Double Cross: The Inside Story of James A Richardson and Canadian Airways

A.A. den Otter is a professor of history at Memorial University of
Newfoundland and the author of The Philosophy of Railways.

Transportation has been a vital aspect of Canada’s history and
culture. Faced with an enormously expansive landscape, Canadians have
traditionally struggled to find efficient means of moving people and
goods. The completion of the transcontinental railway has become for us
a mythical example of our perseverance and ingenuity. Yet, the
actualization of government transportation policies has always been
riddled with errors, delay, and obfuscation. Canada’s air
transportation policy is no exception.

Shirley Render’s Double Cross, which recounts the rise and fall of
Canadian Airways, details the failure of the Canadian government to
establish a clea-cut air policy throughout the 1920s and early 1930s.
When it finally mandated the creation of a transcontinental airline, it
deliberately, and still inexplicitly, shut out the fledgling but highly
successful Canadian Airways—hence the title of this fascinating book.

Central to this story, however, are not the bungling bureaucrats and
politicians but James A. Richardson, the grain magnate from Winnipeg. A
man of vision, Richardson understood the importance of air transport to
Canada’s economic development and national sovereignty. The founder of
Western Canada Airways, a relatively small company flying into the
north, Richardson built Canadian Airways into a successful national
airline that he thought would become Canada’s chosen instrument once
it established a transcontinental and international airline policy. It
was not to be. In 1937, the government created Trans-Canada Airlines and
left Richardson’s company a fatally weakened competitor, eventually to
be absorbed by Canadian Pacific Airlines.

Most of the documents that have survived recount Richardson’s
perspective. The government’s sources are not as rich. Consequently,
Render is unable to fully explain its position. Moreover, Richardson
emerges from this story larger than life and perhaps a little too
altruistic. Nevertheless, Render’s painstaking reconstruction of
Canada’s failure to establish a coherent and consistent air transport
policy is valuable. It is a chilling omen of our current situation.