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Episode 24 - Getting the Whole Country Railed (Part 2)
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Imagine if train nerds had built railways in this country instead of corrupt capitalists.
Imagine if people had access to Transport Fever or OpenTTD and could actually imagine what it was like to build the railways.
Imagine if there was actually a bridge to Vancouver Island and not a railway being built to where it wasn't intended to go.
Imagine if there weren't thousands of kilometres of stone you have to dig through to just get a third of the way to the Pacific Ocean from Ontario.
Yeah. The Canadian Pacific Railway was being built on hard mode.
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Shawinigan Moments is written and recorded on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Stó:lō (Stolo), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) first nations in what is otherwise called Vancouver.
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Transcript
Societal Pressure and Defiance in Voice Training
00:00:00
Speaker
Nobody cares about my voice. They'll just go and be like, oh, tits. I mean, not for me, but that's because I bind. Yeah, you're in a different boat than I am.
00:00:12
Speaker
If they go, oh, tits, that means something has happened to my binder. Something unfortunate. i do appreciate November Kelly for giving all trans femmes everywhere and AMAB and B-folk the permission to not fuck with voice training.
00:00:32
Speaker
Yeah. The subject of trans
Pope's Interests: Humor and Misinterpretation
00:00:35
Speaker
people. um So we have a new poop. A new poop. Yeah, we have a new poop. Well, i knew I knew His Holiness the Pope.
00:00:43
Speaker
He has like, he's consumed hot dogs. He has obviously been to, he cheers for the Chicago Cubs. He, oh no, wait, he cheers for the White Sox. I can't remember, I don't fucking care which team he cheers for.
00:00:59
Speaker
He's watched baseball. He's probably the first Pope to actually regularly attend an MLB game. He's the first Pope to have consumed Malort, ah beverage I have yet to consume.
Art Funding and Personal Experiences
00:01:10
Speaker
He has probably been in the presence of the Bean, a monument to man's hubris. i have ive Wait, that means that the Pope and I have stood in the same spot because I too have seen Anish Kapoor's The Bean. The Bean.
00:01:27
Speaker
It's in honor of Mr. Bean, right? that's what That's what this whole thing is about. I think it's in the honor of ah of getting that sweet, sweet art grant money. Which I, ah as an independent game developer, I am in favor of.
00:01:41
Speaker
get that Get that fucking bag. Put weird street art. Put weird civic art.
Exhaustion and Future Podcast Leadership
00:01:50
Speaker
Fund queer games with with Canadian government funding.
00:01:54
Speaker
And if you're from the CMF and listening to me, ah please approve my grant.
00:02:01
Speaker
This is not for our podcast, I assume. yeah No, no. I was going to say, like, I don't remember this conversation in the slightest. We haven't asked for any grants. No, I usually try and put an application every year or so.
00:02:16
Speaker
ah Fair enough. Well, shall we start the show? Sure. We'll see what we do with the... I apologize to the listeners. i am extremely delirious from basically getting no sleep the last few weeks.
00:02:33
Speaker
And in three days, i will collapse into a pile of dust and we'll figure out who Heather picks as the next host.
00:02:42
Speaker
All right, I'm starting the show. Because I'll be a pile of dust.
Introducing Hosts Heather and Tamarack
00:02:52
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Shawinigan Moments. My name is Heather and I use she or they pronouns. ah My name is Tamarack. I am pending a total collapse of self physically and mentally.
00:03:03
Speaker
My pronouns are was were.
00:03:09
Speaker
Christ. I think you you you and I are not doing so well. like um I managed to wreck my knee in a bad way.
Tamarack's Knee Injury and Mobility Challenges
00:03:19
Speaker
Not the worst way. It's not an ACL, but it did require attention. And now I'm like incapable of walking more than maybe 300 meters in a single day. like I went to the mall yesterday and I did try to buy a few things because...
00:03:35
Speaker
I had things I needed to get and I made it all the way to the other end the mall and I went like, I'm a fucking idiot. Why did I do this to myself as I'm hobbling through this long corridor with a cane?
00:03:48
Speaker
Look on the bright side, though. ah hear Whiterun is hiring new guards.
00:03:54
Speaker
And knee injuries are not a deal breaker for them.
London Underground Incident and Softball Fall
00:04:00
Speaker
You know, this is like okay this is my life advice to everybody. So I fell off of a train back in December when I was in London and I was wearing heels. And this is not hard to do. but londons We're talking about trains today, but London's Underground Network is the oldest metro in the world.
00:04:18
Speaker
And a lot of its stations definitely show evidence of that, such as platforms that are lower than the trains are high. And so I twisted my ankle, but I also kind of twisted my knee in a way. And I felt that was funny, but the ankle was more acute. So I kind of went, whatever. then spent the past few months of my knee giving out.
00:04:35
Speaker
And then finally, because i am the smartest woman on um this fucking planet, I decided to go play softball with a knee that's kind of acting funny. And guess what? I take a spill, did get a double play.
00:04:46
Speaker
If there's anything I need to say that was great about this is I got a double play, but I fucking fell in the process. And then couple days later, I realized I think I fucked my knee real bad. And of course, one x-ray and then an um MRI later, it was like, yeah, you're not supposed to do anything for a while. Don't travel. Don't lift heavy things. Don't play softball.
Summer Plans Cancelled by Injury: Was it Worth it?
00:05:11
Speaker
So like, I just wiped out my entire summer plans in one stupid move. I mean, check the scoreboard. Was it worth it? Well, got the double play. There you go.
00:05:24
Speaker
But we lost the game. Oh, then no, it was not worth it. Yeah. So needless to say, I've been sort of homebound for the past, what, three weeks? And you've heard nothing but bitching and moaning from me.
Game Development Crunch and Personal Well-being
00:05:38
Speaker
that's not true i've been in a huge state i haven't been hearing anything we saw each other for dinner last week was that last week yes oh my god last week sunday see i am coming off of five months of protracted crunch because being a game developer is not a good career choice guys guys Guys, girls, and pals, don't don't don't get into this industry.
00:06:05
Speaker
Fucking sucks. So I'm going to turn into a pile of dust like the moment this contract ends. Like a fucking Disney villain or ah like a demon from Tabletop.
00:06:19
Speaker
i'm i i'm just I'm guessing this is the official announcement that we're looking for a new host because um I don't know how to do any sort of necromancy. Well, according to Pathfinder 2nd Edition, you can't revive a corpse from dust.
00:06:36
Speaker
And also you can't revile a corpse unwillingly. And let me tell you, when I pass, I ain't coming back.
Reopening of Chinese Heritage Museum in Lytton
00:06:45
Speaker
Anyway, Tam, I believe you told me you have a news item.
00:06:53
Speaker
Speaking of bringing old things back from a pile of dust, the Chinese Heritage Museum in Lytton has been rebuilt and is reopening or has reopened. I think it reopened ah the second weekend of May or the first one.
Impact of Lytton Fires on Chinese Heritage
00:07:11
Speaker
ah's excellent yeah This is excellent news because for those of you who don't know, back when 2021 we had this horrific heat wave that gave us 43 degrees Celsius here in Vancouver, which is a temperature that should never happen here and yet somehow has because this thing that our dear neighbors to the east do not believe in happens.
00:07:33
Speaker
And almost 50 degrees in Lytton, which subsequently burned to the ground. Yeah, because a forest fire started or a wildfire rather, and it took out the entire town. And like, this is a town I had stopped in numerous times, never hung around in, but you know, stopped to get fuel and lunch at least once or twice in my lifetime.
00:07:53
Speaker
Yeah, in a blink of an eye, like the entire town had to evacuate and it was practically leveled. i think there were maybe a handful of buildings that survived, but pretty much everybody lost their homes.
00:08:06
Speaker
Yeah, the the town center was completely destroyed. um And then 2022, during a heat wave where further record setting temperatures were achieved in Lytton, I think it actually crossed 50 in 2022.
00:08:22
Speaker
The town, which was barely beginning reconstruction, burned down again. entirely and this time the like little suburbs and cottages around it were not spared ah so it was pretty much completely charred no turn to ash and this sucked because one of the things that was really cool about linton is there was what was called a joss house uh which were just like um I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, but they're there're places that Chinese rail workers would construct to basically be community centers as well as like spiritual centers. So they'd put idols, paper, or for physical, and that would they would be like places of spiritual worship.
00:09:07
Speaker
The Chinese Heritage Museum in Lytton was one of those houses that kind of got purchased by a couple who renovated it and basically started collecting artifacts and remnants and scraps of papers and stuff from Lytton and kind of the Fraser Canyon area of all the rail workers who built ah this whole fucking country.
Chinese Workers' Role in Canadian Railways
00:09:32
Speaker
Sadly, during the first fire, the Heritage Museum, which was in town center, was completely burned to the ground, along with basically all of its all every all the memorabilia that they had, because a lot of it was sadly paper, a lot of newspapers, a lot of school books, particularly from the Fraser Canyon area.
00:09:52
Speaker
I think a lot of them from Lytton itself ah had a little school there they built. And yeah, it was it was really sad. i was ah people who know me knew i was like legitimately upset about it for quite some time. so I'm glad to see it bounce back with some donations by some other folks who hung on to a bunch of memorabilia from that time from the from the interior.
00:10:15
Speaker
yeah We're going to be talking about this particular... We were talking about Lytton. We're going to be talking about um the role that Chinese workers had in involved with respect to building the railway. Not in this episode, in the final episode of this series. so and The heritage of Chinese immigrants to Canada, purpose ah you know in particular with building this railway, should be acknowledged and ah Places like this Joss House in Lytton definitely are markers of that point in history.
00:10:51
Speaker
yeah there's like a there's a certain amount because the the workers themselves were kind of transient they were following the construction of the railroad they didn't get to build permanent routes until basically they were deep into the interior so there's still some small pockets of their communities that existed in largely towns that later became ghost towns they kind of dispersed or re-congregated in chinatown in vancouver um But also, it's important to note that for a large portion of our history, the role of Chinese migrant labor was actively erased, ah which made places like this Heritage Museum absolutely crucial in keeping that, keeping the evidence of those workers, their families, their culture alive.
00:11:44
Speaker
ah Because also where a lot of them ended up going was back home to the country that they came here from. Mostly the United States. I don't want to spoil too much of what's coming down for the next
Canada's Railway Construction Efforts
00:11:57
Speaker
episode. But ah what Tam touches on here is going to be become very apparent once we start talking about the actual construction of this railway. Which, believe it or not...
00:12:09
Speaker
i'm oh i'm not I'm only going to scratch the surface of it because it's good this is actually going to be where we talk about how so stupid early Canada was. Canada has a lot of stupid moments, but early Confederation Canada is an incredibly dumb country.
00:12:24
Speaker
Yeah, the it turns out that the like ah the white European engineers who worked on the railroads were absolute fucking morons. And the railway probably wouldn't have been built without the geographical and geological understanding of native peoples and the hard work.
00:12:42
Speaker
And also a lot of degrees, skilled expertise in railway building. Of the migrant labors. Because a lot of these folks were hot off of. Railway projects down south.
00:12:52
Speaker
As well as. ah Railway projects. ah Like in their home countries. yeah Yeah. Canada was actually pretty late to the game. In the whole rail building. ah You're jumping ahead.
00:13:07
Speaker
It's relevant to this. Yeah.
00:13:12
Speaker
Like, and look, if you want if you want to call spoilers for historical events that happened hundreds of years ago, I'm sorry. That's dumb.
00:13:24
Speaker
Your episode can flow after the news is done. Anyway, that's the news.
00:13:32
Speaker
I'm so fucking tired, guys. I'm so tired.
00:13:38
Speaker
I hope you're going to bed after this. No, I'm not. I have five more sticky notes worth of stuff to do. in our last episode, we actually discussed quite a few items, but in particular, we talked about British Columbia joining ah through Confederation. It was ah pre-existing territory. It was the colony of British Columbia. It was two separate colonies prior to that.
00:13:58
Speaker
But one of the barriers for Canada and British Columbia to coexist was not only the prairies, but a big giant mountain chain. Two if you live in Vancouver.
00:14:10
Speaker
as I get little bit further on this mountain chain is going to be the least like it's not going to be the biggest problem that faces this railway is it's going to be a ah little element of Canada that's not talked about as often.
00:14:23
Speaker
Now, British Columbia, again, is a very different
British Columbia's British Ties and Distinction
00:14:25
Speaker
province climate wise from the rest of the country. Much of northern British Columbia is considered cold and very snowy, but like you don't get the sort of extremes that you'd see in the prairies.
00:14:35
Speaker
ah You get you know different kinds of extremes because you get very far north ah city. Prince Rupert is one of the rainiest places on Earth. Yes, actually, a lot of people who have like ah certain skin conditions with respect to the sun happen to like living in Prince Rupert because I think 250 to days out of the year. Yeah, it's like three quarters a year, poor rain and it fucking pours there. Holy shit.
00:15:03
Speaker
But like even temperatures are kind of low for the place here because like the coldest it nor typically gets in the winter on average. And like places like Fort Nelson is like the mid to low negative 20s. But if you go to like Victoria, Victoria rarely, if ever, it gets below zero and doesn't frequently get above 25. Victoria is considered one of the more temperate sorry temperant parts of this country.
00:15:24
Speaker
In fact, it's the... Temperature in Victoria is so stable that the National Research Council actually runs a observatory just outside of Victoria, which I've been to. It's a nice little facility. Unfortunately, Harper's Cuts made it that the visitor center was closed.
00:15:43
Speaker
Thank you, Stephen Harper, for cutting science like you cut so many other things. The way that British Columbia was described around the time of joining Confederation was that it was basically a second England on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.
00:15:59
Speaker
And the province in a lot of ways was more in tune with British culture than the original members of Confederation, it could be argued. If you go to Victoria, you'll kind of see remnants of this.
00:16:10
Speaker
And it's kind of also the reason why I struggle with ever grouping in British Columbia with the rest of the Western provinces, just because its origins in the creation of this colonial exercise is It just it this had a different role with respect to like its prehistory or pre-confederation history, I should say.
00:16:33
Speaker
Many of the early occupants of like British Columbia were actually from um from like other British colonies. Whereas like if you look at Alberta and Saskatchewan in in particular, many of them were ex-Americans. It's not to say all of them, but many were.
00:16:49
Speaker
Just to give me an idea of like the sort of temperature we have in British Columbia here. So because of all this, British Columbia was extremely important to both Canada and the British Empire as joined confederation, helped stabilize BC's place within the greater context of North America, keeps it American hands.
00:17:07
Speaker
For a while, a good portion of what is now today British Columbia was considered Oregon territory and was going to probably get manifest destiny and all this shit. and they definitely they definitely wanted that um which is kind of why culturally particularly on vancouver island there was that strong british presence because the original purpose of victoria was of course to be a british naval outpost to prevent why alts fair yeah to prevent that very uh that very annexation
00:17:39
Speaker
Squamelt's a good thing to bring up because one of the big problems of British Columbia, as I mentioned, is that it actually had a lot of geographical barriers in the way in terms of getting immigrants from elsewhere in the colonies that the British still held into its own lands.
00:17:54
Speaker
Well, the sort of. Sort of. I'm going to explain this. A certain type of colonist and settler. They had trouble getting getting into yeah British Columbia.
Navigating Cape Horn and Maritime Dangers
00:18:04
Speaker
Yes.
00:18:05
Speaker
One of the things that they would do is they would just send a boat around Cape Horn. Yes. Which is, Tam, tell me, do you know much about Cape Horn? Can you describe why Cape Horn is a nightmare?
00:18:16
Speaker
ah it's the place It's the place where the ocean decides, fuck you, you're going to die here. Yeah, Cape Horn is at the south tip of, like, a very southern tip of the Americas. This is where places like Argentina and Chile meet. I think that's the best way to describe it. yes I think I might be mixing it up there.
00:18:37
Speaker
it's ah it's It's also near where that bit of Antarctica beckons you to come to your death. Yes. So that's also the reason why the Panama Canal, despite it being a mechanism to speed up ah commerce and trade and that sort of thing, was also because it was far fucking safer.
00:18:55
Speaker
Yes. It turns out all those all those like locks and channels and everything to get you between the the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean The thing is, is that the reason why you have all that elevation change is not so much because there's a difference in elevation in the land that you have to like go up and go down.
00:19:13
Speaker
It's a little bit of that. Mostly it's because Pacific and Atlantic Oceans are themselves at very different elevations. which is what makes the cap Cape Horn so fucking dangerous, because that's where that all meets.
00:19:25
Speaker
The province's early years were quite fraught with government stability. The first premier was an Irishman named John Foster McCraight, whose reign barely lasted over a year until he was taken down in a non-confidence vote in December of 1872, succeeded by a man named Amor de Cosmos,
00:19:44
Speaker
who hailed originally from Nova Scotia. I wanted to mention him because of his name, but he actually becomes important in some aspects later on. He'd be premier for a year, resigning over a mining scandal involving iron deposits found on Tuxedo Island.
00:19:56
Speaker
ah There was some bribery going on with respect to that. After his resignation, he'd move on to federal politics, where he'd win a seat in the House of Commons. holding it for four years until losing it to johnny mcdonald after he returned in 1878 which is actually going to be important this is for the writing of victoria just victoria that was the name of the writing yeah there there weren't like a lot of population like uh I'm a broken record on this. Most of British Columbia is a post-war invention.
00:20:25
Speaker
That what which wasn't a post-war invention was a post-railroad invention. Yeah. And when we talk about the creation of this railway, you're going to be like, wow, British Columbia could have been way different if certain things had lined up differently.
00:20:39
Speaker
And actually, as a result, this railway was going to be goddamn important if this paper country was going to work out. If you remember from our previous episode on the Telegraph, I made mention of a Sir Hugh Allen, a Scottish Canadian who, with the help of the Merchants Bank of Canada, became a very
Railway Politics and Corruption in Early Canada
00:20:55
Speaker
rich man. So that we could just go back to the Telegraph episode, you'll hear all about this particular individual.
00:21:01
Speaker
Alan had become involved with the Brandtruck Railway, which by the time of British Columbia joining the country, had an extensive of railway network throughout cele Ontario, northward into Montreal, deep into the American Northeast to cities like new New York, Boston, and Portland and Maine.
00:21:16
Speaker
The federal government asked the GTR if they would build the railway to the Pacific, but refused. Leading me to believe that this, alongside some shenanigans with rail gauges and a later desire to go on it alone with building its link to the other side of the country, is what ended up killing it later on.
00:21:32
Speaker
I will eventually come up of a way to discuss the Grand Trunk Railway in detail, but not in this particular series. We're only talking about the Canadian Pacific. Because it made it to the Pacific.
00:21:44
Speaker
In specific. The GTR made to the Pacific, sort of. but Again, but we're not going to get into this episode. 1871, he became the president of the Montreal Northern Colonization Railway, which was named the Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa, and Occidental Railway in 1874. This was formed by the province Quebec because the GTR lobbied against the federal government for subsidies to be given to any railway looking to compete against it.
00:22:11
Speaker
Seeing is going to be built along the Ottawa and St. Lawrence River, their territory. Yeah, i I want to write I want to revise my earlier statement that Canada was built on the rails ah was built on rails. ah No, it was actually built on just enormous amounts of corruption.
00:22:26
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, this is this this. Corruption is important to this episode. ah This project failed twice before it got any sort of steam. Forgive the pun.
00:22:38
Speaker
With the first attempt in 1853 the second in 1869. took financing from London.
00:22:43
Speaker
it took financing from london Despite GTR's best efforts to secretly fuck over the company from completing its goals, but it would eventually link what is now Gatineau, Quebec to Montreal and Quebec City.
00:22:55
Speaker
Doing what VIA Rail's high-speed line could not.
00:23:01
Speaker
i' am firm I firmly believe that we are going to get this high speed rail line. it's going It's going to be dog shit and it's going to be awful, but I think we are actually going to get it now. I don't think so, but what I think we're going to get, I think i think i think Carney will deliver to us high frequency rail and that would be better than what we already have yeah and like honestly that's better than high that's better than high speed rail ah because it'll actually like get delivered we'll talk about that when we talk about via rail we'll have to talk about with via rail
00:23:36
Speaker
That whole though that that cold corridor is a nightmare and is a product of its time. Yeah. Entirely flat portion of the country somehow impossible to build a fucking rail line through.
00:23:49
Speaker
Pushing aside Alan, we also have to talk about David Lewis McPherson, a shipping magnate who would become a founding member of the Senate as well. This man sucked for a lot of reasons, largely because he couldn't figure out why nobody would settle in the Canadian prairies, nor didn't understand the Northwest Rebellion.
00:24:08
Speaker
Yeah, but that was... was everybody upset about but yeah that? Yeah, that was pretty fucking normal for people in Upper Canada at that point in time. Like, holy Yeah.
00:24:21
Speaker
So we have like we have men inside government who have have links to government who want to have things happen. What do you you think is going to happen here? Well, looking at their other ah ingredients that we have in the pot of a disdain for the Métis and indigenous people, as well as psychotic racism, I think they're going to try and put a railway through in a place where there are already people.
00:24:50
Speaker
Well, how about that? So let's talk about Johnny McDonald and his amb ambitions to build this country. Genocidal murderer and and first prime minister of Canada, I guess. Yeah, mostly genocidal murderer.
00:25:03
Speaker
Canada was rather vulnerable as talk of annexation by the Americans was still fresh despite confederation. The Alaska purchased by the United States and the attitudes there about the whole continent being made part of the American project encouraged McDonald not only to keep American money out, to also keep the route in the country and its territories.
00:25:23
Speaker
Manifest destiny was in full swing in the United States, and the Treaty of 1818, which established the northern reaches of the contiguous in the United States, were making things look rather shaky.
John A. MacDonald's Nation-Building via Railway
00:25:34
Speaker
Don't worry, we were also hot off our Second Amendment, the the purchase of Rupert's land.
00:25:40
Speaker
So much money was floating around and McDonald and his conservative party wanted to win the upcoming 1872 election. And they had so just the genocide to do it. Tam, do you know anything about how elections worked in ah in the first and second elections in this country?
00:25:59
Speaker
I remember there was something weird about them, but they're more or less like took the shape of what they are today. Just no no, no, they are very different. They didn't split everything up into ridings. And no, it's about how you vote.
00:26:15
Speaker
Oh, is it landowners only? No. okay we're going to dive right into this one. I don't remember. This is in social studies from too long ago. So him and his party did win the election, but with a minority parliament with one seat short of a majority. Very familiar to us these days. Very familiar.
00:26:33
Speaker
Mark Carney, please do not do any genocides. ah Build rails, please, but don't do any genocides. Yeah. This would prove to be a disaster for him six months into his second term after a liberal MP from Quebec, Lucius Seth Hunt, Lucius Seth Huntington. Man with great name.
00:26:54
Speaker
I know that is quite a name dropped up. This is an episode full of interesting names. You got a cosmos, the cosmos. Yeah, but his his name was actually like William Alexander, like whatever. He had a very Nova Scotia Scots name.
00:27:09
Speaker
I looked because I was like, Is that Acadian name? No. Huntington dropped a bombshell in Parliament that him and his party, being him being McDonald, accepted donations of $360,000 Canadian dollars, which is probably worth about $15 million today, on the condition of construction favors to build the Canadian Pacific Railway. Oh, yeah. but yeah but john John A. was taking bribes left, right, and center.
00:27:37
Speaker
The thing about elections in this time, and the reason why we were able to have, you know, some shenanigans with respect to getting people to vote, was that the votes were not done in secret.
00:27:50
Speaker
Oh, right. So what you would do is you would give them orally and everyone in the room would know who you sided with. It was suggested in the papers, in particular, the Globe and Mail, who at the time sided with the liberals and still sort of do today, that the money would be given to them based on their oral votes. So like people were going to vote, somebody would know that you voted for the Tory and then you would get paid whatever that for that vote. Yeah.
00:28:17
Speaker
Yeah. For roll call voting or something it's called anyway. Yeah. Yeah. this This is so weirdly how how democracies were done for quite a while. it's This is an interesting time because it's going to sound fucked up later when I say this, but Canada was probably a better democracy than its mother country.
00:28:36
Speaker
that's that is That is the that bar that I have just set We did actually have... Particularly once you left the, like, just ah fantastically corrupt then and in a lot of ways still now upper Canada. You did actually get genuine, like, popular rule.
00:28:56
Speaker
Well, we're going to be, the mother country I'm talking about is Britain. Yeah, which, which again, was, like, basically democracy for the for the moneyed classes and the property owners. Yes. So for six months, McDonald would find himself dogged down by this whole fiasco. And then by November of 1873, he re resigned.
00:29:14
Speaker
He attempted to resign as leader of the Tories, but the party refused. He was like, no, we want you to stay as as leader of the party. Given this would not be his last, career like his last specific, specifically election bribery scandal. I'm assuming they figured he just had more legs.
00:29:34
Speaker
Probably. And they were right, unfortunately, for everyone in the Red River Colony. On January 22nd, 1874, using a now secret ballot, a new election was held and the Tories were defeated with Alexander McKenzie and his liberals gaining a majority in Parliament. It was a So things are going swimmingly well for the country. The liberals are about to become Canada's natural governing party and get this country built. And they would be insufferable about it ever fucking since.
00:30:05
Speaker
Ontario liberals are like their own breed of like fucking weirdo. Yeah, the liberals are... It's hard to describe to people the Liberal Party. like it's Whenever I hear like Americans talk about their politics and they go like, oh, you have the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party.
00:30:26
Speaker
They're just different two shades of the same color. if you ever If you ever had like student democracy sort of thing in your school... The ah Ontario liberals like federal liberals are those people who just assume they're just going to get valedictorian or whatever class president.
00:30:45
Speaker
they They just sort of assume that it's natural and get really fucking angry when they don't. And it's really funny because they're the party that I would tolerate more than the other. That's the that's the absurd thing in all this.
00:30:56
Speaker
ah No, i i I I will. I said tolerate. I didn't say accept. I would rather toss my vote for the fucking Marxist-Leninist, which I did do when I lived in Kelowna, than vote for a fucking liberal or conservative. I'll go on record and say that I haven't voted liberal in 20 years.
00:31:17
Speaker
There's my defense. There was a period of time where my choice was Stockwell Day, some fucking liberal. ah I don't even think there was an NDP candidate and i our local Marxist-Leninist representative. and That guy got my vote every time.
00:31:33
Speaker
It's been five months since we've mentioned Stockwell Day on this show. I'm so proud of us. do Do I need to dig out the wetsuit again? Much of what I'm going to talk about here is based off the writings of Stanford Fleming. This is a man famously known for having invented standard time or time zones as we know it.
00:31:48
Speaker
However, he was part of the group that originally approached the provincial government of Canada in the 1860s desiring to connect the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans with a railway. With MacDonald no longer in office and Alexander McKenzie I almost said Alexander McKenzie King.
00:32:04
Speaker
Alexander McKenzie is prime minister. Work commenced on the project with the railway reaching as far west as Winnipeg by 1875. Now I'm going to put a huge asterisk on what I just said here because that's not quite correct.
00:32:16
Speaker
The work was very patchy. In many reports, contracts for parts east of Manitoba were not carried out until as late as 1878. Put it lightly, let me read a few paragraphs from Fleming's report.
00:32:28
Speaker
this is a This is his report, and it's like just lithographed all hell, so it's like really great for me to read here. I tried to OCR this so many times, I'm just going to read this and hope to God that my eyes do not bleed from the way this is scanned in.
00:32:41
Speaker
The first expenditure of construction was towards the end of 1874. Contracts were entered into for the telegraph from Lake Superior to British Columbia along the route of the railway, including clearing of forest land to the width of 132 feet.
00:32:56
Speaker
The line was divided into four sections, of three of which the work was prosecuted with vigor, and the telegraph continue completed from Fort William to Edmonton 1,200 miles so messages could be transmitted.
00:33:08
Speaker
The remaining section across the mountains to British Columbia remains incomplete. So the initial statement here is getting telegraph lines into British Columbia is going to be a problem because of the mountains, but that's actually the least important part here.
Geographical Challenges of the Canadian Shield
00:33:24
Speaker
Because if we talk about here, the length of the line now under contract, based on what Fleming had written, was Fort William to Selkirk mainline, 410 miles.
00:33:35
Speaker
Selkirk to Emerson, which is like a little branch line, it was only 85 miles. Like this was going to... ah somewhere north of winnipeg west of the red river 100 miles in british columbia 127 miles how much does this sound like the railway has been rather well connected it's 722 miles you know what the distance is between somewhere in british columbia to ontario is it's a long way 722 seems a little short doesn't it
00:34:05
Speaker
Yeah, and on top of this, my recollection is during the McKenzie years, um not only was not a lot of it built, also that which was built was not necessarily all contiguously connected.
00:34:19
Speaker
Particularly, think the telegraphs were, but the rails were very disjointed, where they'd build a little bit in this, like, around a settlement, and then they would kind of also have another project, but they wouldn't quite have met. Yeah.
00:34:33
Speaker
yet So like you built a lot of rails, but a railroad you do not have. By 1879, only 1200 kilometers of railway were actually under construction of that 200 were for a branch line that we're not going west to east. It was just going north of Winnipeg, like I mentioned.
00:34:52
Speaker
The driving distance from Thunder Bay to Kamloops, which is when this mate's mention of a ah lake there, what was it? Basically, there was a section that was being built in British Columbia that was going to Kamloops, which was going through the Fraser Canyon. As mentioned earlier, we were talking about Lytton. Well, this would have been Kamloops, Lilloo at Lytton heading south towards Vancouver.
00:35:18
Speaker
And when we're talking about Fort William to Selkirk, we're talking about tooth Thunder Bay to just outside of Winnipeg. That's the idea there. Sorry, we just it's there's a lot of back and forth here because we're not using modern names for these places.
00:35:33
Speaker
Basically, we're eight years into the promise of a railway within 10 years. Yeah, and we have some railway in British Columbia. We have some railway in the in the prairies, and we have some rail railway crossing through the Canadian Shield.
00:35:50
Speaker
But we do not have a railway from the Canadian Shield through to British Columbia. and Do you want to know what the pisser is with that section of railway in British Columbia? ah Which?
00:36:02
Speaker
It's not supposed to be in that spot. Yeah, but like... We're going to talk about this. We're going to talk about this. why Why this was a problem. But, Sam, why do you think Ontario in particular... Like, why do you think Thunder Bay had no railway going towards like Toronto, Montreal, and all that? what's What's one geographical feature of Ontario in this part that makes it ah Terrible place to build anything. Well, for one, there's the not very friendly terrain of the Canadian Shield.
00:36:35
Speaker
and Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Which it's much gentler than the very dramatic mountains of the Rockies and Cascades. However, there's a lot more of it.
00:36:48
Speaker
i'm I'm going to make an argument to say that it's actually worse to build in the shield. Yeah, because it never ends. It never ends. That's the problem. It is. It is torture to build through this. This is the reason why no there nothing is exists between Thunder Bay and Sudbury. Yeah, like I was I was going to bring up when you mentioned that a lot of the early settlers on the prairies and the Canadian prairies were from the United States.
00:37:12
Speaker
And that's because it was just entirely impractical to move people over the Canadian shield. There was nothing there. Kind of still isn't to this day.
00:37:24
Speaker
And like, it was way easier to go like use the Americans rail lines, which they had at the time. to go to like the Dakotas or something and then move north. In fact, that's kind of what a lot of Métis folks did back and forth between Genocides.
00:37:40
Speaker
So while many look to the Arctic as Canada's most inhospitable place, it doesn't mean that anything south of 60, we really should watch north of 60 at some point, is going to be easy mode for building anything to the likes of a railway or a telegraph line or a highway or a wagon road whatever yeah like many they they kind of built uh it's not quite canadian shield well it's canadian shield geographically but you don't really think of it as this like churchill manitoba i think is a really good example of this where they kind of built no it's not it's not shield it's not shield okay No, I'm going to explain the shield in the moment. Sure, sure, sure. Can i finish my point, though?
00:38:17
Speaker
Yeah, like go for it. They built kind of a road, not really a highway, just a road. They built the rail line, and then they kind of just gave up. And that's how it's been for, like, a long time.
00:38:28
Speaker
i will also, I will, like, I made an argument earlier. I will argue that building the railway through the Rockies, the Cascades, the Coast Mountains... Yeah, because, you you know, it has its challenges, but it's not as hard as the shield. like, 100 kilometers of really absolutely awful, like, blasting, And and you get a nice valley. Yeah, and you and and then you get to a valley, and then you cut along the valley, and then you're good.
00:38:52
Speaker
Whereas the kitdding rocky or the the Canadian shield is just... Like, you can't just blast your way through it, because it's just... It's more rock.
00:39:04
Speaker
It's just all rock and trees. You have to actually like pin bridges and like level the terrain and you can't just dramatically blast things. There's not really tall mountains to just tunnel through either.
00:39:17
Speaker
if you wanted to go that route, like, yeah, it's, it's, and it's unending. It's just a huge swath of land. That's just all like this. put him Put in perspective, how much of a nightmare the shield is Canada is just shy of 10 million square kilometers.
00:39:33
Speaker
8 million of that is the fucking shield. Yeah. It touches every province and territory except for Yukon, British Columbia, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and PEI.
00:39:44
Speaker
There's even Alberta has the smallest amount of shield, but it still does in its northeast corner. Saskatchewan, practically half of it is shield. Manitoba is not too far behind.
00:39:55
Speaker
Quebec and Ontario is practically like 80% shield. And okay Labrador, there's a reason why nobody lives in Labrador for the most part. It's because it too is shield. um the Oh, there's tons of indigenous communities in Labrador.
00:40:09
Speaker
But that's one of the reasons particularly that's one of the reasons why they got left alone. Yeah, it's just the shield is the shields really good for for minerals and so forth. There's a reason why Sudbury exists.
00:40:20
Speaker
But the thing about... Yeah, the thing, the thing that ah that's a Saskatchewan, that's a nickel in Sudbury. This geologic feature is product of like a lot of geologic forces. And then i my, my, some of my friends who are geologists are to be upset with the way I'm describing it.
00:40:38
Speaker
But a lot of the soil is stripped away through glaciation. So like, there's just maybe at best, maybe there might be a meter of of soil underneath you, but like you can be just walking along and all of a sudden you're just walking on rock. And that's just what the area is like. Yeah.
00:40:53
Speaker
the railway had to be cut through the shield. So you're, you are blasting, but you're trying to like, just make nice gradients the entire time. Yeah. You're blasting to level, not blasting to like make a little shelf. The reason why it sucks so hard is like, once you get to like, just slightly South of Sudbury,
00:41:11
Speaker
You're going to be going from this like hundreds and hundreds of kilometers until a Winnipeg of just blasting through this rock. So it's just slow going. It's you may as well or you may as run a TBM, but we didn't have TBMs at this point in time. It's just running a TBM on the surface.
00:41:30
Speaker
I guess it would work. It would probably work better than just blasting. It might be just as fast. And you can have a machine put your rails down. It would probably be just you can automate the process. Yeah. Like this. This is why basically we ended up with like a railway that goes to Sudbury, a railway that goes from like kind of near Ontario to Winnipeg to Edmonton or
Creating a Contiguous Railway Across Canada
00:41:54
Speaker
Calgary.
00:41:54
Speaker
No, it's Edmonton. They went to Edmonton first. no and they went to calary they went to calgary okay uh calgary the canadian pacific south and the canadian northern would be okay right right yes another railway that you've banned me from talking about yeah it's not part of this episode uh but like yeah they so they went a peg to calgary that that was done that was fine telegraphed whatever and then like conspicuously now cam loop south to vancouver yes Because they avoided all the hard part and they're eight years in.
00:42:25
Speaker
So two years through the shitty stuff. The shield is fucking annoying, but it is also incredibly valuable, like just for minerals and so forth. ah Just to kind of keep in mind. But like there are patches of fertile lands within the shield. It's not to say that you can't do any. There's no arable land in there. It's just it's patchy. It's not.
00:42:43
Speaker
as great as say Southern Ontario. And you don't have like British Columbia where you'll have like in between the rough terrain, these like big cut, like glacial or river valleys that are just like,
00:42:56
Speaker
nice and loamy and with good soil and shit like that we haven't spoken about anything past 1878 and this is on purpose because alexander mckenzie perhaps our least problematic prime minister is now up for re-election what do you know about british columbia in the 1870s what like this is going to be very easy because for me but i'm curious what it is for you I'd probably be able to have a better answer if I wasn't fuck off tired.
00:43:23
Speaker
ah But this was around the point in time where are serious discussions around whether or not Confederation was a Ah, don't jump ahead just yet. Think about where people lived in British Columbia at the time. New West, Victoria, and nowhere else.
00:43:40
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, actually. Okay. So that's what I was going to say. So yeah, many of you will be quick to assume that the principal city of British Columbia has always been Vancouver. no It hasn't. that Vancouver at this time was a place where a man named Gassy Jack was kidnapping 12 year olds.
00:43:56
Speaker
That's a true story. That is a true story. And he did it more than once. So Vancouver did not exist until 1885. There were places like Port Moody and so forth, which is going to come up in the next episode.
00:44:08
Speaker
But Vancouver itself did not exist. New Westminster was the largest city on the mainland. But Victoria, the provincial capital, was at the time... the biggest center for commerce and so forth we we touched on um this a little bit in our airplane episode series on the avarero uh victoria had a lot more prominence uh in british columbia's early history but yeah vancouver eventually it's where immigrants would come and be denied landing and uh where
00:44:42
Speaker
Where, like again, there was the naval base to kind of fend off the Americans, which kind of balloons out into its own population because you can't it's not like modern militaries where you can have isolated military bases. You you need a populace to support them.
00:44:57
Speaker
um So the original plan for the Canadian Pacific Railway, or one of the
Bridge Proposal: Vancouver to Vancouver Island
00:45:03
Speaker
what Victoria was pushing for, was for the terminus to be in Esquimalt. Which would involve bridge.
00:45:10
Speaker
Yes, but and it's not obvious. bridge Do you have any idea to where they would build a bridge to Vancouver Island if you didn't have to worry about Vancouver? If you didn't have to worry about Vancouver...
00:45:22
Speaker
The original proposal was to link Victoria to the railway by way of Butte Inlet, which have would have made cities like Nanaimo and Campbell River part of the path that connected the CPR.
00:45:33
Speaker
This would have involved using a path carved out by Waddington's Road, a road built in the 1860s that results in the death of many colonial workers as well as First Nations peoples as a result of typical colonial bullshit of entering into lands and belonging to the Chocoltan without any compensation.
00:45:53
Speaker
The lack of compensation wasn't the only thing that was pissing off the Chocoltan. It was also a smallpox epidemic that was going on, and they were like not having anything to do with it.
00:46:04
Speaker
Yeah, but it's it's worth noting for those not familiar with British Columbia's particular politic around First Nations, most of the treaties are very recent, and British Columbia was almost entirely unceded, unnegotiated territory for the overwhelming majority of its history.
00:46:24
Speaker
Most of the treaties were from the colony of Vancouver Island and not the colony of British Columbia. it's something to keep in mind. i believe actually most of the treaties are from from Canada proper, just because there was so few.
00:46:38
Speaker
We kind of just stole them. There were some treaties pre-confederation. There were some, yes, but ah most of the... ah like British Columbia was very much not a place where they actually bartered in good faith.
00:46:52
Speaker
For years, Tam and I have heard rumblings about a tunnel or a bridge going to Vancouver Island from the mainland. Yeah. But often it's off the coast of Metro Vancouver, like...
00:47:03
Speaker
provincial I'll tell you about why there's no bridge to Vancouver Island, and then we'll talk about this route and what would have happened. The thing is about ah building a bridge from Vancouver to, say, Nanaimo or the Gulf Islands or whatever is any bridge built would have to contend with 115 km per hour winds plus gusts going up to 180. Add fog and ice conditions. this The weather would just make it suck.
00:47:28
Speaker
That's the first problem. Yeah, BC Ferries runs really large ferries, and those sometimes can't, like, sailings get canceled fairly regularly due to bad weather. Water is as deep as 365 meters, and the sediment layers sometimes go 450 meters deep. Because it's also glacial carved.
00:47:46
Speaker
Yes, you would end up with piers that would reach three quarters of a kilometer deep in some cases. That's that absurd. So any bridge built would have to be a combination of tunnel, floating, and suspended.
00:47:59
Speaker
All of which would make it prohibitively expensive. Yeah. because and you can't You can't just tunnel because it's too soft in some places. You can't float because the water's too rough and it's too windy.
00:48:10
Speaker
And you can't put piers down for places where it's too deep. Well, yeah, and it'd be a 50-kilometer tunnel. And they have built 50-kilometer tunnels, but not for this sort of thing. And not through mud. Yeah.
00:48:22
Speaker
Cost of a bridge today would be estimated around $15 billion. dollars This is $2024. These are official numbers from the provincial government Is that for the Campbell River one or the Courtney Bridge? This is going from somewhere in Vancouver to Nanaimo. Oh, yeah. I'm going to talking about the route for this. That would be such an insane mega bridge, though.
00:48:42
Speaker
Yeah, for its time, it would have been incredible to see them try to pull this off in the 1800s. It's already incredible to think about in the 2000s. Yeah, it's already a bridge that's considered to be nigh on impossible to practically build today. Yes.
00:48:55
Speaker
well if Well, the other problem is is they can build it. It's going to cost $15 billion dollars and cost $90 million dollars per year to maintain and have ah ah needs to have a life expectancy of 100 years. Yeah, and it's a bridge that will be constantly destroying itself.
00:49:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's just it's you just don't want to build a bridge, just have boats or we do it this way. Now, that is, again, for the lower mainland of British Columbia to Vancouver Island. But if you find yourself in the aforementioned Campbell River, you can get to the mainland with a canoe.
00:49:26
Speaker
Yeah, you don't you could do this with your arms. So the route was fairly reasonable. It would have followed Butte Inland, as I mentioned, to Stewart Island. Stewart Island, ah which is weirdly referred to as Valdez Island in this report that I was reading.
00:49:40
Speaker
It would have been hop over to Quadra Island. And then finally, ah there's like a small little narrow cut that goes right to camp like north. Yeah, in you can cross you can cross from Campbell River onto Quadra, cross Quadra to usually Morrell or Stewart and then cross through into Vancouver Bay and then you're on the mainland and you just kind of hop fjords yeah all the way south to Lund.
00:50:04
Speaker
Yeah, so the idea was to basically build these this route here. It would have been really easy to do in the 1800s. Bridges were already 2,800 meters long in some cases. The bridge over the River Severn comes to mind. The fourth bridge was maybe about 10 years out, but like the technology was already there to build bridges long enough that you could have done this island hopping exercise.
00:50:26
Speaker
So of course, this bridge never got built. However, the terminus plan was all over the place for this. One of them was to Kluquat, which was ah an exposed part of British Columbia, or sorry, Vancouver Island that would have been directly west.
00:50:42
Speaker
Another option was to Port Alberni, which is just east of Nanaimo. And then the most reasonable suggestion, if they took this particular route, was to fucking Esquimalt, like they were talking about.
00:50:56
Speaker
And this would have made perfect sense. It would have... for the time victoria was the most important city in british columbia and i saw this proposal and went like this would have made sense yeah because again vancouver didn't exist new west was a fairly major city it was actually it wasn't the royal city at this point in time but like it wasn't it was still fairly inland it wasn't it had a port but it didn't have a huge port so really Yeah, the Fraser River wasn't actively dredged at this time. like yeah The dredging of the Fraser River was the the through the advent of the port of...
00:51:35
Speaker
ah port port of vancouver surrey docks or whatever you call them i think that's the main reason why they dredge it this way now but big ships didn't enter into the fraser river until well into the 1900s however the terms of the agreement i didn't mention at the beginning was that it was supposed to be esquimalt it was the deep water port of the british empire in the pacific in victoria like esquimalt was again super fucking important to the british empire and there were people already there you didn't have to invent port alberni I will say that Victoria never ended up with the interco ah intercolonial, intercontinental, whatever railway terminating there.
00:52:12
Speaker
But it did get a railway built all the way up through to Courtney, which is north of Nanaimo, the Esquimo and Nanaimo Railway. But we're not going to get into it. That's ah that's local stuff.
BC's Secession Consideration over Railway Failures
00:52:23
Speaker
I'm not going to get into the whole politics of that.
00:52:25
Speaker
But where the fuck was the railway going to go? Why was a portion of the railway being built in the Fraser Canyon while considerations were being made to have it go to the island? Because where else are you going to put it?
00:52:39
Speaker
Well, this is the problem, is that this was pissing off British Columbia. And of course, the current government, having been taken over by the liberals, there was like a new attitude and they were like discussing relaxing the conditions of confederation with respect to BC. Mm And this sort of talk by the sitting federal government started to stoke like the flames of secession in the province.
00:53:06
Speaker
British Columbia was the first province to ever consider jumping ship. and And due to our unique position of the Western provinces of not being part of Rupert's land, we actually had the grounds to do so.
00:53:19
Speaker
Yes, there there's this is the reason why Wegxit and all this shit is so stupid to me, because Wegxit makes kind of sense for BC. For Alberta, they're literally all sitting on land the federal government owns, so they can separate, but then they instantly become a government in exile.
00:53:37
Speaker
Yes.
00:53:39
Speaker
So talk of secession became so bad that the governor general of the time had to say this. The action of the Dominion government in ignoring the Carnarvon settlement has produced wide feeling of dissatisfaction towards confederation.
00:53:56
Speaker
If the government fails to take the practical steps to carry into effect the terms solemnly accepted by them, we must respectfully in inform Your Excellency that, in the opinion of a large number of people of this province, the withdrawal of the province from Confederation will be the inevitable result.
00:54:12
Speaker
Now, when I say Carnarvon, that is Lord Carnarvon. He was the architect of the British North America Act. ah He was also, again, as I mentioned earlier about ah Canada being a better democracy than the United Kingdom.
00:54:26
Speaker
He was against the Reform Act, which would have given like regular laborers, not landowners, the right to vote in the UK. It's also the reason why Benjamin Disraeli's government fell apart in 1868. sixty eight ah Benjamin Disraeli is the reason why Canada exists on paper because he his government brought it like brought in the legislation for the BNA. There's just so much shit going
Debate on CPR Terminus Location in BC
00:54:51
Speaker
on. like When I say that this country is insane or rather like really incredibly dumb in the in the eighteen
00:54:57
Speaker
seven 1870s canada is a very dumb country but at least it was more democratic by 1874 yeah i do want to i do want to qualify a thing that i said about there was nowhere else to go but the fraser canyon when building a railway because the the current number five and number three highways basically didn't exist in their current form it's you certainly would have a lot of work to build a railway through them a lot of blasting so starting from Kamloops they basically had two choices go north basically through to Prince George following the Fraser Canyon that way or follow the Fraser Canyon south through inevitably to Vancouver ah and they just sort of sort of started building south and hoped for the best but if they wanted to build a bridge to Vancouver Island going north actually would have been the smarter play laughing
00:55:52
Speaker
so So Alexander McKenzie has made a mess of things. Yes. British Columbia was saber rattling. We only had 500 kilometers of operating track at best in the Canadian Shield.
00:56:03
Speaker
We were building a railway where we weren't supposed to be building it in the first place. But also where the hell's fuck where were we going to put it?
00:56:13
Speaker
Well, in 1878, the sitting McKenzie government lost and Daddy MacDonald... No, don't call him daddy. No, no, no. do not call... do not... Daddy's home. datify, like, Genocide John.
00:56:33
Speaker
i had written down... I just kind of went, like, Daddy McDonald on my notes, and then I just went, Tam is going to hate what I said. Sir John when it feels sir john um A., two genocides deep at this point, McDonald.
00:56:46
Speaker
Coming in looking for a third.
00:56:51
Speaker
louis riel's back for back from the south and is coming back swinging oh my god and unfortunately ended that ended up swinging in another way and that's also where i'm gonna leave this episode off because we're gonna be talking about the railway actually getting fucking finally built but tam what have you learned so far in this episode That are probably our least problematic Prime Minister Alexander McKenzie was still a massive fuck up.
00:57:21
Speaker
But also he was he was an Ontario liberal. So that's kind of par for the course. That is ah that's basically so far the mess. Like I will say that that was I hope always forget that the railway was supposed to be built to Victoria.
00:57:37
Speaker
And because everybody talks about the Port Mooney and all this, because Port Mooney was original Terminus and then eventually they just extended it to Vancouver. yeah But it's it's always forgotten that Vancouver is, despite being the third largest city, and it's a fairly large city considering now, like when I was growing up, I think when I was born, in the city had like a million people in the entire region and now it's 3 million.
00:57:59
Speaker
it's It's not a small city, but it does behave like one sometimes. Mm-hmm. So yeah, that's ah well that's what we have so far for this particular episode.
00:58:11
Speaker
um We will have a third part coming up, which will be the next episode. i'm We're not doing a bonus episode for this month, unfortunately, but we do want to continue this series. Bonus episode, Tam dies.
00:58:23
Speaker
yeah no the It'll be like a Canadian Idol for a new host on here.
00:58:30
Speaker
But I don't have much actually to actually close off on in this episode, so I'm just going to remind you all that we're... Awkward middle episode. Yes, it's the awkward middle episode. It's it's the hump episode.
00:58:43
Speaker
I want to remind you all that we're mailbag at schwinneganmoments.ca. We get most of the emails we do get happen to be from people trying to sell us on doing a new website. We also are blueskyschwinneganmoments.ca.
00:58:55
Speaker
ah We also have a Patreon, patreon.com slash schwinneganmoments. And we will be doing a bonus episode real soon. We're going to be doing on Via Rail. If you're interested in hearing us talk about our little rail adventure. God, we've been sitting on that for so long.
00:59:11
Speaker
I know because we have a whole video. So the video will actually be made available to the public because, you know, may as well get a little bit of a tour of Canadian railways in least the shittiest way possible.
00:59:23
Speaker
And ah yeah, I guess that's about it. Tim, do you have anything you want to put out there before we close this off? I am dying. Okay. All right. Goodbye, everybody. Bye.
00:59:45
Speaker
Shawinigan Moments is written and recorded on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, Stolo, and Sewatuth First Nations in what is otherwise called Vancouver.