The following article is based on Bram Fookes’s recent master’s thesis, “St. Vincent’s Iron Harvest: The History of the Meaford Tank Range.”
Over just a few months in 1942, a small rural settlement in the township of St. Vincent was transformed into the Meaford Tank Range – today known as the 4th Canadian Division Training Centre. The need for new training ranges in Canada was fuelled by numerous Allied setbacks in the early years of World War II, from Dunkirk to the fall of Hong Kong. However, despite the need for new military training centres, developing new military bases had drawbacks. Establishing the Meaford Tank Range meant transforming a civilian settlement into a restricted and contaminated military base, which it remains to this day.
In 1942, the Canadian military established a tank range in St. Vincent, Ontario, a small township about two hours north of Toronto on the south shore of Georgian Bay. But what drove the military to expropriate 18,000 acres, an area three times the size of the nearby city of Owen Sound, from the farmers who already lived there?
Military correspondence and war diaries held at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) show that military officials, with the home front chaos of the First World War still fresh in their minds, were initially reluctant to disrupt the lives of civilians to meet war goals. They worried that those at home, already hardened by the experiences of the Great Depression and three years of wartime rationing, might not accept being pushed off their land to make way for new military installations. However, this strategy was abandoned by the beginning of 1942 as the Canadian military scaled up following Allied defeats in France and the Pacific.
The flatlands of northern St. Vincent were bordered to the north and east by Georgian Bay and to the South and West by the cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment. Largely deforested and divided into farms, northern St. Vincent represented a nearly ideal training environment. Going through the trouble of expropriating land and evicting some two hundred families from the area was, to hard-pressed military planners, a small price to pay in exchange for what was effectively a ready-made facsimile of rural Europe right here in Canada.
The military moved quickly, establishing the range in just a few months. It became the jewel of Camp Borden’s sprawling training network and received visits from officials as far away as the Soviet Union. However, those who had lived there previously had mixed emotions. Local archival sources reveal how locals experienced the sudden expropriation of their lands and the impacts it had on the community and the environment.
While the military saw the region as the perfect tank range, and the presence of the local population as little more than another logistical issue to be solved, those who called St. Vincent home were confused and devastated by the sudden uprooting of their lives and livelihoods. Though most locals understood that they were making a sacrifice to help end the war, many complained bitterly about the prices offered by the government for their land. The token payouts were simply too small to purchase new homes and develop productive farms in just a few months. After the war, it quickly became clear that the land would not be returned to its former owners as some had hoped, with the government citing the presence of unexploded munitions across the region, which had already claimed the lives of two local boys back in 1944.
Locals have not forgotten this forced displacement. The people who were displaced, along with their descendants, developed a longstanding distrust of government. One of the most significant contributors to this mistrust is a widespread concern about the state of the environment at the range. The military thoroughly transformed the land. Some transformations were expected. At the tank and artillery range, near-constant firing exercises for nearly eight decades transformed the once-vibrant Mountain Lake into a munitions dump while peppering forested regions with shrapnel, making it too dangerous to cut down for lumber. However, the base also shaped the land in more unexpected ways. For example, the military adapted a heavily forested section of the range into a facsimile of a Japanese village to train soldiers for the dreaded invasion of mainland Japan.
After the Second World War, from the Cold War to the present day, the Tank Range has been the site of cyclical environmental controversies. For example, during the 1990s, a former soldier stationed at the base during the Cold War insisted that the area was a secret dump for Agent Orange, a potent defoliant and carcinogen used to devastate vast swathes of Vietnam and Laos by the United States during the Vietnam War. No traces of the chemical have been found during subsequent investigations, but this has not diminished the danger of the area in the minds of many locals. Today, it is the site of another controversial initiative to establish a large water reservoir for power generation. However, locals and politicians have actively resisted, driven by the longstanding mistrust sown by the necessities of a war that ended nearly a century ago.
The military actions taken in St. Vincent were likely necessary during World War II, and they continue to have value in the present day as a bulwark against the trend of rising global authoritarianism. Nonetheless, the impacts on the local population should not be overlooked. Military development continues to affect the region’s natural and social landscapes, as the base’s economic value, its impacts on the surrounding environment, and its controversial history remain major issues in local politics.
