In 1966, then-premier Joey Smallwood heralded it as a “marvelously useful link.” Two years later, papers were calling it a “dream tunnel.” On the 1968 campaign trail, Conservative leader Robert Stanfield touted the “vast social and economic implications” it could have.
It was an outlandish idea, with an unknown price tag.
It was Pierre Elliott Trudeau, running his first election campaign, who scuttled the tunnel. Wrote columnist Arthur Blakely then of Trudeau the senior, “We’re not, he told voters everywhere on the Canadian mainland, doing the customary thing of trying to buy your votes with your own money. We’re not, for example, promising to build a tunnel between Newfoundland and Labrador.”
A half-century on, Trudeau’s son is talking about building exactly the tunnel that his father blasted.
The Liberals’ election platform promises a new infrastructure fund, one that could pour money “right away” into projects “like the Newfoundland-Labrador fixed transportation link, which will give people living on the island of Newfoundland a permanent and secure way to travel to and from mainland Canada.”
It may sound fantastical, but there is a real plan on paper. The link would see a 17 kilometre tunnel bored under the Strait of Belle Isle, bridging the divide where Labrador and Newfoundland come closest. An electric train would run through the tunnel, carrying cargo and passenger cars.
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See Also:
(1) The Trans Mountain pipeline is in peril
(2) Trudeau owes Canadians an answer — would he sacrifice Trans Mountain for power?
(3) An election theme emerges — we demand the government give us stuff, now
(4) If young voters lose interest in Trudeau, the Liberals are in trouble
(5) Christie Blatchford: How did elections become meaningless, drunken spending frenzies? (video)
