Living on an Island can be challenging, especially at certain times of the year. Manitoulin is blessed with two methods of getting on and off the Island during the broader summer season, but once the ice begins to form there is only the swing bridge at Little Current on offer. That is a question for which there does not seem to be a satisfactory answer.
The Manitoulin Municipal Association will be discussing the province’s “revised” emergency plan should the swing bridge suffer a catastrophic failure. That plan is only slightly revised from the decades-older plan it will be replacing, once approved.
The swing bridge sees thousands of vehicles each day passing over the North Channel in each direction during the warmer months and even in the winter months there is significant traffic across its venerable span. Islanders have seen increasing instances of closures of the bridge, albeit usually those are resolved within a few hours, lending some urgency for a well-communicated and adequate plan should the now all-too-thinkable occur.
The ministry’s revised emergency plan does indicate the use of private barges to ferry emergency supplies to support Manitoulin’s population, and the use of buses to transport people from the mainline side to transportation hubs at Espanola and other ad hoc options. But given the sheer volume of traffic involved, the number of individuals who require off-Island services and travel to employment on the mainland, those options would prove woefully inadequate.
The Owen Sound Transportation Company currently possesses a small car ferry that is not currently being utilized but there are apparently suggestions that ferry should be sold.
Given that Manitoulin, not to mention those other islands in Ontario which depend on their own ferries for access through much of the year, (such as Wolf Island near Kingston and Pelee Island in Lake Erie) needs something more than a couple of makeshift barges and a mainland bus link should the swing bridge be out of service for a long time. This isn’t just a hypothetical concern. The Manitoulin swing bridge is obviously starting to feel its age—it is, after all, the oldest structure on the provincial highway system.
Manitoulin once depended on a small car ferry at Little Current, before the current swing bridge was opened to vehicle traffic in 1945, and at that time traffic volumes were much lighter. It would not take a tremendous amount of ingenuity and effort to put in place the necessary landing docks for a small ferry to fill in during a pinch—at least during the ice-free months when it could be moved to the North Channel.
Hopefully, wiser heads will prevail over short-term economics and the Owen Sound Transportation Company, itself a servant of the Crown, will decide to keep an ace up its sleeve and retain its “surplus” ferry for emergency use.
