Canadian National Railway (CNR) 100th Anniversary Photo Courtesy of CNR
Charles Melville Hays 1910
Wilfred Laurier
Completed in 1885, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was pivotal in creating Canada as we know it today. By the end of its first decade, the CPR was posting an annual profit of $15 million, and was cutting into the business of its main competitor in the eastern, the Grand Trunk Railway (GTR). Taking the challenge head-on, in 1896 the GTR hired Charles Melville Hays, to begin a transcontinental competition with the CPR. Hays initially focused on cutting costs in eastern Canada. By the time he committed to expand westward, there was a new kid on the block, the Canadian Northern Railway (CNoR), devoted to breaking up the CPR’s monopoly on western trade. In response to the GTR’s westward expansion plans, the CNoR sought to complete track to the Pacific Ocean quickly and proposed a partnership that would see the Grand Trunk build in the east while the CNoR built in the west.
Hays however, declined. Instead he petitioned the government to charter his railway to build across the prairies, and over the Yellowhead Pass and along the Skeena River to the Pacific. Hays stipulated that the government had to invest $6,400 per mile and provide a land grant of 5000 acres per mile. It was an election year and prime minister Wilfred Laurier, a Liberal, received Hays warmly. In the manner that John A. Macdonald had put the Conservative party’s stamp on the CPR thirty years earlier, Laurier wanted to affix his political mark to a competitor that would crack the CPR’s monopoly. Laurier put forward a complicated idea for what he called the National Transcontinental Railway. East of Winnipeg, the Canadian government would lay track to Moncton, New Brunswick. And west of Winnipeg, a newly created subsidiary of the GTR would build to the Pacific ocean.
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