bridge become an economic necessity. Montreal, with access to ice-free Atlantic ports over the Victoria Bridge, was stealing business from Quebec, and the only thing that could stop the drain was for the city to have its own link with the south shore. In 1887, the Board of Trade called a meeting of politicians and business leaders, all of whom spoke passionately of the bridge as a necessity, not only for the city’s economy but for the good “of the whole Dominion, as it will be a complete and unbroken connection on Canadian territory.” Part nation-building propaganda and part fiscal pragmatism (if the bridge could be sold as a national project, the federal government might help pay for it), the rhetoric had the desired effect: in June 1887, the Quebec Bridge Company (QBC) was chartered to erect a bridge across the St. Lawrence. Under the terms of the act, the company had three years to begin construction and six years to finish; if it failed to do so, the charter would become null and void. It was immediately clear that the QBC had little chance of meeting these deadlines. The project was anticipated to cost over $6 million (more than $110 million in current values), but the firm had limited financial resources. Even when various levels of government kicked in money to get the ball rolling—$1 million from Ottawa in 1889, $250,000 from the province of Quebec the following year, and $300,000 from the city of Quebec in 1891—the company remained desperately underfunded. So in 1891, in a cycle that would become tediously repetitive, the company’s directors convinced Parliament to grant another three-to-six-year window to complete the project. Three more times they would return, and each time Parliament gave the requested extension. This should have set the alarm bells ringing, but if it did, no one was listening.

Perhaps that’s because the company was doing what it could, within its limited financial capabilities, to keep up a show of activity. In 1897, it was busily considering sites along the St. Lawrence, and the directors eventually picked one near the mouth of the Chaudière River, 6 miles from Quebec City. But that was the easy part. In engineering terms, the bridge represented as much of a challenge as had the Victoria Bridge. Its centre span had to be long enough and high enough, at least 150 feet, that ocean-going ships could pass under it, and had to accommodate two railway lines, as well as streetcar tracks and two lanes of road, for a total width of at least 67 feet. The challenge was not insurmountable, so long as the company made the right decisions along the way.

Then, in 1899, the Quebec Bridge Company made its first bad decision: it hired American Theodore Cooper as consulting engineer for the project. Cooper had spent eleven years in the U.S. Navy before getting his first big engineering job, on the St. Louis Bridge. It was a great success, and Cooper moved on to build bridges in Providence, Pittsburgh, and New York, each one a triumph. But none of them was large, at least compared with what was envisioned for Quebec. Cooper was nearing the end of his career and desperately wanted to build a truly great bridge as a capstone to his professional life. The Quebec project must have been irresistible to him. There was just one problem: Cooper didn’t want to have to come to Quebec. In fact, he didn’t like going to job sites at all and his previous contracts had all limited his time at construction sites to no more than five days per month. As he got older, he grew less willing to travel, often claiming ill health as a reason for refusing to leave his New York office. In total he would visit the Quebec Bridge sites only three times, the last in May 1903, before the work had progressed very far. He was, as the Engineering News later put it, “an engineer who had never seen the structure for which he was actually carrying the entire engineering responsibility.”

The QBC seemed undeterred by Cooper’s odd contract clause, and in March 1899 its representatives met with him in New York to review the tenders submitted for the project. They apparently suggested (although no one would ever say how strongly) that, in making his decision, he should keep in mind the perilous financial state of his employer. When Cooper submitted his report on 23 June 1899, it was clear that he had taken the advice to heart: “I hereby conclude and report that the cantilever superstructure plan of the Phoenix Bridge Company (of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania) is the ‘best and cheapest’ plan.” If there’s one word that should never be attached to a complex engineering project, it’s “cheapest.” It was an unfortunate choice of words, and for the next eight years, everyone working on the project would have one eye on the bridge and the other on the bottom line.

The following summer, Cooper was officially appointed consulting engineer for the project, and within a matter of days, he made another fateful decision: the centre span would be lengthened from 1600 feet to 1800 feet. A longer central span would put the innermost piers in shallower, slower water where the ice was less dangerous; the cost of building those piers would be lower, and they could be built more quickly. The projected reduction in cost and time, combined with the fact that the change would give Quebec the longest cantilever bridge in the world, dazzled the directors of the QBC and they accepted Cooper’s recommendation. Then, he suggested another major change: the structural members of the bridge should be redesigned to reduce the amount of steel needed, and therefore the cost of the project. The risk was that each piece of the bridge would now have to carry higher stresses, but Cooper believed the loads were still acceptable. In his original report, he had put “best” before “cheapest”; the order was rapidly reversing itself.

On 2 October 1900, Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier and a host of dignitaries descended on the bridge site to lay the cornerstone of the first masonry pier. Four steamers were required to carry all the invited guests, and it may have seemed to spectators that every single person on those steamers was given a chance to speak. Almost all of them referred to the bridge as a national undertaking, but it was Simon Napoleon Parent, the mayor of Quebec City and the new premier of the province (and, not incidentally, the president of the Quebec Bridge Company), who described the significance of the bridge most explicitly: “We are at last realizing the cherished dream of every Quebecker for the last fifty years, and we long to hear the cheering sound of the hammer which is going to rivet the last link that was wanting to complete our national unity.”

After the crowds had dispersed, though, not a hammer could be heard—not that day nor for months afterwards. For the next three years, the company teetered on the brink of financial ruin and did little to move the project forward. It should have been carrying out intensive testing on Cooper’s redesigned structure to ensure that it could stand up to the demands that would be placed on it, but that cost money. Instead of recognizing that it was essentially working on an entirely new bridge, the company went on as if it were the same old bridge. Cooper’s skill and experience were taken to be enough of a guarantee that the calculations were sound.

Finally, in 1903, after sixteen years of planning had yielded almost no results, the federal government stepped in. It was anxious to go ahead with the construction of another coast-to-coast railway to compete with the Canadian Pacific Railway, and needed the bridge at Quebec to realize that goal. The project was promptly declared to be “for the general advantage of Canada,” which allowed Ottawa to guarantee a bond issue of $6.7 million to pay for the work. All at once the Quebec Bridge Company sprang into action. Now, they pleaded, there was no time to do the tests that should have been done on Cooper’s structural changes. They were under the gun, so the engineers decided to accept the Phoenix Bridge Company’s theoretical estimates of the weight of the redesigned bridge. The government made a half-hearted attempt to force the QBC to accept an independent bridge engineer to study the new plans, but backed off when Cooper protested this as an attack on his professional competence. There would be no independent oversight of the plans or of the construction as it proceeded.

The first hint that something was amiss came in February 1906, when Phoenix’s inspector of materials reported that the bridgework weighed in at 38,800 tons, over 7000 tons heavier than anticipated. This would boost the already high stresses by a troubling 10 percent. Cooper was backed into a corner. He could either scrap everything and start again from scratch, which would be an admission that he had erred (and would also ruin the Quebec Bridge Company’s plans to have the Prince of Wales officially open the bridge in 1908), or he could order work to proceed. He probably didn’t deliberate for long: work would go ahead.

The following summer, Cooper received even more alarming news from Quebec. Workers reported that pieces of the south anchor arm, which connected the bridge structure to the stone pier, didn’t match up when they tried to assemble it; they had to use two 75-ton jacks to force them into place, and even then the pieces didn’t fit properly. On 6 August, Norman McClure, a bright young engineer hired by Cooper to be his eyes and ears at Quebec, reported that two pieces of the south cantilever arm were bent, a discovery that sparked a disagreement at Quebec. The local representative of the Phoenix Bridge Company said they had been bent when they left the shop (an admission suggesting that the company’s quality control measures were not up to snuff), but McClure insisted the pieces had warped after being installed on the bridge, which suggested they were buckling under higher stresses than they could handle. Cooper’s assistant took to measuring the affected pieces on a regular basis, and on 27 August was shocked to find that they had bent a full 2 inches in the previous week. The situation could hardly have been more serious, but no one at the job site knew what to do because not one of them was technically qualified to make any major decisions. The chief engineer of the QBC, Edward Hoare, was experienced in laying railway track but had never built anything larger than a 300-foot, single-track bridge. Phoenix’s senior engineer at the site was Arthur Birks, a graduate of Princeton University, praised to the stars by all who worked with him, but only twenty-five years old. McClure, another Princeton alumnus, was even younger and less experienced. As a later report put it scathingly, “[T]he greatest bridge in the world was being built without there being a single man within reach who by experience, knowledge and ability was competent to deal with the crisis.”

McClure immediately wrote to Cooper for advice, while Benjamin Yenser, Phoenix’s general foreman at the site, declared the bridge unsafe, and suspended work. Rather than wait for a reply to his letter, McClure decided to go directly to New York, where he met Cooper on the morning of 29 August. Cooper immediately agreed that work should remain suspended until the situation could be studied carefully. McClure was dispatched to Phoenixville to consult with the engineers there, but in his haste he neglected to cable Quebec with Cooper’s decision. He soon noticed his oversight, but wasn’t unduly worried because he knew Yenser had stopped work. What neither he nor Cooper was aware of was that Yenser had ordered work to resume, for reasons that remain unclear; most likely he was pressured by officials from the Quebec Bridge Company, who were concerned about delays.

McClure got to Phoenixville around five o’clock that afternoon. He told the company of Cooper’s decision that all work should be suspended, but company officials wanted to postpone any action until the next morning, when they were expecting a telegram from their engineer at Quebec. They expected it to confirm that the pieces in question had indeed been slightly bent when they left the factory and hadn’t buckled under the high stress loads. McClure, very much the junior man in the room, could only defer. At 5:30 p.m., the meeting broke up.

While McClure was conferring with the managers in Phoenixville, the workers swarming over the Quebec Bridge were waiting for the whistle signalling the end of the workday. Instead, they heard what sounded like a cannon shot. A flawed piece of the south anchor arm failed and the bridge started to collapse, the superstructure on the piers falling, according to one witness, as if its supports were made of melting ice. In no more than fifteen seconds, 19,000 tons of steel crashed down, taking the lives of eighty-six workers. Some of them lay trapped and wounded in the wreckage of the bridge for hours because there was no equipment to free them. As their mates watched helplessly, the river slowly rose and drowned them.

The disaster was no respecter of position. Among the dead were two of the senior officials at the site, Birks and Yenser, and the youngest of workers, fourteen-year-old Stanley Wilson, who earned 10 cents an hour as a water boy. Thirty-three of the dead were natives from the Kahnewake Reserve, men who were starting to build a reputation as fearless ironworkers. Just a few days earlier, the Kahnewake lacrosse team had posed for a photo, the spidery form of the bridge looming ghost-like behind them. Over half of the team went down with the bridge.

The nation was horrified by the graphic accounts and photographs in the newspapers, and the federal government immediately appointed a Royal Commission to study the accident. Two of the commissioners were at the bridge site within two days of the disaster, and their inquiries also took them to Ottawa, New York (to meet with Theodore Cooper), and Phoenixville. Their exhaustive report, presented in February 1908, traced the collapse to the two pieces of the south anchor arm that Norman McClure had been watching for weeks, and put the blame squarely on the Phoenix Bridge Company’s engineer for designing the faulty pieces, and on Theodore Cooper for approving them. The Quebec Bridge Company was also held partly responsible, for its “loose and inefficient supervision of all parts of the work.” One of the commission’s last conclusions was that a bridge of that design and size simply couldn’t be erected given the state of engineering knowledge of the time.

The government was quick to restart the project and complete the much-needed link. In August 1908, the minister of Railways and Canals appointed a board of engineers to draw up specifications for a new bridge, and eventually the government selected a design submitted by the St. Lawrence Bridge Company. This time, the bridge segments would not be imported from the United States but would be built right at the site. No mills in Canada had the capacity to form rolled steel into bridge components of that size, so St. Lawrence had to build a factory on each side of the river, at a total cost of over $1 million. Even more time-consuming was the task of removing the wreckage of the old bridge and dismantling the piers, a job that took two years.

By September 1916 the superstructure on either side of the river had been completed; all that remained was to hoist the centre span into place. To do so, the pre-assembled span was put on two scows and floated down the river, which was clogged with rowboats, skiffs, and every manner of watercraft, all packed with people anxious to watch the final act in the bridge saga. People lined both shores—estimates put the crowd at fifty thousand—and among them were a host of dignitaries, including local, provincial, and federal politicians, representatives of the contractors, two hundred members of the Society of Canadian Engineers and their American guests, even a party of members of the Australia parliament on their way home after visiting their troops in France.

When the scows reached the bridge, they were anchored in place and the span was attached to the massive chains that would lift it. Then, the scows would be removed and the span slowly jacked upward, about 2 feet at a time, until it was level with the superstructure at either end and could be bolted into place. For the first few hours, everything went according to plan. The span was attached to the lifting chains, at which point the scows drifted away. So, too, did most of the spectators, who assumed that the rest of the operation would be a mere formality. And for a while, it did seem as if the big excitement had passed. The span was slowly elevated, and when it was about 30 feet off the water, the crews were given a break for a meal and a rest; within the hour, they were back at it. They had just completed another lift when disaster struck. A support piece at the southwest corner of the centre span failed, dropping that corner and then the southeast corner into the St. Lawrence; it was only a matter of time before the north end of the span plunged as well. For the second time in a decade, the great Quebec Bridge lay in ruins—this time killing thirteen workers.

It was wartime and there was considerable pressure on the supply of steel, but the government and the U.S. steel supplier immediately agreed to free up enough material to construct a new centre span (fortunately, the bridgework stretching out from either shore of the river was undamaged). On 17 September 1917, almost exactly a year after the most recent disaster, the process of lifting the centre span started again. This time, work proceeded without incident and the span was in place in four working days. When the last rivets were hammered home, a group of workers held an impromptu footrace to see who could be the first to run across the bridge. A month later, the first train, carrying some four hundred company officials, engineers, bridge workers, and government representatives, passed over the new structure, and on 3 December the bridge was turned over to the Department of Railways and Canals for testing. In August 1918, it was finally made available to regular rail traffic, and on 22 August 1919, the Prince of Wales unveiled four commemorative plaques to formally open the span.

Just two days later, Theodore Cooper died, lonely and disappointed, without ever having seen the bridge he had wanted so badly to be his.

The Union, Victoria, and Quebec bridges had been engineering challenges pure and simple. There had been no debate about the potential social consequences of linking Ottawa to Hull or Quebec to the south shore, and the phrase “environmental impact” had not yet been coined. All three were built in the days when the government neither sought nor desired the public’s opinion on any infrastructure project. In contrast, the story of the Confederation Bridge linking Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick offers an interesting case study of how technical problems could be matched, and in some cases overshadowed, by other issues.

In August 1955, the largest crowd yet assembled in Nova Scotia converged on the Canso Strait to be part of the grand opening of the Canso Causeway, a 4300-foot strip of rock linking Cape Breton Island with the mainland. Cape Bretoners had been talking about some kind of link since the nineteenth century, but it took a decade of intense politicking to see the project through. It was well worth the wait, as far as lobbyist L.J. Doucet was concerned, for the causeway was “like a handshake across the water, a handshake whose clasp remained!” One local woman was a little more sanguine: “And, thank God,” she said, “for having at last made Canada a part of Cape Breton!”

Even harder was the task of making Canada a part of Prince Edward Island. The process didn’t take much longer, but there were significantly greater obstacles to be overcome: local opposition, environmental concerns, engineering challenges, and constitutional issues. But there was also, arguably, a greater need. Compared to Prince Edward Islanders, the residents of Cape Breton could hardly complain about the difficulties in reaching the mainland. The Canso Strait was only a few thousand feet wide; the Strait of Northumberland, at its narrowest point, was more than 9 miles across.

The first politician to grapple with the problem of communication was the island’s governor, Walter Patterson, who hired a crew of men to carry the mail from Wood Island to Pictou, Nova Scotia, in February 1775. These winter mail runs continued sporadically over the next fifty years, but in 1829, the island government opted to stop using that 23-mile route and instead use the 9-mile crossing between Cape Traverse, PEI, and Cape Tormentine, Nova Scotia. The craft of choice was the classic ice-boat, 17 to 18 feet long with a bent cedar-plank hull covered in sheet tin. The men who worked the boats were the best and strongest paddlers around, experts in the kinds of ice that flowed through the strait and able to spot a patch of open water in the worst conditions. At the best of times, it was an exhausting trip; at other times, when a brilliant blue sky over Tormentine changed to towering grey clouds and gusting sleet before they were 3 miles into the strait, the crossing was a nightmare.

So dangerous was it that in 1885 the federal government decreed that boats had to carry survival supplies and fire-making equipment, be operated by a crew of six, and travel in convoys of three. The fare for men was $2, but they had to help haul the boat across the ice whenever necessary; a gentleman who didn’t want to dirty his hands with manual labour could pay $5 to remain in the boat while others did the pulling. Women, the elderly, and invalids paid $4 but weren’t expected to lend a hand with the hauling. These were not inconsiderable sums in those days—a century ago, $6 would buy food for a week, and $1.75 would pay the rent. Winter travel to and from the island, then, was only embarked on if absolutely necessary.

When PEI joined Confederation in 1873, it appeared that its isolation would end. Under the terms of union, the federal government agreed to provide efficient, year-round steam-ferry service to keep the island in “continuous communication” with the mainland. But the much-anticipated ice-ferries turned out to be a disappointment. In 1881, one of them was icebound for three weeks, and even the addition of three newer ferries, the Minto, the Earl Grey, and the Stanley (the same Grey and Stanley commemorated by Canada’s premier sporting trophies), didn’t help things much. In 1915, the federal government inaugurated a railway car-ferry service with the launching of the Prince Edward Island. It was so efficient that the old ice-ferries were soon taken out of service. The PEI, which was fitted with an automobile deck in 1938, crossed the strait faithfully until 1969. By that time, it had been joined by the Abegweit—which made 123,000 crossings before it was retired in 1982 to become the floating clubhouse of Chicago’s Columbia Yacht Club—its successor the Abegweit II, and the new, larger, and more modern ferries that followed.

However good the ferry service was, though, it was still dependent on the weather; until an all-season link was constructed, the “continuous communication” promised in the terms of union didn’t really exist. Not that there hadn’t been plans. In 1885, PEI senator George Howlan thought about building a bridge, but believed it would obstruct ship traffic. His idea? A subway—5 miles of connected iron tubes, each 300 feet long, 15 feet in diameter, with a concrete base inside to support the railway roadbed, and with long, earth-filled wharves stretching out from each shore to meet the subway as it rose to the surface. The cost, according to his consulting engineer, would be about $2.1 million. That was good enough for Howlan; he established the Northumberland Straits Tunnel Railway Company, resigned from the Senate, and ran for a seat in the House of Commons, where he thought he stood a better chance of pushing his project. But, as historian Boyde Beck put it, “the project was popular, Howlan was not.” He was trounced at the polls, taking with him any chance of seeing his subway become a reality.

Over the next few decades, the federal government occasionally revisited the notion of a fixed link, but was always scared away by the experts’ reports. In 1955, when the Canso Causeway was opened for traffic, PEI premier A.W. Matheson petitioned Ottawa to build a Northumberland Causeway, but the numbers defeated him: the project would cost over $50 million and require at least 40 million tons of rock, four times more than the Canso Causeway. Not until 1962 did the federal government start to make noises that could be construed as positive interest. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker committed to paying $105 million for a fixed link between the island and the mainland, and consultants advised that a combination bridge–causeway–tunnel would be the best option. A causeway would stretch out from Bayfield, New Brunswick, for about 2 miles and would then become a bridge. As it neared PEI, it would become a causeway again, and then, close to the town of Borden, would become a tunnel to allow ship traffic to pass over it. Finally, a ramp would take the road back onto land again.

Diefenbaker fell from power in 1963, but in July 1965 the new prime minister, Lester Pearson, announced that Ottawa would go ahead with the project. On 5 November 1965, the sod was turned for the ramp approach road on the Prince Edward Island side. Another two years passed before bids came in for the New Brunswick portion of the causeway, and then they were far higher than anyone had anticipated. By 1968, the federal government had spent $15 million moving earth for the New Brunswick approach road and building the highway interchange on the PEI side, but then the project’s yearly budget was cut to $5 million amid rumours that it would be shelved altogether. In March 1969, that’s precisely what happened.

It was 1982 before the government took another look at the idea, but by then the estimated cost of a bridge had climbed to $640 million. Then, within a year, Public Works Canada (PWC) received three unsolicited proposals from private sector companies, one for a tunnel and two for bridges. Here was an idea that any fiscally conscious government could get behind: private sector loans would finance the construction, and the money that the federal government was already paying in ferry subsidies would be used to repay the loans. Perhaps Canada might become part of PEI after all.

In 1826, the Union Bridge had been proposed, approved, surveyed, and started in the space of three days; two years later, the work was done. The bridge linking PEI to the mainland would take a full fifteen years, from the time PWC reopened the file on the project to its grand opening, and would have to clear a succession of hurdles that would have mystified By and Mactaggart—feasibility studies, the examination of the unsolicited proposals, the call for Expressions of Interest, the Initial Environmental Evaluation. And then there was the plebiscite, called for 18 January 1988 after the provincial government decided that the matter was important enough to be put to the people. To help islanders come to grips with the issues involved, the University of PEI’s Institute of Island Studies held public meetings in eleven communities. Two camps quickly emerged. The Islanders for a Better Tomorrow, representing mostly business, tourism, and labour groups, supported the plan, arguing that its economic benefits couldn’t be ignored or understated. “If you vote no, you’ll never know,” they said. Opposing them were the Friends of the Island, dominated by academics, fishers, environmentalists, and social activists, who put the case against the link. They were determined to open people’s eyes to what they believed were the potentially serious environmental and economic consequences of the fixed link—the slogan “If you don’t know, vote no” captured their position.

The debate took on a curious character. As Island historian David Weale put it, “We are Islanders … living in a place set apart by time and nature. And though it is denied by some, it is our Islandness which is at the centre of this debate.” But the notion that an “island way of life” was at stake was itself contentious. Some people in the anti-bridge camp thought the very idea gave the pro-bridge group the upper hand; they could paint themselves as the proponents of progress, modernization, and the future, in contrast with the misguided defenders of “Islandness” who hopelessly clung to a stagnant past. The Friends fought hard against this characterization by publishing a collection of studies that avoided the rhetoric and instead made the anti-bridge case with hard science on the environmental impacts, economic studies and policy analyses, and exposés of the flaws in the process.

The debate was a bitter one—some friendships were severed forever as people took sides—but one person who refused to take a public stand was premier Joe Ghiz. At home, the subject was a constant source of spirited argument. Rose Ellen Ghiz opposed the bridge, while their son Robert supported it. The premier steadfastly refused to give his personal opinion. Only after his death was his deep secret revealed: he had voted against the fixed link. As things transpired, the premier was on the losing side. Voter turnout was only 65 percent, less than what the Island usually sees and surprising given the bitterness of the debate, and almost 60 percent of voters supported the fixed link.

Following that was another round of bureaucratic exercises. The twelve companies that had submitted Expressions of Interest were whittled down to seven, and then three by September 1988. The financial arrangements had to be worked out—Ottawa set an upper limit of $42 million (an amount equivalent to the yearly ferry subsidy) as the most it would pay on an annual basis—and it wasn’t until 2 December 1992 that the federal government announced that it had selected the proposal from Strait Crossing Incorporated (SCI). But first, the project had to go through the courts, for on 6 December the Friends of the Island brought suit against the federal government for failing to follow certain procedures with respect to environmental assessments, and on the grounds that cancelling the ferry service was a violation of the 1873 terms of union. In March 1993, Madame Justice Barbara Reed agreed on both counts: the proper environmental studies had not been completed, and ending the ferry service would require a constitutional amendment in the House of Commons. PWC promptly went away and commissioned the court-ordered environmental assessment, but then the Friends were back in court to demand a full Environmental Assessment Panel. This time, the judge disagreed; he ruled that there had been enough studies and that there was nothing to stop bridge construction from proceeding as long as the constitutional amendment was passed before the last ferry sailed. That amendment was secured on 15 April 1994.

The way now clear, in October 1993 the federal government signed a contract with SCI that bound the company to certain deadlines. It had until 1 June 1997 to finish; if the bridge was not ready for traffic by that date, SCI would have to cover the $42-million cost of continuing the ferry service. SCI immediately got to work on the site preparation. The company had decided that most of the construction would be done on shore, but it had to find a suitable property on which to build and store everything. They fixed upon John Read’s Amherst Point Farm, which his family had been working for three generations; once the sale of the land was finalized, it was transformed from a bucolic farm with trees, flowers, and cattle into an industrial yard. All of the bridge components would be manufactured at that site and then assembled in the water using a modified crane ship, the Svanen, which had been used to build a similar bridge in Denmark. Three times higher than PEI’s tallest building, the Prince Edward Hotel, the Svanen soon became a tourist attraction in its own right.

Concrete, from which the new bridge would be built, had been used in Canada for bridges since the early twentieth century. One of the first spans was a reinforced-concrete-arch highway bridge built at Massey, Ontario, in 1906, but concrete bridges really came into their own in the interwar era, with structures such as the Ashburnham Bridge in Peterborough, Ontario (1920), and the Broadway Bridge in Saskatoon (1932). These boasted impressive spans to be sure, but nothing like the magnitude of the SCI project. The construction process itself, however, was not unlike that for the Victoria Bridge: piers would be built in the water, and then the pre-assembled sections of bridge would be mounted atop them. The first job was to prepare the sites for the piers. Work crews sank a series of cofferdams to the bottom of the strait, pumped them dry, and drilled holes over 16 feet deep into the bedrock; filled with reinforced steel and concrete, the holes would act as anchors for the pier bases that were cemented to the bedrock. On top of the bases were the pier shafts, with ice shields sloped at a 52-degree angle; just as with the piers of the Victoria Bridge, flowing ice would be forced up the sloped shields to break under its own weight. Once the pier shafts were completed, a main bridge segment was attached to each shaft, and then spans to join the main segments were dropped in. Some were fixed at both ends, while others slid on bearings at one end so that the bridge could expand and contract as a result of climatic conditions.

Once the actual construction began, it went smoothly. On 1 October 1995, the first main segment was put in place, and during the 1996 construction season, the work of setting the piers went on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. That fall, on 20 October, the ferry Abegweit II became the first ship to sail under the navigation span in the middle of the bridge. The last structural component was installed on 19 November 1996, and it looked like SCI would be able to meet its deadlines.

But what to call the bridge when it was finished? The Fixed Link was entirely too dull, and the federal government’s name, the Northumberland Strait Crossing Project, didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Islanders seemed to prefer the Abegweit Crossing, which honoured the two ferries that had plied the route for fifty years and the ancient Mi’kmaq name for Prince Edward Island. Yet Abegweit crossing wasn’t easily made bilingual, a priority for a federal government still reeling from the razor-thin result of the 1995 referendum on Quebec sovereignty. Instead, Ottawa chose a name that has been variously described as bilingually appropriate, nationally accepted, and politically correct: the Confederation Bridge.

Meanwhile, preparations were underway for the grand opening, to be known as BridgeFest ’97. It began on 30 May 1997 with the Race of a Lifetime, which drew thousands of entrants to a footrace across the bridge. Later that day, fifty thousand of the less athletically inclined took part in the Walk of a Lifetime, the one and only chance to walk across the bridge; the lineups were so long that some people missed the walk altogether. Then, on 31 May came the official opening, assisted by six-year-old Benjamin and nine-year-old Sabrina Campbell, whose grandfather worked on the last ferry crossing the strait and whose great-grandfather had worked on the ice-boats. As a farewell, the three ferries then in service, the Abegweit II, the Vacationland, and the Holiday Island, positioned themselves abreast and blew their horns in a final salute. At five o’clock that afternoon, the bridge was officially opened to traffic; in the first three days, more than twenty thousand vehicles crossed its span.

The first consequence of the opening was to put six hundred ferry employees out of work, but after that, pundits predicted, the fixed link would add 150,000 tourists to the 740,000 who had visited the island in 1996 (in fact, the number of tourists entering the island grew by a staggering 60 percent in the bridge’s first summer of operation). They said it would bring $24 million to the island’s economy and create hundreds of new private sector jobs, and would save the PEI transport industry $10 million a year because truckers wouldn’t have to waste time waiting for ferries. These numbers were certainly important to the politicians who had presided over the bridge’s creation, but their rhetoric was also about nation-building. Diane Marleau, the public works minister, called the Confederation Bridge “a symbol of Canadian unity and an example of close cooperation between the Government of Canada, the provinces and the private sector,” while New Brunswick’s premier, Frank McKenna, praised “the progress we continue to make in uniting this great country of ours.” Islanders, however, remained divided on what it meant to be physically attached to Canada. For some, it represented the end of PEI’s unique status as Canada’s island province. One native, as he flew over the bridge and into Charlottetown Airport, huffed, “[T]here’s that great, jeesley slab of concrete … an island’s not a real island if you can drive to it.”

One of the studies published by the Friends of the Island was an analysis of what will happen if the Confederation Bridge reaches the end of its useful lifespan, as such structures often do. If we ignore the Canadian Forces helicopter that flew under one of the spans in August 1998, only to be caught on tape by a bridge surveillance camera, its short life has been uneventful. The Union Bridge in Ottawa lasted barely eight years, but the Montreal and Quebec bridges have fared better. The Victoria Bridge was altered in 1897 to deal with ventilation problems—the iron plate walls were removed and replaced with open truss sections—and if today few of the forty thousand Montreal drivers who use the bridge every day would refer to it as the Eighth Wonder of the World, it still stands as a tribute to Victorian engineering. The Quebec Bridge faced its own challenges when changes in Canada’s railway network reduced its traffic to passenger trains of VIA Rail’s Quebec–Montreal corridor and a few CN freight trains each day. Fortunately, its significance as the longest cantilever bridge in the world (at 3239 feet) was recognized when the railway and the federal and provincial governments came together in 1997 in a partnership to restore and preserve the landmark. The project is expected to continue until 2006.

So what’s next? A British general in Canada once floated the idea of a causeway between Newfoundland and Labrador, in the belief that it would reduce winter ice in the St. Lawrence. The notion went nowhere in 1879, and was no more popular a century later when Newfoundland politician Steve Neary suggested a tunnel under the Strait of Belle Isle to link Newfoundland and Labrador. The idea of a bridge between Vancouver Island and the mainland was also raised in the 1870s, when a potential route for the CPR included a series of bridges across the Strait of Georgia near Campbell River. The suggestion still comes up occasionally, usually in the form of an island-hopping bridge between Tsawassen and Vancouver Island, but opposition to any such project, even if we think only of people concerned with the potential environmental impacts, is likely to be fierce.

In a relative sense, the challenges facing John By and John Mactaggart at Wright’s Town in 1827 were every bit as daunting as those facing SCI in the 1990s. In both cases, there were many people who said the bridges could never be built, but they were. And whatever economic benefits might have accrued, these projects and the others were undertaken on the assumption that anything that linked Canadians and helped them to know each other better could only be good for the nation. PEI’s terms of union with Canada spoke of “continuous communication,” which was the goal of all these bridges. In the ideal world that bridge-builders envisioned, familiarity would not breed contempt, but rather sympathy, understanding, and unity.

“Building Canada is a well-researched and remarkably readable account of not only the structure but also the infrastructure of our country. To read about these construction projects is to marvel at the achievements of our heroic builders of the past and the present.”
—John Robert Colombo, author and anthologist

“It seems unlikely that a book on Canada’s infrastructure should turn out to be a great read, but Jonathan Vance is a first-rate storyteller.”
—Patrick Watson, creative director of Historica, and responsible for that foundation’s famous Heritage Minutes

“Building Canada is a delight. Jonathan Vance turns the usual view of Canada upside down, working from the foundations up, and succeeds brilliantly. Packed with surprising insight and rich ‘Canadiana,’ this book offers a new appreciation for how we got to where we are.”
—Roy MacGregor, author of A Life in the Bush and Escape: In Search of the Natural Soul of Canada