Breaking New Ground—Stories from Defence Construction Breaking_new_ground | Page 41

Crew members stand by the Guided
Lacrosse Missile at the launching site at
Fort Churchill, Manitoba, in January 1960.
The missile was part of a series of test
firings successfully carried out by a joint
U.S.-Canadian Army team. Measuring about
10 feet long and 20 inches in diameter, it
was fired from a truck-mounted launcher.
DCL provided the infrastructure at the
Churchill rocket research facility.
DCL also persuaded the U.S. Corps of Engineers to agree that Canadian
Standards Association (CSA) approvals would be accepted as the equivalent
of the Underwriters Laboratories (UL) approvals required in American
contracts. This allowed many Canadian manufacturers to sell their products
to contractors working for the Corps.
In a summary of U.S. military construction projects carried out in the late
1950s and early 1960s in Canada, DCL staff noted: “This arrangement
(that Canadian contractors be used) had not been accepted merely on the
insistence that it was appropriate that work in Canada be handled by a
Canadian agency. A more potent argument was that DCL had demonstrated
a capability to have such work carried out satisfactorily and economically.”

Working with the Defence Research Board
DCL was also continuing its tradition of working on unique projects, including
several for the Defence Research Board. Through the late 1950s and early
1960s, these included the high-speed wind tunnel at Uplands, near Ottawa;
a research radar observatory at Prince Albert in Saskatchewan; and
laboratories for electronics, radio physics and chemistry work at Shirley’s
Bay, near Ottawa.
DCL also worked for the Board on a rocket launching facility in Churchill
that was completed by 1959, following up in the same location in 1962 and
1963 with a $1.78 million rocket research facility for the U.S.
BREAKING NEW GROUND
DEFENCE CONSTRUCTION CANADA
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