“Work and life on the Trent-Severn Waterway is a way of life as much as it is a job,” explains Nicolas Angers, UCTE Regional Vice-president for Ontario. “We’re profoundly connected to our communities. Their safety and our work are inseparable.” To care for the Waterway, as we explained in our previous post, is to care for the land and the communities of these regions.
Make no mistake: it’s a labour of love, but it’s a hard job that involves skills and know-how you’ll hardly see anywhere else in the world. The highly-specialized UCTE members – machinists, carpenters, hydraulic engineers, and other trades almost too specific to have names – are intimate with this system.
Angers describes the technical complexity that people probably don’t really think about: “To give you an idea, the system includes earth-moving and cutting projects from the 1830s up to the twentieth century, with technological upgrades all the way up to the digital era. Our members have these layers of knowledge and skill that enable it all to interoperate, keeping the region safe and navigable.”
Nicolas has been a lock operator for 14 years and has a deep appreciation for what it takes to maintain the system in operable condition.
Construction started with nineteenth-century canal and lock methods and technology, and continued until the entire route became navigable in 1930. Controls and other systems have been upgraded with electronics and digital interfaces since then, and upgrades continue along with maintenance. But what doesn’t change over all this period is the crucial nature of the waterway’s function. Without its navigability, water management, wildlife habitat management, and more, the region’s tourism and communities wouldn’t be what they are today. That’s what our members are maintaining and operating: not just a heritage site, this is one of those pieces of infrastructure that opens up the land to recreation, economic prosperity, and safe habitation.
The machine shop on Ashburnham in Peterborough is incredible. It’s equipped with all kinds of custom tools, and a lot of irreplaceable human experience – well over a century of accumulated know-how for machining parts, fabricating gates, and maintaining everything on about 400-kilometers of waterway with 44 lock stations (including dams too) along the way.

The day that National Vice-President Mike Tennant and PSAC National Executive members visited, machinists were creating new fasteners and other pieces to refurbish some of the huge iron valves that control water flow through the gates of the locks. In another area, we saw the process of carving and planing the tremendous pieces of Douglas Fir that our members use to build the lock gates. There are uncountable other custom-machined and constructed parts that make it all work, and just a couple of dozen tradespeople who are intimately in tune with it all.
And some of the facilities they maintain are truly awe-inspiring. The dedication and creativity in the engineering and upkeep is evident. The larger of the two lift locks is at Peterborough. Every time it operates it raises a 1700-ton caisson of water up 20 meters high to reach the upper channel. The other caisson descends at the same time in a hydraulic counterweight system. The other lift lock at Kirkfield is impressive too, and quite different in its structure. Perhaps the most unique equipment is at Big Chute, where a specialized rail car carries boats and other craft clear out of the water, up over a highway, and into another stretch of the Severn River, many times per day. The effect is awesome, but it’s human ingenuity, not magic – just imagine the thousands of components and finely-tuned machinery that our members are maintaining to make this all work through the season and repairing in the winter.
The members told us about the difficulties of their unique work. At the same time, the work is critical: it would be unthinkable for these members to see the system falter just because of tough challenges in their work. After all, it’s a matter of public safety – for their own families, neighbours, and communities.
That’s where the members’ activism comes in, and the union is a channel for that. Employers, including Parks Canada, sometimes need to be educated about the things that don’t fit neatly into a box or a line in a job description, not to mention the workers’ sense of commitment to the successful operation of the waterway. Parks Canada is their employer but keeping their communities liveable and safe is their mission.