  Rogers Pass. Walter Lanz/Image Makers |
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A national road linking the Pacific Coast to Eastern Canada was first proposed by Governor James Douglas back in the 1860s. The construction of the transcontinental railway made a road unnecessary, at least until the birth of the automobile. As the popularity of the "horseless carriage" spread, so did enthusiasm for the idea of a national road running coast to coast. By 1942, it was possible to drive a motor vehicle across the country following a patchwork of provincial highways, but they were mostly unpaved and impassable in bad weather. Finally, in 1949, the federal government and most of the provinces agreed to share the cost of building a Trans-Canada Highway.
The highway took a lot longer, and cost a lot more, to build than anyone had suspected. One of the most difficult sections was at Rogers Pass, through British Columbia's Selkirk Mountains. The CPR had chosen the pass to be its route through the mountains and during the summer of 1885 work crews punched through the line all the way to Craigellachie, west of Revelstoke, where the famous "last spike" was driven that November. But the pass turned out to be constant peril to train traffic, chiefly from snow thundering down across the track. Following a terrible avalanche in 1910 that killed 62 workers who were in the pass trying to clear a blockage, Canadian Pacific built the eight-kilometre-long Connaught Tunnel, allowing trains to avoid Rogers Pass by going under it.
When it came time to build the first roads through the mountains, engineers considered a route through the pass to be too difficult. For many years motorists had to follow the Big Bend route instead, north from Revelstoke then south again to Golden in an arc that stretched for 305 kilometres. It took at least seven hours to drive this perilous gravel road and very few motorists or truckers could be bothered to do it. That was where things stood until 1962 when the new Trans-Canada Highway shaved about five hours off the Revelstoke-Golden drive and restored Rogers Pass as the preeminent route through the interior mountains.
Because it was the last major section of the Trans-Canada to be completed, planners chose Rogers Pass as the site for the official opening ceremony. At 3:05 on the afternoon of September 3, 1962, under a clear blue sky and surrounded by the glistening Selkirk peaks, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker tamped down the final square of asphalt in the Rogers Pass roadbed and declared the Trans-Canada Highway officially open. It was typical of the day that at that precise moment the sound system failed, and Diefenbaker's words were lost to the onlookers who had assembled to watch the historic occasion. The ceremony had not gone according to plan. Fourteen dignitaries felt obliged to give speeches, which dragged on for more than two hours. When it came his turn, the representative from Saskatchewan, whether distracted by the glorious view, addled by the heat, or bored by the long-windedness of his colleagues, declared how impressed he was to be in Quebec. British Columbia's minister of highways, Phil Gaglardi, who was a preacher when he wasn't being a politician, declared, "I want to thank God personally for the beautiful weather He has given us." The customary singing of O Canada had not taken place because the bus carrying the instruments belonging to the band of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry had taken a wrong turn on the way up the highway from Calgary. The bus arrived in time for the band to end the festivities with God Save the Queen, however, and the crowd of close to 3,000 people sang lustily, thankful that the ceremony was over and they would soon be able to eat some lunch.
Conspicuous by his absence was the host premier, British Columbia's own W.A.C. Bennett. "Wacky", as he was fondly known to provincial voters, had built his career on Ottawa-bashing and he was not about to show up at a federal ceremony on his home turf. Especially since he had already opened the highway at an official ceremony of his own a month earlier, on July 30. On that occasion, Bennett had snipped a ribbon near Revelstoke and christened the new road "BC Highway No. 1", no mention of Canada at all. "There was one of the most peculiar, self-centred actions that I've ever known," Diefenbaker later recalled. But to Bennett, it was all part of jockeying for political advantage. Why should federal politicians get any credit, he argued, when they weren't contributing to the other highways in the province, nor were they contributing to maintaining the Trans-Canada?
Whichever ceremony is accepted as the "official" one, the opening of the 147-kilometre section of road through Rogers Pass marked the completion of the first continuous, all-season, two-lane road across Canada. At 7,714 kilometres, the Trans-Canada Highway crosses six time zones and remains the world's longest continuous trans-national highway.
Premier Bennett never could reconcile himself to the Trans-Canada. The federal-provincial agreement that had financed its construction lapsed in 1970. The following summer, Bennett, still irritated that Ottawa did not contribute more to the maintenance of provincial highways and convinced that political power in Ottawa was controlled from Quebec, ordered the removal of all the roadsigns identifying the Trans-Canada Highway. At a cost of $20,000, he had them replaced with signs that said British Columbia #1. (The ill will went both ways; during this period Pierre Trudeau referred to the BC premier as "the bigot who happens to run the government there".) Bennett's act of defiance lasted just a year. In August, 1972, the New Democratic Party won election in British Columbia and the new government promptly put the Trans-Canada signs back up; they had been discovered mouldering in a warehouse where the Socreds had stashed them.
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