Cantley's 1889 Articles in The Echo of Cantley
Cantley 1889’s volunteers have written more than 150 monthly articles of local historical interest for publication in The Echo of Cantley, a non-profit bilingual organization that produces Cantley's only community newspaper.
The following article is reprinted here with permission from in The Echo of Cantley, Volume 37 no 1, July 2025.
Gatineau River, 1987 – hopes for its uncertain future
Bob Phillips; foreword by Margaret Phillips
My late parents, Bob and MaryAnne Phillips, lived in the historic barn they relocated and restored on the shore of the Gatineau River – today’s La Grange-de-la Gatineau.
The following article appeared in the November 1987 Ottawa Citizen. It is one of Bob’s 646 bi-weekly columns he wrote every second week for his “View from the Outaouais” series before his death in 2003.
In 1987, as Bob was writing this article, Cantley citizens were fighting for independence from Gatineau. They had already chosen the tugboat logo to symbolize their strong determination to push through all obstacles to save Cantley’s unique identity. That summer, 20 tugboats had moved 280,000 cords of logs downriver alongside Cantley’s shores. Bob was deeply concerned about the Gatineau River’s health and what its future would be after 1991 when logging was scheduled to end. Bob’s concerns are still concerning today, 38 years later.
The journey begins 370 kilometres away in the anonymity of the empty wilderness. It brings to the Capital of Canada 500 pails of water every second. The Gatineau is not among the longest, deepest or widest of Canada's rivers, though in your average country elsewhere in the world possession of such a waterway would be considered riches beyond the dreams of avarice.
If the country were wise, such a river would be guarded from abuse. Its water would be protected against the pollution of industry, of householders, of the poison which falls from the skies. People would enjoy the waters in innocent pleasure: swimming, paddling, sailing, walking its shores, free from the noisy pollution of overpowered boats or the cacophony of land-based civilization. The beauty of the hills which run to the water's edge would be preserved from the exploitation which destroys their character. Such a river would be, to coin a phrase, "a sacred trust."
This is not quite how the Outaouais has seen the river. It is another of those Canadian resources which once seemed so limitless until the cries of alarm are sounded. In the Outaouais, almost no one hears. In the lower reaches of the Gatineau, only Quebec, Gatineau, Hull, and West Hull have responsibility. Since no one found a way to save half a river, combined action is needed.
If Cantley were to become a separate municipality, there would be hope. Its separatists have made the river a symbol of their logo. Their Phantom Mayor would protect this treasure for the region's people. West Hull has just formed an Environmental Commission under Councillor Isabel Bayly, a distinguished biologist. She personally made tests of water standards when no one else cared if there was pollution and what its source might be. She shamed the province into belated tests; otherwise, the main contribution of Quebec has been to turn over the river to the pulp and paper industry. They send some 280,000 cords of logs down that river each year.
Once the river was thick with tugboats and river crews who unsnagged the errant logs from shores or rocks before they sank, or salvaged deadheads when they began to be waterlogged. No more. Manpower is expensive. It is far cheaper to let the logs sink to the river bottom, gradually weaving a carpet of suffocating wood and bark which can be metres thick. And yet, when chill November sends rolls of morning mist scurrying past the farther shore, there is romance in this, one of the last of Canada's logging rivers. The puffing tugboat towing the grand ellipse of logs sculpts patterns in the grey-blue water.
The rivermen, with pike poles, peavey hooks, or monstrous iron chains that tame the booms, are the survivors of another age. The logs themselves evoke the lumber camps of the not-so-distant frontier. There in the imagination is the sight, the sound, the very smell of hurling down the pine. For centuries it awaited majestically the white man's coming. Then it became the wonder of the shipwrights and joiners of Europe's world. Now the pine has dwindled and slipped further beyond the Gatineau horizon. It is no longer crafted with the skill of artists but is ignominiously ground into pulp.
We can still say to our children or grandchildren: "Remember this logging river. You will never see its like again." It is just a moment in the river's history until it will be free again of the logs. Then whose river will it be? What threats of pollution still remain? What will its waters, or the fauna beneath its surface, be like? When the river is returned to the people, how will they share it, and what laws should now safeguard their quiet enjoyment? How will we preserve the fragile beauty of the hill and the valley?
What will be left when the loggers' tugboats are finally gone from the river?
