global warming???? Looks like they have less snow than now!!!!

global markets??? To send goods into them ‘profitably’ was the reason it was built. They’d take all we could produce, and more again, if we could produce it, everyone thought. Jobs, jobs, jobs. Turned out to be mostly ‘pie in the sky’ ~ like a lot of things do.

Private builders got into financial difficulties and couldn’t make payments on the bonds issued to finance it. Same thing happened to Canadian Northern Pacific. And Pacific Great Eastern (BC Rail). And a lot of other lines elsewhere.

Most of the bonds were held abroad, British and American capital. Needed to be, we didn’t produce a lot of the things actually needed to construct railways way back then. And we had to pay for them in the currency of the country where they were made. Or to buy stuff from them, so we could make the same things here. Like ‘rail’, for instance. So that’s where the dough was borrowed. First World War came along and that changed the global market perspectives.

Canadian government ended up taking over the bankrupt GTP and CNP, merging them into CNR, and making accomodation with the bondholders. Letting them take the loss wasn’t an option ~ would’ve wrecked Canada’s ability to borrow abroad, and put us in same league as most of South America. Where US military intervention was regularly necessary to collect on defaulted debts. So we ‘voluntarily’ paid, and the CNR was a drag on the Canadian taxpayer for generations.

Even when, after putting millions more into it, the CNR was finally ‘operationally’ profitable, the interest on the accumulated bonded indebtedness kept it perpetually in the red. And more tax dollars made up the loss.

Finally, government paid off the private bondholders, and wrote off the bonds it held, sold the assets, and got out of the railway business.

What lessons did we learn from the whole exercise? Big one should’ve been not to overestimate the ‘revenues’ expected relative to the ‘expenditures’ that will have to be repaid.

A great day in the history of building the nation. Lets not forget that also on this day three years later the Canadian forces united its four divisions to defeat the heart of the German Army at Vimy Ridge thereby changing the history of Western Europe and gaining Canada recognition as a world power in its own right leading to the eventual sovereignty of Canada as a nation.

One in six from BC went to fight at Vimy Ridge so in all likelihood a lot of the men in that picture above where men that also fought for Canada at Vimy Ridge on this same day three years later forging Canada’s modern history. Would be interesting to know their stories….

Socredible, it was a good thing the government stepped in and consolidated these bankrupt railways, to form CN.

We sometime fail to realize that it takes a body like the government to get into a industry and develop something bigger than what we can see now. If we did not do this, we still will be buying power from small private operators. I am greatful for BC Hydro.

Eagleone. You might be going a little overboard when you state that the Battle of Vimy Ridge defeated the heart of the German Army. In actual fact it had little effect. The war carried on for another 19 Months after Vimy.

There is no doubt that even though the Canadian forces were under British control, that this battle had a significant effect on the Canadian Army, and on Canadians as a whole, however it was not possible without British artillery, and planning.

Palopu, You are wrong. The German 1st Division was considered the most powerful army in the world at the time. 800,000 British and French died at Vimy Ridge in the months before the Canadians arrived. The British and the French lost the heart of their fighting force at Vimy Ridge. Canada was their last chance. This was a purely Canadian operation with the camp at Vimy Ridge being the third largest Canadian city at the time, and the Canadians building the first railroad in France as a supply route to bring in their supplies for the battle. What won the battle was the Canadian planning that undermined the German defense. Once Vimy Ridge was cleared of Germans the door was wide open to the German heartland.

Eagleone. I don’t want to denigrate the Canadian Armies effort at Vimy, however lets look at the big picture.

1. In the spring of 1917 the Allies planned a new, massive offensive: the French would assault the German lines at the southern end of the front in the Champagne Region of France, while the British would launch divisionary attacks in the north, around the French town of Arras. The Canadians, fighting as part of the British diversion in what would be known as the battle of Arras, were ordered to seize the high strategic strongpoint of Vimy Ridge, on the northern flank of the British assault.

2. The Canadians were successful in capturing Vimy, and as a result the Canadians had achieved the greatest single Allied advance on the Western Front, to that point in the war, with 3,578 Canadians dead and 7000 wounded.

3. Vimy was a proud moment for Canada. But in spite of the impressive victory there, the battle was strategically insignificant to the outcome of the war. No
massive Allied breakthrough followed either the assault on the ridge or the wider Battle of Arras of which it was a part.

4. Other Canadian battles, such as the 1918 victory at Amiens, had greater impact on the course of the war, but are far less known.

Check out Amiens.

I agree, He spoke. Though the CNR didn’t have as good a management as BC Hydro did when it was first formed.

WAC Bennett made sure BC Hydro was always able to pay its own way, even though his goal was low cost electric power for British Columbians. That was one of our ‘natural advantages’ he hoped to exploit for OUR benefit. And he did.

It would enable our industries to pay good wages, and still be competitive internationally, because our power costs were low. Dave Barrett got in, and one of the first things he did was the doubling of industrial power rates. To fund all his ‘social programs’, for wahtever good any of them ever did. Bye-bye ‘natural advantage’.

Every other government since has just milked Hydro as a convenient cash cow, and not even kept up with meeting the costs of the facilities’ ongoing depreciation. Now they have to do that all at once, and the rates just keep getting higher and higher.

In contrast, the CNR was plagued by poor management at the start, and for decades. I don’t think the government ever really had a very clear idea just what they wanted to do with it ~ and a lot of the top management thought they’d build a little empire of their own, something like the CPR had done.

They plunged into buying steamships, and building swank hotels, and a lot of the areas they’d laid rail into were already serviced by the CPR, with not really enough traffic for one railway let alone two. That all added to the bonded indebtedness, and the interest payments thereon. (I think one of their latter day CEOs when it was still government owned spent a small fortune renovating an old caboose into his luxurious private office.)