8 August 2009
Canada's Rail Legacy: Nation and Nationality Built on a "Ribbon of Steel"
We're a railroad nation.
It's been driven into the Canadian consciousness as surely as the Last Spike - note the uppercase deference to a mythic nail - was
pounded into place at Craigellachie, B.C., by railway baron Donald Smith.
He's the white-bearded fellow in your mind's eye, the man with a top hat and sledge hammer at the centre of one of the
country's most famous photographs - a motley assemblage of tycoons and tracklayers at a remote B.C. mountain pass on
7 Nov 1885.
Late historian Pierre Berton captured the essence of it all nearly a century later, deftly recounting the wonderful, tragic, sordid,
miraculous, story known as the National Dream - along with the Pacific Scandal, the Northwest Rebellion, and a few other suspenseful
subplots, all duly capitalized in keeping with their notable roles in the unfolding drama of a nation and its railroad being
simultaneously forged.
"It was," Berton wrote, "the great symbolic act of Canada's first century. In more ways than one, the completion of the
railway signalled the end of the small, confined, comfortable nation that had been pieced together in 1867."
Try to imagine, without a train flashing to mind, John A. Macdonald's transcontinental legacy, Wilfrid Laurier's
whistle-stop rise to power, the mass movement of soldiers, the Great Depression trekkers, the return of triumphant
Olympians, the historic tours of royalty, the flag-draped final journeys of John Diefenbaker and Pierre Trudeau.
When Green Leader Elizabeth May chose a VIA Rail car as her mobile election headquarters last fall - and the country's iron rails as
her route to respectability in the national campaign - she was tapping into a rich tradition in Canadian politics and a potent place
in our collective psyche.
"The Green party wants to put Canada back on the right track," May said at the time, promising to produce "a fraction
of the emissions" of her jet-setting rivals and to "re-invest in our national rail system",
"build more train cars", and "restore service to regions that have been cut off from rail".
The talk was earnest and the pitch was straightforward, but the medium was the key part of the message: Without a word, May's
campaign train projected a sense of familiarity, vision, and history.
This is, after all, the land of Lightfoot, where an entire high school history course was crammed by Lord Gord into a single, sweeping
ballad that many Canadians believe is the greatest song in (and about) the country's history.
The Canadian Railroad Trilogy runs longer than six minutes and may actually count as three tunes, but its colourful, compact
recounting of Canada's past poignantly evokes the toil and tears of the trail-blazing navvies and culminates with the
triumph of the train.
"There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run," it begins, recalling a prehistory when the "wild
majestic mountains stood alone against the sun."
By song's end, the wilderness has been tamed, the railway has been built, and "on the mountain tops we stand, all the world at
our command".
It's little wonder, then, that Canadian politicians and railway executives still trade heavily on the industry's epic past when
touting its future.
Just last month, dignitaries gathered at Toronto's Union Station to announce a $300-million upgrade to VIA and CN
infrastructure between Montreal and Toronto - "the heart of the Canadian passenger rail system," as federal Science and
Technology Minister Gary Goodyear put it.
What came next might astound those who assumed Canada's railway history began with the CPR and the driving of the Last Spike 124 years
ago.
"Today is the dawn of a new era in safe, swift, and sustainable passenger rail travel in Canada," said VIA chairman Donald
Wright. "Just as the opening of this rail line 153 years ago changed the whole concept of travel between the burgeoning cities of
southern Ontario and Quebec, this project has the same transformational potential. It will decisively position the passenger train as
the modern answer to highway gridlock and airport winglock".
There may have been a time in Canada when the railroad did not run, but it was at least a quarter-century before Smith's
historic hammering.
The Grand Trunk Railway, opened in October 1856 between Toronto and Montreal, had been given the name in hopes that it "would
exert the same nation-building influence as the Roman Empire's trunk roads", VIA noted. "The inaugural train
of one wood-burning steam locomotive and seven cars took 14 hours to traverse the (550-kilometre) route at
an average speed of 50 km/h - a far cry from the 160 km/h service of today's VIA passenger trains".
Technology would progress significantly by the time an Atlantic-to-Pacific railway was being contemplated in the years
following Confederation, making it conceivable to cross the entire country by train in less than a week.
When British Columbia joined Canada in 1871, it was on the promise that a rail line connecting it to the eastern provinces would be
built.
The year after, railway engineer Sandford Fleming and his secretary - Halifax clergyman and educator George Monro Grant - completed a
Halifax-to-Victoria scouting mission to identify the best route for a cross-Canada railway.
The title of Grant's published account of the journey - "Ocean to Ocean" - would eventually morph into Canada's official
motto: From Sea to Sea. And the author's enthusiasm for the transcontinental railway would prove infectious, selling thousands
of his books and helping to solidify public support for a project he deemed vital to Canada's future.
Goods from both Asia and Europe, Grant reasoned, would be shipped to Canada and then over land via its new rail network to markets
throughout the Americas. Immigrants would pour into the country and citizens in all parts of Canada would move efficiently east and
west - strengthening the human bonds of the nation. "To be united politically but disunited physically is an anomaly only to be
endured so long," Grant wrote in his landmark 1873 book, a combined travelogue and treatise on why the newly confederated Canada
urgently needed a coast-to-coast railway. "It is wise to secure the material union as soon as possible."
The message trumpeted by Grant - great-grandfather of Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff - was echoed often by Macdonald himself, who
staked his political future (and partly financed it, as the Pacific Scandal made clear) on the construction of the CPR.
"Until this great work is completed, our Dominion is little more than a geographical expression," he once said. With
"the railway, once finished, we become one great, united nation."
With nationwide "ribbons of steel" long since put in place to connect East and West, the ongoing project of uniting Canada
by rail takes different forms today - at a regional level in the push for high-speed routes in major urban corridors, on
a local scale with light-rail transit schemes and other initiatives.
Among them is an ambitious commuter rail project in Ottawa, including a proposed tunnel that would run under streets just a stone's
throw from the Parliament Hill offices once occupied by Sir John A.
Even some in Canada's Arctic territories - the northern frontier left out of the original National Dream - harbour visions of iron
roads stretching southward.
In 2005, despite the Canadian government's decision to not help finance a feasibility study, Yukon Premier Dennis Fentie and
then-Alaskan governor Frank Murkowski announced a joint plan to explore the potential for a 1,800-km,
Alaska-to-B.C. railway via Dawson City or Whitehorse.
"A railway link," Fentie said at the time, "has immense economic potential for our jurisdictions."
In 2007, a report concluded that "the Alaska/Yukon/Northern B.C. region is in a geographically advantageous position, potentially
linking North Pacific Rim markets with the shortest trade route between North Asia and North America.
"A new railway connecting the far northwest to the existing Canada-U.S. rail network would also boost tourism in the
region and "dramatically increase the resource productivity of Alaska and Canada," the study stated.
No trails have been blazed yet, no spikes driven, but the railway nation is still dreaming.
Randy Boswell.
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