Classic Canuck Collection
Celebrate Canada’s 150th at this fantastic car museum
EOSHAWA, Ont. ver heard of a McKay? How about a Tudhope, a GrayDort or a Brooks? Virtually unknown today, they were all Canadian cars, and all are represented in the Canadian Automotive Museum.
Located in downtown Oshawa, Ont., in a 1920s car dealership, the museum owns what executive director Alexander Gates says is the country’s most significant collection of Canadian cars.
“We look at important Canadian stories,” Gates says. “We’re not just an automotive museum, but a Canadian museum.”
Cars were still known as horseless carriages at the turn of the 20th century, basically high-wheeled buggies with engines attached. Some would evolve into more modernized machines, rolling out by the hundreds of thousands from large factories.
But for every Henry Ford or David Buick, there were dozens of inventors making a handful of cars in a tiny garage, or whose small companies lasted only a few years. This was happening all across the continent, and almost every province and state had at least one auto company at some time.
Because designing a car from scratch was so difficult and expensive, many Canadian manufacturers bought components from American automakers, or in some cases obtained a license to build a version of the American car for Canadian consumers. The museum’s Tudhope, for example, was a version of the Indiana-based McIntyre, but built in Orillia, Ont.
The business failure rates were high, and most early automakers were on precarious foundations, but the Canadian companies were especially vulnerable. If their American suppliers closed, they usually did as well.
Of the 90 vehicles in the museum’s collection, about two-thirds were built in Canada, and two of them are the last of their kind. A Kennedy, made in Preston, Ont. — now part of Cambridge — and initially advertised as the “farmer’s car” with a price of $840, is the lone survivor of about 75 the company made in 1909 and 1910.
A 1914 Galt, one of two hybrid prototypes built and the only one left, contained a two-cylinder gasoline engine that was used to generate power for the car’s electric motor — in effect a century-old version of the backup system on today’s Chevrolet Volt. The Galt is currently in Los Angeles on loan to the Petersen Museum, part of a co-operative program Gates is trying to establish with other museums.
The Oshawa museum was founded in 1963, but after receiving a major donation of cars from the estate of Canadian business magnate John (Bud) McDougald in 1995, it stagnated. Gates, who was brought on in 2014, is on a mission to turn it into an important attraction. There are Canada 150 sesquicentennial grants and private donations — General Motors’ Canadian operations are based in Oshawa, and it has contributed but is not affiliated with the museum — that are being used to install air conditioning and better lighting, improve the displays and spruce up some of the more tired vehicles.
In conjunction with the Oshawa Public Library, Gates is also organizing the museum’s huge collection of auto-related books, magazines, service manuals and advertising brochures, with the goal of making them more accessible to researchers and restorers.
None of this work comes cheap. A 1911 De Dion-Bouton, a small French car from McDougald’s collection, sits in the lobby on a tire that finally deteriorated enough to split. It’s intended to show visitors how difficult it is to keep a car in good condition even when it isn’t being driven.
Gates is careful to balance appearance with authenticity. A 1909 Ford Model T on display will not have its cracked leather upholstery or threadbare top replaced. It may be the oldest Canadian-built Model T in existence, produced at Ford’s plant in what is now Windsor, Ont.
“The upholstery is original and the top may be,” Gates says. “We won’t change that. But it’s also very difficult to restore a car like this because it’s very hard to find parts for it.”
Fords weren’t built rapidly on a moving assembly line until 1913, and the Canadian plant only made 458 copies for 1909 versus more than 100,000 in 1926.
In addition to its rarer models, including a 1925 Brooks steam-powered car made in Stratford, Ont., the museum owns several McLaughlin models. The McLaughlin company started as a local carriage-maker but turned to cars in 1908, using Buick as its engineering base. Ten years later, it became General Motors of Canada.
There are also cars at the museum that were built by American-based automakers specifically for the Canadian market to get around government tariffs. They include as a 1957 Dodge Regent and 1949 Meteor. There’s even a 1971 Manic GT, one of 160 Renault-powered fibreglass sports cars built by a shortlived company in Quebec.
The building renovations are moving as quickly as possible, but Gates has longer-term plans for the museum’s focus. Right now he’s asking Canadians to send photos and stories of their vehicles to canadianautomotivemuseum.com for an exhibit launching this year.
“There aren’t that many really old Canadian cars left, and that’s a challenge,” Gates says. “But we’re still making cars in Canada, and we’re still defining what they are. We’re focusing on cars that tell the Canadian story, and getting people engaged in that.”