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Trans-Taiga Road (2004)

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154 points jason_pomerleau | 4 comments | 03 Jul 25 01:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.624s | source
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newyankee ◴[03 Jul 25 02:55 UTC] No.44451201[source]▶
Its funny when I saw this road, I realised the distance is probably more than the N-S or E-W distance of Bangladesh , a country with > 171 million people last checked.

In fact barely equal to the diagonal length of the country. How much ever one talks about fertile plains, tropical weather being able to support more people, this no is still bonkers to me

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retrac ◴[03 Jul 25 03:13 UTC] No.44451295[source]▶
The low population density of central Canada is not because it's not fertile.

A few hundred kilometres south of the area in the article, is a vast clay belt of about half a million square kilometres. It's fertile. You can grow potatoes and oats and the usual garden vegetables up there. Somewhat settled on the Quebec side, and there are farms, but less than 5% of the area suitable for agriculture, is currently used for agriculture. It's a region about the size of France, and there are no large cities, and the total population is about 100,000.

You can even see the Quebec/Ontario border from space in some spots, because the Ontario side is wholly undeveloped: https://www.google.com/maps/@48.7805302,-79.5591059,52996m/

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1. noduerme ◴[03 Jul 25 05:43 UTC] No.44451983[source]▶
Fascinating! The border between Quebec and Ontario looks like the Mexican border with the US, or the Israeli border with Egypt, but this is all in the same country, Canada. In the US you can see some traces of this between Nevada and California or Idaho and Oregon, due to different laws and tax structures. Obviously if it's a sharp difference in land use along an arbitrary imaginary line, it must be due to the governance. So why is the Quebec side so much more farmed and developed?

[edit] one reason in the US for those sorts of divisions has to do with water rights. I think that probably applies to my other two examples as well. Buy I don't understand how that would be an issue in the northern parts of Canada.

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2. retrac ◴[03 Jul 25 06:43 UTC] No.44452315[source]▶
Different history of colonization policy in Quebec and Ontario. Colonization in Ontario was shut down in the 1930s during the Great Depression. In Quebec, formal colonization was more tightly integrated with the Church, had more institutional support, and officially continued until 1973. There were still government-backed homesteading projects in the 1960s in Quebec. Also, on the Ontario side in the early 20th century there was no road/rail connection except via Quebec. Which meant that development in the region was tied more to Quebec than southern Ontario. And Ontario had little reason to support that. So it remained government land on the Ontario side. Or at least that's how I understand it.
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3. noduerme ◴[03 Jul 25 08:58 UTC] No.44453041[source]▶
Thanks for the history. Very interesting. I guess Ontario still isn't interested in trying to farm land further north now..? The last time I was in Australia (15 years ago), I met a French chef in the middle of nowhere in the Northern Territory (he walked out of the bush with a can of kangaroo meat to say hello) who told me he was being paid something like $500 per month by the government just to live out in the middle of nowhere and homestead, which I found astonishing.
4. nsavage ◴[03 Jul 25 12:55 UTC] No.44454525[source]▶
I think you're right, but I don't think 'colonization' ever really stopped in Ontario - it just moved elsewhere. While Quebec was incentivized to develop its regions, there were more valuable places for Ontario capital to flow to, such as Alberta.

The difference between the two is language really and the urge to develop Quebec as a sovereign country, that drive has never been there for Ontario because Ontario is Canada, at least in the eyes of Ontarians. You don't see people in Ontario proud of being Ontarian as you do in Quebec, the Maritimes, Alberta, etc, instead they're proud of being Canadian.