Who was really the first person to champion the Rideau Canal Skateway?
Former NCC chairman Douglas Fullerton typically gets all the credit. But three others, including a 19th-century editor of the Ottawa Citizen, were early advocates of building “the world’s longest outdoor ice rink.”
Author of the article:Randy Boswell
Published Feb 22, 2024 • Last updated Feb 22, 2024 • 7 minute read
As the fragility of Ottawa’s Rideau Canal skating attraction becomes more and more apparent in the age of climate change, there’s a growing appreciation for what the 7.8-kilometre ice rink has meant to the nation’s capital as a recreational amenity, tourist attraction and symbol of quintessential Canadianness.
Worries about the Skateway’s future have prompted much thoughtful reflection recently about its history, including its inauguration in January 1971. But the citizens of Ottawa had been skating on the canal for a good century before that.
“A large crowd of young people enjoyed themselves skating on the canal last evening,” the Citizen reported on Nov. 29, 1871, “amongst whom were noticed several young ladies who showed their ankles, their ajility (sic) and grace to perfection.”
Leering aside, the report confirms — 100 years before the official Skateway existed — the deep-rooted impulse in early Ottawa to make the ice-covered canal a winter playground. And many tragic drownings and dramatic rescues made the news throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries as skaters routinely misjudged the risk of blading along the canal’s sometimes poorly frozen surface.
But when exactly did Ottawa’s urge to go skating on the canal solidify into a public proposal that local authorities should create a full-length skateway from Ottawa’s downtown core to Dow’s Lake or Hartwell Locks, where Col. John By’s boating channel splits off from the Rideau River?
According to the National Capital Commission, which oversees operation of the Skateway, that moment occurred just 53 years ago.
“The idea to turn the Rideau Canal into a skateway came from then-newly appointed NCC chair Doug Fullerton,” we are officially told by the NCC in its online “History of the Rideau Canal Skateway.” Fullerton, a federal economist who served as chairman of the NCC from 1969 to 1973, is rightly hailed as the man who not only championed the skateway concept in those years but who also had the position, power and funding to make it happen.
It wasn’t Fullerton’s idea
The birth of the skateway as we know it today is justifiably traced to Friday, Jan. 22, 1971, when Fullerton himself — captured in a famous front-page Citizen photo, which also illustrates the NCC’s skateway history page — laced up with about 100 others on the official opening day of skating along a section of the canal near the National Arts Centre and a thin strip of cleared ice to Dow’s Lake.
But it wasn’t Fullerton’s idea. There is a long paper trail — a newspaper trail to be exact — making it clear that the concept of a safely maintained skating surface along the canal had been seriously explored three times before the Fullerton-led NCC accomplished the feat.
First, there was A.C. (Alexander Colin) Campbell (1857-1943), a well-known Ottawa journalist and public servant, who floated plans for a Rideau Canal skating, skiing, snowshoeing and tobogganing mega-playground at a public meeting in 1913.
During an exceptionally good span of skating on the canal in February of that year, community-minded citizens led by Campbell held a winter-sports summit. They recommended that the Ottawa Improvement Commission — forerunner of the NCC — consider Campbell’s idea that “it might be feasible to convert the stretch of the Rideau Canal from the Château Laurier to Hartwell’s Locks in the wintertime into a number of playgrounds for the children,” the Citizen reported. “One way of doing this would be by making a glare sheet of ice of the whole thing.”
Nothing came of the concept then. But in November 1918, the prominent Ottawa businessman and journalist Andrew Holland (1844-1923) — editor and co-owner of the Ottawa Citizen in the early 1870s — revived Campbell’s skateway push.
In a letter to the Citizen, Holland argued for “having the Rideau Canal, from the Dufferin Bridge to the locks at Hog’s Back, converted into a skating rink by leaving two feet of water in the stretch. Such a rink would be perfectly safe and thousands of citizens could enjoy open air skating without rink expenses.”
Holland signed the letter “Old Timer,” but Campbell was so thrilled at the show of support that he promptly identified Holland as his new skateway ally, writing in the Citizen that “there is no man in the city whose advocacy of a cause carries greater weight than his.”
Campbell then reiterated his case for “the use of the Rideau Canal as a straightaway skating course” to celebrate the recent end of the Great War; to bring healthy benefits to Ottawa’s youth; and to fulfil the OIC’s obligation to maintain the capital’s recreational attractiveness in winter as well as in summer.
“They tell me there are difficulties,” Campbell wrote. “That, of course, is true. The question is: Should the difficulties be allowed to stand in the way of an object so desirable?”
The Citizen was all in, too: “The canal is delightfully situated for the enjoyment of young people during the bracing winter months,” the newspaper opined on Dec. 3, 1918. “The return would be immediate, in an all-round improvement of health and brightening of the community. It can be done.”
Idea on ice for three decades
And yet it wasn’t. The OIC (remember, the predecessor of the NCC) remained unmoved on the cost question. And perhaps the ravages of the post-war Spanish flu — the last runaway global pandemic before this era’s COVID-19 crisis — killed the momentum for a skateway. So the idea was put on ice for another 30 years.
That’s when Chester (C.E.) Pickering (1881-1983), local business leader and elected member of the City of Ottawa’s powerful Board of Control, took up the cause. In January 1949, Pickering presented an ambitious proposal to transform the canal into “the world’s longest skating rink.” Sound familiar?
“We are neglecting one of the great natural attractions this city has,” Pickering declared. “It is a shame that this fine stretch of water should be forgotten. If it was kept clear of snow, and with a good surface, it would give Ottawa the longest out-of-doors skating rink in Canada.”
It had been less than a year since Ottawa’s own Barbara Ann Scott became the 1948 Olympic women’s figure-skating champion and the toast of the nation. Meanwhile, the Ottawa RCAF Flyers represented Canada in the Olympic hockey tournament, winning the country’s only other gold medal at the St. Moritz Games. Canada, in short, had emerged as a skating superpower — and Ottawa was now both the country’s political and sporting capital.
City politician Len Coulter was the chief challenger of Pickering’s skateway proposal. “We have enough rinks in the city now,” he insisted. “To me it sounds absurd … What will it cost the taxpayers of Ottawa?”
Pickering counter-punched with a flourish: “People would come from all over the world to see the largest outdoor rink in the universe.” It was a compelling pitch, and the city’s main local newspaper — as it had in 1918 — voiced support for the imagined skateway.
“Once again it is being seriously proposed to use the Rideau Canal as an open air skating rink, and this time the idea should not be dropped because of minor difficulties or objections,” the Citizen urged.
Discussions went on for months. Pickering was gently mocked in an Ottawa Journal cartoon in July 1949 — titled “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — that showed him happily skating on the frozen canal under an illuminated downtown bridge.
The city investigated the proposal and began talks with the Federal District Commission (the former OIC and future NCC). But plans for a test rink on the canal ran up against liability concerns, then poor weather conditions.
Still, the idea percolated throughout the 1950s. In December 1958, city recreation director J. Alph Dulude oversaw the preparation of an experimental skateway on a patch of the canal between the Glebe and Old Ottawa East.
The ”trial scheme” lasted 20 days before heavy snowfall ruined skating conditions in early January 1959. City officials decided at the time that maintaining the historic waterway as a skating attraction wasn’t worth the cost or effort.
Even so, the skateway idea persisted in Ottawa politics. In the fall of 1970, city staff were directed to prepare another feasibility study. It concluded — just a month before the NCC inaugurated the Rideau Canal Skateway to great acclaim — that clearing the canal for wintertime skating would never be practical.
Yet again, the Citizen editorialized that a skateway would be possible if only the will to make it happen existed at Ottawa city hall. “The durable proposal to bring outdoor skating to the Rideau Canal is a great idea,” the Citizen insisted. “But let’s face it; it’s going nowhere.”
The political conditions — and, significantly, the weather conditions that winter — were perfect for Fullerton and the NCC to take hold of the skateway concept.
And the rest is history.
But the tale of the NCC’s skateway triumph has been the only backstory we’ve been telling ourselves ever since. In truth, the long and winding story of the Rideau Canal Skateway has a colourful prelude stretching far back in Ottawa’s past — and some earlier skateway dreamers we should also remember.
Randy Boswell is an Ottawa writer and Carleton University journalism professor.
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