Cold War-era sub at centre of controversy in tiny Ontario town
Default of $6-million loan to bring HMCS Ojibwa to Port Burwell has sent shockwaves through Elgin County.
By: Betsy Powell City Hall Bureau, Published on Fri Apr 03 2015
Toronto Star
Melissa Raven, director of communications with Project Ojibwa, gives a guided tour of the submarine on Good Friday.
PORT BURWELL, ONT.—In the unlikeliest of tiny Ontario towns looms a giant Cold War ghost
After the Second World War, there was much debate about whether Canada still needed submarines, until the Cuban Missile Crisis settled the question for the government of the day.
Today, one of Canada’s Cold War-era subs is at the centre of a different debate raging in the southwestern Ontario municipality of Bayham.
The controversy centres on the HMCS Ojibwa, a five-storey, football-field-long vessel that became a tourist attraction in the little hamlet of Port Burwell.
Last month, the Royal Bank of Canada called on the municipality to pay the $6-million loan used to cover the cost of hauling the 52-year-old Ojibwa from Halifax to the north shore of Lake Erie in 2012.
The defaulted loan sent shockwaves through quiet Elgin County.
“We sold the farm and bought a sub,” area resident Mary Fisher, who recently moved into the area, told the St. Thomas/Elgin Weekly News at an information session packed with 300 “grumbling townsfolk.”
“My grandchildren are going to be paying for this, if they’re still in Bayham.”
A blogger named John uses wry humour to convey his dismay over the sub situation, calling it a “monstrosity of a project.”
“There are so many things wrong with all this. . . . Why is it Bayham gets stuck with paying the bill?”
“We will still find a way to pay them back,” responds Melissa Raven, director of communications for the Elgin Military Museum (which brought the sub to Port Burwell), after taking a small group on an hour-long tour of the Ojibwa on Good Friday. She doesn’t want to get into specifics about a rescue plan. “We’re open to all kinds of ideas, all kinds of concepts, all kinds of partnerships.”
She’s well aware of critics like blogger John.
“We brought a submarine into a small community. There’s no guarantee everybody’s going to like it,” she says unapologetically.
Sitting in a small trailer near the Ojibwa, where a handful of sightseers bought admission tickets to see the vessel on this chilly, foggy holiday, Raven spoke to the Star about the submarine saga, in which she and her siblings are central figures.
“A lot of what we need to do is to let people know we’re here, to get more people coming,” says Raven, who has a background in marketing.
“We’re very determined. It’s a bunch (of people that) if you put a roadblock in front of us we’ll find a way around that, and if it leads to a mountain we’ll climb the mountain, and if that slips us down into an ocean, we’ll figure out a way to swim across it.”
That Raven, 64, is passionate about the Ojibwa is never in doubt. She impresses her small tour group with an encyclopedic knowledge of the vessel and marine history, which she credits to the many submariners who have come this way since the Ojibwa came to town.
Raven thinks municipal leaders over-estimated how many tourists would initially visit the vessel. The business plan suggested 100,000 visitors per season and so far, after a season-and-a-half, about 40,000 people have taken the tour.
“Because we’re really strapped for cash, we don’t have a marketing budget — not to sell us, but to let people know that we’re here. That’s been a challenge throughout,” she says.
“It’s a building process. People, I think, looked at the end of our five- to 10-year plan and thought that was what it would be like in year one, but every business needs to build. So we really only had one-and-a-part season before the plug got pulled on us.”
Raven is still hopeful the federal government may step in.
The Ojibwa’s sister boat, the HMCS Onondaga, is in Rimouski, Que., and does quite well as a tourist attraction. “We’re kind of saying, ‘How come there isn’t federal support for the Ojibwa?’ ” she says.
“We’re doing everything we can to keep it open and we worked so hard to get her here.”
How and why did the sub end up parked here?
The Raven siblings’ father, a war veteran, was one of the founders of the Elgin Military Museum, based in nearby St. Thomas. Its mandate is to tell the story of Elgin County and its residents and their role in the Canadian military.
In the Second World War, Elgin had a tank supply regiment. In 2009, the museum approached the Department of National Defence to see if it could get a tank to put on the lawn. DND didn’t have any tanks, “but there was a submarine heading to the scrap yard. It was in Halifax,” Raven says.
The bank advanced the money to the Elgin Military Museum after municipal leaders signed on as guarantor.
The original cost estimates were “vastly exceeded when the final invoices arrived,” Raven wrote in a March 13 statement. It included a litany of things gone wrong, including bad weather, federal funding that did not materialize, and a lack of ticket buyers.
Canadians have never acknowledged the importance of the submarine service in this country, she says.
“Those are the stories we need to tell because it looks now like we’re going into another Cold War. We need to know how we won the first one, how we prevented World War Three and our submarine service had a tremendous amount to do that.”
http://license.icopyright.net/3.7212-48523
More info;
http://www.bayham.on.ca/siteengine/activepage.asp
http://www.elgintourist.com/Tourism/Ojibwa-Submarine
http://projectojibwa.ca/