CAR NATION
The first automobile revolution reshaped Canada in the twentieth century. Now get ready for the second.
CANADA’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE AUTOMOBILE GOES BACK TO THE FIRST DUSTY ATTEMPTS TO build homemade vehicles, when tinkerers such as Quebec’s Henry Seth Taylor crafted one of the original steam-powered cars in 1867, the year of Confederation. In 1912, Thomas Wilby and Jack Haney generated headlines for completing Canada’s first cross-country drive from Halifax to Alberni, B.C., in fifty-two days in an REO Special — though they put the car on a train from Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, to Winnipeg, owing to the lack of roads. By the 1920s, when the first automobile revolution, spawned in 1908 by Henry Ford’s Model T, was in full swing, Canadians had become the world’s second-leading consumers and producers of motor vehicles.
Of course, not every Canadian loved cars during that first auto revolution, nor the disruption that cars caused to society. Some saw the automobile as the apocalyptic devil’s wagon. In 1908, Prince Edward Islanders voted to ban motor vehicles entirely from their island, and newspapers on the island referred to cars as “terror wagons,” “instruments of death,” and “death dealing machines.” The prohibition was not lifted until 1919, and not without great debate. Many Prince Edward Islanders felt that allowing cars would completely upend their way of life; in that, they ultimately weren’t wrong.