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Reviews
| Canada's "New Main Street": The Trans-Canada Highway as Ideal and Reality, 1912–1956 (Transformation Series 11). By David W. Monaghan. Ottawa: Canada Science and Technology Museum, 2002. ix+90 pp., illus., maps, tables, notes, bibl., index. $20 (Canad.) pb (ISBN 0-660-18720-5).
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Canada's "New Main Street" considers the politics behind the construction of the Trans-Canada Highway or, rather, the politics that thwarted its construction from the early years of the automobile age until the 1950s. This interpretation of the Canadian experience with federalism (or dominionism) in public works policy was most appreciated by this reader, but then I might be the perfect audience for such a book. Those who lack my burning interest in highway politics should be content to know that if they ever need an authoritative account of the Trans-Canada Highway, they can pull Canada's "New Main Street" down from the shelf or order it through interlibrary loan.
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David Monaghan does not purport to analyze the technological evolution of road building in Canada but, rather, the political construction of a massive technological artifact with some cultural and social-historical observations sprinkled in. Progress and lack of progress on the highway are discussed in terms of the politics of unemployment relief in several eras; the electoral fortunes of the Liberal and Conservative parties; regional rivalries among the eastern, prairie, and western provinces; and, most significantly, the constitutional, administrative, and financial relationships between Ottawa and the provincial governments. A major highway will always transform its environment, and the value of this book is in looking beyond the spatial dominance of such an imposing project to discern its highly contingent origins—an effort based on extensive research in parliamentary proceedings, budget documents, and the reports of numerous agencies and special commissions.
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It does no injustice to this work, or to the nation of Canada, to dwell on the comparisons with federal road building south of the border because the author offers numerous explicit contrasts between U.S. and Canadian policies. Canadian constitutional provisions made it very difficult to chip away at provincial autonomy in road construction, which meant that the government in Ottawa lacked any agency with the expertise or the influence exercised by the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads. As a result, the technology of the Trans-Canada Highway was largely derived from the work of U.S. engineers. Canada enacted a gas tax in the 1920s, the same period when state governments in the U.S. rallied to this method of funding highways, but, unlike many U.S. jurisdictions, Canada did not restrict the proceeds to highway expenditures, with predictable results in limiting construction. The discussion of the legislative deliberations leading up to the Trans-Canada Highway's funding breakthrough of 1956 provides an international parallel to Mark Rose's study of similar efforts underway at the same time in the U.S. Congress (Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1979) but with some twists that serve to emphasize the differences between the two nations, such as the divergent roles played by the trucking industry.
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| Road scholars will find much of value in Canada's "New Main Street," as will anyone seeking a narrative about a major construction project that does not cast its subject as a triumph of progress. It is difficult to imagine much broader appeal for a tightly focused discussion concerned with the political nuances of highway construction, but that should not serve to diminish the author's accomplishment or our gratitude to the Canada Science and Technology Museum for making this study available. |
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