May 26, 2006

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Korky Koroluk

Seeking visionaries to resume nation-building

It’s not often, when reading a book, that you have a strong urge to pick up the phone and call the author. But that’s just what happened to me while reading Building Canada: People and Projects that Shaped the Nation.

So when I finished the book the other day, I phoned author Jonathan Vance, a history professor at the University of Western Ontario.

In his book, he outlines a dozen projects that, in his view, were about nation-building, and I wanted to know whether, in these politically fractious times, he felt it was time for another exercise in nation-building.

His answer was a qualified yes — qualified because although it might be necessary, he doesn’t really think it’s possible. It would require leadership from “a visionary politician,” he said, adding that “I haven’t seen one in many years.”

Few of the projects he chose to highlight in his book were single projects in themselves. Rather, they were series of projects — like bridge-building — that together formed a larger whole that contributed to Canada’s sense of nationhood.

Others were series of really small projects that taken as one, contributed in a similar fashion. I’m thinking here of the chapters on the building of the rural telephone system, or rural electrification, or the development of rural postal delivery.

One of the more obvious projects — the building of the CPR — was left out simply because the story has been told so many times. Others were tasks spread out over many years, but which together formed a large and important project — construction of Montreal’s Nelson Monument, the Brock Memorial at Queenston, Ont., and Niagara Falls Skylon, the Husky (now Calgary) Tower and, of course, the CN Tower in Toronto.

For each, he has included interesting construction details that the general reader might not know about, and which the construction reader may have forgotten. And throughout, he has succeeded in making it all easily readable. This is not a dry historical tome.

For example, the first interprovincial bridge was between Upper and Lower Canada near the village of Bytown, named after Col. John By, who was later to build the Rideau Canal between Bytown (now Ottawa) and Kingston.

The bridge crossed the Ottawa River just below the Chaudi<0x00E8>re Falls in a series of short spans between islands. The first span, a stone arch, was built in just three weeks in the fall of 1826.

As Vance describes events, the stonework was built around a wooden frame arch. Then the frame was to be removed in a process called “striking the centre,” and the stones would settle firmly into place.

People gathered to watch the process, but “when workers struck the centre, the span promptly collapsed.”

“Clearly,” Vance comments wryly, “speed in construction hadn’t been a virtue.”

With the rebuilding necessary on that first span, the entire project wasn’t finished until October, 1828. But within a few years, the longest of the spans had begun to deteriorate. In 1834, heavy chains were added as reinforcement, but by early May of 1836, engineers were so worried that they closed the bridge to traffic.

Just as well, 13 days later, the central span collapsed into the river.

There are lots of stories of accidents, collapses, delays, cost over-runs and the like. But in the end, Vance says, all are success stories, because the builders, the organizers, the politicians, “believed passionately in the importance of building a nation with a strong sense of itself.”

They also believed that “highways, telephone lines and concert halls could help achieve that end.”

Nation-building today, though, is not as simple a matter, Vance says.

Indeed, the very phrase “nation-building” is something that “people snicker at now,” unless they’re talking of nation-building in an economic sense, and he sounds somewhat sad when he says it.

Maybe that’s why this could be an important book. Maybe it will get people thinking about nation-building instead of dwelling on the negatives.

“We hear enough about what does not work in the Canadian nation,” Vance writes.

“There should always be room to celebrate what did work.”

Korky Koroluk is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. Send comments to editor@dailycommercialnews.com

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