From the Rideau to the Peace: Two Centuries of Building Canada
- Megan Weber
- 5 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Second film in the series — Britain last week, Canada this week.
Last week we released a short film about Britain: eight centuries of cathedrals, canals, and a tunnel under the sea, all built by people who showed up ready for the work in front of them. It landed well enough that we're doing it again. Same premise, this side of the ocean, and this time we changed how we tell it.
This one moves through two centuries of building Canada, showing Canadian construction in seven scenes of archival footage. It borrows its voice from somewhere nobody expects: Shakespeare. Over the cutaways, in full performance voice, the film reworks Hamlet's most famous soliloquy into a different question.
“Cleared or not cleared. That is the question.”
Building Canada, Scene by Scene
1826 — Rideau Canal, Ontario. Dug largely by hand through granite and swamp, a back route from Montreal to Kingston built out of fear of another American invasion. Roughly a thousand of the labourers who built it, many of them Irish, died of malaria before it opened in 1832.
1885 — Canadian Pacific Railway, Craigellachie, British Columbia. Donald Smith drives the Last Spike, and Canada has a railway coast to coast. The mountain sections were blasted through largely by Chinese labourers paid a fraction of other crews' wages — and left out of the photo.
1916 — Parliament, Ottawa. Fire guts Parliament in hours, sparing only the Library. The Peace Tower rises from the same footprint over the next decade, standing by 1927.
1942 — The Alaska Highway. Seventeen hundred miles of muskeg and permafrost, built in just over eight months by the US Army Corps of Engineers — with segregated Black regiments building the toughest stretches, without the machines given to white crews, faster than anyone else.
1959 — The St. Lawrence Seaway. Five years, two countries, one waterway from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic — opened by the Queen and President Eisenhower together, aboard the royal yacht Britannia.
1975 — The CN Tower, Toronto. A helicopter named Olga lifts the final antenna sections through the clouds. At the time, it's the tallest freestanding structure on Earth.
2025 — Site C, British Columbia. BC Hydro's dam on the Peace River comes into full operation after a decade and thousands of workers. The film ends on them, not the concrete.
The Scene That Isn't Archival at All
Add an eighth scene: a logistics warehouse, present day, Canada, going up without a ceremony, a helicopter, or a single frame anyone will look at in a hundred years. Nobody's putting it on a stamp. But the standard it has to meet - who's on site, who's trained for what they're doing, who's actually cleared to be there - hasn't loosened since 1826. If anything, it's the one thing that hasn't changed across either film.
The Same Question, Asked a Second Time
“Cleared or not cleared. That is the question.” The monologue runs the length of Hamlet's, rebuilt line by line around a construction site instead of a Danish castle — tick-box theatre standing in for the slings and arrows, a site turnstile standing in for the gate between life and everything after it. It ends here:
Thus paperwork does make cowards of us all,
And great programs lose the name of readiness.
That's the joke and the point at the same time. Every builder across both films, the stonemasons in last week's UK cathedral, the navvies at the Rideau, the crews at Craigellachie, the battalions on the Alaska Highway, the workforce at Site C, had to be cleared to be there, by whatever that meant in their moment. Today it means something specific and checkable: current training, valid certification, the right credential for the role someone's actually doing that day, not the one on file from six months ago. LUMA1 exists to make that answer immediate, for the person at the gate as much as the person running the site. Not a form filed once and forgotten, but a readiness status you can actually see, on anyone, in real time.
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