1 Newfoundland and Labrador There''s no sign on the Trans-Canada Highway that marks its start, or its end, in Newfoundland. Sure, there''s a sign and a stylized map on the sidewalk outside St. John''s City Hall that calls itself "Km 0," but the Trans-Canada itself was moved away years ago. When the highway was opened in 1962, it was routed through the downtowns of many of the cities it connected because merchants wanted the business from the visitors it would bring. Heavy trucks started using the wider, better-built road, and those local merchants quickly changed their minds. Now, the official highway usually bypasses the city and St. John''s is no different. That''s why, today, the Trans-Canada officially begins beside the municipal dump on the outskirts of town.
Maybe that''s also why there''s no sign. Peter and I drove to a boat ramp that drops into Quidi Vidi Gut, the harbour on the north edge of St. John''s, and jostled with too many tourists at the wharf for too few parking spaces. There''s a craft brewery there and a few souvenir stores and the whole area is very quaint, with brightly coloured wooden buildings at the base of the low cliffs. Fortunately, nobody had a boat or wanted to park in the ocean itself, so I backed the Lexus into the cold water for the official start of our long journey west. It was early June, and we were wearing sweaters and jackets for the single-digit chill. At the last minute, I scooped some salt water into a plastic bottle to carry to the Pacific and then we drove into the mist to nearby Quidi Vidi Lake. This seemed the right place to begin the actual highway drive.
The official Trans-Canada was moved out to the ring road in the 1990s and that four-lane highway was extended east to the edge of the Robin Hood Bay Regional Waste Management Facility in 1999. There, the 7,700-kilometre national icon ends without notice under a bridge. A regular two-lane industrial road continues on for four dismal kilometres to a hard stop at the lake. I would be writing stories along the way for the Globe and Mail , and shot a phone video at the lake decrying the lack of a sign. I''m not alone. On Google Maps, there''s a locator pin and a few reviews that feel the same way. "Put up a sign please would like the satisfaction of acknowledging I came to the end of the road lol," wrote A Maze the previous year. The eloquently named arseface2k wrote that "they have a whole park set up for where Terry Fox started his run and not even a measly sign for this, which you could argue is more important.
" And a guy named Joe Caines wrote: "Am I there?? Did I make it?? Guess we will never know. Over 7000 km. Nothing. So much history of our country is connected to this hiway. Well, when I get there again, in June, I''m bringing my own spray paint, make my own plaque." He''s right that a huge part of Canada''s history is tied in some way to the Trans-Canada Highway. For postwar Newfoundlanders, the federal government used the promise of a highway as an enticement for Confederation: it agreed to pay the costs of the Newfoundland Railway that already crossed the island, and to pay the entire cost of a reliable, regular ferry route to link the island at Port aux Basques with the mainland. More important, Newfoundlanders knew that if and when a Trans-Canada Highway should be built, the Feds would pay for a significant portion of its construction.
This was a big deal: at almost 1,000 kilometres, it would be the second-longest stretch of any province, after Ontario. Not that Newfoundlanders really cared about the rest of Canada. "The majority of people here in Newfoundland just think of it as a road across the island," Lloyd Adams told me at his home in Whitbourne. "But I would think that those people have probably never been off the island." I met Lloyd in 2012 and sat down with him and his wife, Audrey, on their 48th wedding anniversary to talk about the Trans-Canada. He was fresh out of high school in 1953 when he landed a job as a surveyor''s assistant for the new highway, earning $105 per month for holding a tape measure and plotting points on rudimentary maps. His team of a half-dozen men slept in tents and were in the bush for weeks at a time with no generators, no ATVs, no power saws. They worked from a camp, and when they completed five kilometres of surveying, they broke camp and moved it to the next new start, pressing across the island.
They had the better job, too. Another team of a half-dozen men swung the axes that cleared the way. The beginning of the new road to be constructed was at the corner of Stamps Lane and Freshwater Road in St. John''s, about three kilometres from the city hall, back when there was just a farm and a couple of houses at the intersection. They headed west from there. "Back then, what we were really doing was pioneering," said Lloyd. "I don''t think I realized the challenges of the things we did, because it was just a job. We were in canvas tents, and the bathroom was a two-holer in the back.
" They pushed on, five kilometres at a time, one of a number of crews doing the same job across the new province. Ponds were drained and muskegs filled for the road to run across, and more often than not, all the heavy work was done with picks and spades for the extra employment it created. Gravel trucks backed into a quarry to be hand-loaded by pairs of men with shovels. And when they were done in the late 1950s, and the road was finally complete from St. John''s to Port aux Basques -- avoiding out-of-the-way Labrador, of course -- few people appreciated the physical effort it took. Edward McCourt, an author and professor at the University of Saskatchewan, drove the length of the highway with his wife, Margaret, in 1963, the year after the Trans-Canada Highway was declared fully open. In Newfoundland, two-thirds of it was still unpaved. "A wonderful road," he was told by a truck driver at a coffee stop.
"The lots in St. John''s is full of cars folks like you drove over from Port aux Basques and didn''t figure was worth driving back. A wonderful, wonderful road." McCourt''s account of the journey in his book The Road Across Canada is perceptive and graphic and hard to imagine today: Rock-fills lightly coated with sand or gravel (the kind of road bed that keeps a man vibrating steadily for hours after he has stopped driving); dense clouds of dust hanging over the road for miles, through which monstrous trucks and cats (lights ablaze and visible through the dust for ten feet) bore down upon us with terrifying speed; roller-coaster forest trails hardly more than one-way tracks; blind hills and paralyzing right-angle curves -- these were the orthodox hazards of the unpaved sections of the Trans-Canada Highway in Newfoundland. Premier Joey Smallwood, who had brought the province into Confederation in 1949 and negotiated every facet of its integration within Canada, was well aware of the embarrassment of the Trans-Canada Highway and in no hurry to improve it. There was now a ferry service paid for by the Feds to bring goods to and from the island, and a railway bankrolled by the Feds to carry them wherever they needed to go. If any improvements were made to the Trans-Canada, the province would have to pay half the cost, and canny Joey just pleaded poverty. Schools were more important, he said.
Hospitals were more important. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker would just have to wait for his glorious highway while everything else took priority. When the Trans-Canada was declared open in 1962 at Rogers Pass -- at the national ceremony, not the cheeky B.C. one -- there was a convoy of politicians from across the country but no one from Newfoundland. Joey didn''t want to pay 50/50 for the highway, and neither he nor Diefenbaker would blink. It took a new governing party and a new prime minister to get things moving again, with a new deal in which Ottawa agreed to pay 90 percent of the cost of completing the highway to a high-quality, national standard. The country would mark its centenary in 1967, and Prime Minister Lester Pearson wanted everything ready for that showcase to the world.
McCourt saw regular road signs that declared: We''ll finish the drive in ''65, Port Aux Basques to St. John''s, thanks to Lester B. Pearson, and when the money started flowing in soon after, the curves were straightened, the road was widened, and the asphalt went down. It took a couple of years, but the Trans-Canada Highway would finally be complete. The road was wide and smooth for Peter and me as we drove west. The landscape seemed empty, with low trees and pond-spattered fields all the more desolate for the low-lying cloud that kept obscuring the horizon. There was rock right beneath the stubby grass, and erratic boulders were scattered about where they''d been moved by ancient ice. Quarries scraped out hillsides beside the road.
You can graze sheep here, but that''s about it. There were rarely houses, except in the few communities down by the coast. Sometimes, you could see the ocean off to the left or right -- St. John''s is on a large peninsula attached to the bulk of the island by a strip of land less than 10 kilometres wide -- but the sea was grey that day, the wind cruel. I remembered a comment Lloyd Adams had made just before I left his house in Whitbourne. "It was tough land to work on," he said as I''d put on my shoes, ready to head out to drive to the other side of the country. "These days, you don''t even notice when you''re speeding past. Now we have a four-lane highway and it only takes 45 minutes to get to Walmart.
I guess that''s progress." The highway is constantly upgraded, and the government announced a $306 million project in 2023 to add lanes to it at some of its narrower points. Much of the Trans-Canada on the island is stil.