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A new wave of construction was inspired by the formation of the Department of Transport in 1937 and the inauguration of Trans-Canada Airlines (now Air Canada) in 1937. Dorval Airport (1940-41) near Montréal represented the new breed of airports.

Throughout its history, the Port of Quebec has undergone numerous changes reflecting the needs and concerns of the day. From its initial military role under the French regime, the Port of Quebec turned to commerce and transformed radically in the 19th century as a result of the timber trade and immigration. These two new realities had major repercussions on the port’s development, which adapted to accommodate ships of increasingly higher tonnage. With its sizable ocean port, the third largest in North America after New York and New Orleans, Quebec became the primary gateway to Canada for hundreds of thousands of immigrants arriving by sea.

​The Lachine Canal passes through the southwestern part of the island of Montréal, from the Old Port to the borough of Lachine, where it flows into Lake Saint-Louis.

Throughout the period of the historical fur trade (early 17th to the mid-19th century), water routes were the natural “highways” of First Nations trappers and European fur traders. Water trading networks connected Indigenous societies from the Atlantic Ocean, along the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes, and then on towards the Hudson Bay watershed. North America’s waterborne geography facilitated intracontinental travel, enabled European expansion and settlement into Indigenous North America, and shaped the contours of Euro-Indigenous relations in the context of the fur trade. These extensive and interconnected systems of rivers, lakes and overland trails criss-crossed Indigenous territories and had been used for generations. At the height of the fur trade, the principal canoe route extended westward from the Island of Montreal through the Great Lakes, and from the northwestern shore of Lake Superior over the height of land into the Hudson Bay watershed. From the Lake Winnipeg basin, Indigenous trappers and European traders fanned out towards the Western Prairies via the Assiniboine, Qu’Appelle and Souris rivers, towards the foothills of the Rocky Mountains via the North and South branches of the Saskatchewan River, and finally towards the Athabasca Country via the Sturgeon-weir River and the Methye Portage.

Canada's first highways were the rivers and lakes used by Indigenous peoples, travelling by canoe in summer and following the frozen waterways in winter. (See also Birchbark Canoe; Dugout Canoe.) The water network was so practical that explorers, settlers and soldiers followed the example of the Indigenous peoples. (See also Coureurs des bois; Voyageurs.) To a greater extent than most other countries, Canada depends for its social, economic and political life on efficient communication and transportation. (See also Economy; Politics.)

The Confederation Bridge is the longest bridge in the world crossing ice-covered water. The toll bridge spans a 12.9 km stretch of the Northumberland Strait connecting Borden-Carleton, Prince Edward Island, to Cape Jourimain, New Brunswick. Although the bridge would provide a faster and more reliable link to the mainland, the decision to proceed sparked heated debate on the Island. The $840-million bridge opened on 31 May 1997.

The Intercolonial Railway was a rail line that operated from 1872 to 1918, connecting Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Québec and Ontario. The line was Canada’s first national infrastructure project. Plans for its construction date to the 1830s, but the project only gained momentum during the Confederation conferences of 1864 in Charlottetown and Québec City, where construction of the Intercolonial Railway was negotiated for the Maritime colonies’ entry to British North American union. Construction began shortly after Canada became a country in 1867, with most lines completed by the mid-1870s.

The Champlain and Saint Lawrence Railroad (incorporated 1832), Canada's first railway, ran between La Prairie on the St Lawrence River and St Johns [ St-Jean ] on the Richelieu.

The Montreal metro opened on 14 October 1966. The second Canadian subway system after Toronto’s, which opened in 1954, the Montreal metro was the first subway in North America to run on rubber tires instead of metal wheels. Extensions to the Montreal metro were built on Montreal Island over the two decades after it opened, and then to the city of Laval, on the island of Île Jésus, during the 2000s. The system runs entirely underground, and each station has a distinct architecture and design. The Montreal metro consists of four lines running a total of 71 km and serving 68 stations. In 2018, its passengers made more than 383 million trips.

The low rolling resistance of steel wheels on steel rails, plus the simple guidance mechanism offered by flanges, has made rail-bound transport attractive for a variety of applications.

Streetcars began operation in Canada during the era of horse-powered local transportation, expanded rapidly with electrification, shrank with a public policy switch in favour of rubber-tired vehicles, and recently re-emerged as light rail transit.

This article is from our Toronto Feature series. Features from past programs are not updated.

More familiar are the "road stations" built between 1855 and 1857 for the Grand Trunk Railway's line from Montréal to Toronto and Sarnia.

Horse-drawn trams were a vast improvement, but they were far from ideal transportation. Heavy loads could not be hauled, and horses were expensive and required frequent rest periods; they also polluted the streets.

Numerous tragedies have unfolded on Canadian roads and highways, the deadliest being a bus crash that killed 44 people in Quebec in 1997. Despite the death toll in such headline-grabbing disasters, Canada’s motor vehicle fatality and injury rates are steadily declining, thanks to engineering improvements in vehicles, and the increasing promotion and awareness of safe driving practices.

CTrain is a light rail transit system in Calgary, Alberta. It is operated by Calgary Transit, a public transit service owned by the City of Calgary and operated through its Transportation Department. Service began on the initial downtown transit corridor and south line in 1981. It expanded to northeast Calgary in 1985, to the University of Calgary in the city’s northwest in 1987 and to the city’s west side in 2012. Most of its route and stations are at surface level. Calgary Transit operates the CTrain in conjunction with an extensive network of bus routes. Through equivalency purchases of wind-generated electricity, it has been entirely wind-powered since 2001. Its two separate lines comprise 45 stations, 118.1 km of track, and an average daily ridership of 312,300 (2018).

This article is from our Toronto Feature series. Features from past programs are not updated.

This article is from our Toronto Feature series. Features from past programs are not updated.

This article is from our Toronto Feature series. Features from past programs are not updated.