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A couple of weeks ago, Tristan Hopper's National Post article "The grandiose — but failed — 1960s plan by an Ontario war hero to settle a ‘second Canada’ below the Arctic" caught my attention. Richard Rohmer had a very ambitious plan for the settlement of the Canadian Shield.

If things had gone Richard Rohmer’s way in the 1960s, the Canada of 2016 could have been home to as many as 70 million people.

Canada would have had a GDP rivalling that of the United Kingdom and new highways, new railways and new metropolises, all built in the sparsely populated boreal forest region that Rohmer came to call “Mid-Canada.” He would even help to spawn an entirely new type of citizen: The hearty, winter-loving “Mid-Canadian.”

Rohmer — a lawyer and decorated RCAF Wing Commander — was leading a charge to build a “second Canada” on top of the old one.

“It was a very simple concept; the country needed long range policies and plans for the future orderly development of this vast land that we have,” said Rohmer, 92, speaking by phone from his home in Collingwood, Ont.

[. . .]

In its heyday, Rohmer’s Mid-Canada plan attracted the attention of a who’s who of powerful Canadians: Captains of industry, bank CEOs, labour leaders, scientists and Aboriginal leaders and the patronage of former Prime Minister Lester Pearson and the Governor General.

“Canada’s future is inseparably linked with the development of Mid-Canada,” read a preliminary report. More zealous boosters even claimed that a Canada without the moxie to develop its boreal forest might as well meekly surrender to U.S. annexation.


A broad belt of territory from the Yukon through to Labrador would be populated by millions of people living in new resource towns, with the net effect (Rohmer promised) of increasing Canada's heft in the world.



This idea keeps resurfacing. A September 2014 article in The Walrus, "If We Build It, They Will Stay" argued straightforwardly for this plan to be implemented now, for this national vision

The thing is, Rohmer is a bad author. His technothriller novels were filled with unbelievable plots and one-dimensional personalities, selling only because they were Canadian. The Mid-Canada Development Corridor, too, is flawed. Why should Canadian nationalism manifest itself in this project? Would Rohmer's model of colonization of the Canadian sub-Arctic actually have worked in producing viable communities, not fragile one-industry cities? Where would the money for these projects come from? I can imagine this ending in much the same way as the Soviet colonization of the Siberia Far North, with fragile regional economies unable to retain people once the subsidies end amid environmental ruins.

Meanwhile, I am unconvinced that there is a natural constituency for this project. Scott Gilmore in MacLean's noted that, by most metrics, the Canadian North is terribly underdeveloped and that Canadians by and large are fine with this. At Vice, meanwhile, James Wilt's article "Why Scott Gilmore’s Latest Claims About the North Are Bullshit" makes the point via a series of interviews that much of what Gilmore would term development (large-scale resource exploitation, particularly) would be unwelcome among the people who actually live there. What would the First Nations think of this onslaught? Would Canadians really be ready to massively increase public spending?

That said, bad ideas have been implemented before. The aforementioned Soviet colonization of the northern Siberia comes to mind, for instance. I can imagine that, in the mindset of certain kinds of development ideologues in the mid-20th century, this might actually seen to be a forward-looking plan that might well be implemented. A strong Canadian federal government that paid little attention to First Nations might well plunge ahead with this project, regardless the costs.

What do you think? Could the Mid-Canada Development Corridor ever have been realized?
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