Completing the First Trans-Canada Highway in Ontario
 
For 2018, a group of volunteers are organizing to commemorate an historic event that occurred in 1943.  For the first time, a highway linked Eastern and Western Canada entirely on Canadian soil.
 
In 1939, there was no highway link across Ontario between Quebec and Manitoba.  There was a dream of a trans-Ontario highway, but that provincial dream was subsumed under the national dream of a Trans-Canada Highway (TCH).  A Trans-Canada Highway would eventually link all nine provinces, from the Maritimes on the east coast to British Columbia on the west. 
 
In 1939, there was no highway link across Northern Ontario . . .

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It has been called the bloodiest conflict in Canadian labour history, and it happened in our backyard.
Last night, driving west from Kapuskasing, I stopped at the sign that identifies the monument for the Reesor Siding Incident.  The light was failing, and I was late getting home, but I thought, This time I'm stopping.
How many times have we driven past a sign identifying an historic site or a monument or a plaque and said to ourselves, "Okay, interesting, but I'll stop next time."
I've always remembered my late father, Robert, telling me about the "incident".  I was away teaching in another northern community at that time. In 1963, Robert worked in management for Kimberly-Clark of Canada in Longlac, Ontario.  He had transitioned from lumberjack (after a near-fatal bush accident) to the job of safety supervisor. The incident moved him, and consequently I was moved.  The Lumber & Sawmill Workers' Union that had organized the Longlac wood industry was also operating in Kapuskasing District. When the union went on strike in Kap, where Kimberly-Clark had a decades-old mill under the name of Spruce Falls Power & Paper Co., the Greenstone area union members also struck . . .
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