A 2024 Cadillac Escalade parked in front of the Trout Creek Community Centre, which is just north of Scotia, Ont.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
Standing in front of the old wooden building, you could almost hear the carousing from 100 years ago.
“A blind man would have known that that hotel was bad, if his nose and ears were doing business, but we were the sort of people who have to eat the whole egg to know that it is old,” Percy Gomery wrote in his 1922 book, A Motor Scamper ‘Cross Canada.
He and his wife Bernadette were attempting to drive home from Montreal to Vancouver, and they were headed north from Pembroke, Ont., on their way to North Bay. They did not have a map or know whether roads even existed – spoiler, they didn’t – but on that first night out of Ottawa, they needed a place to stay. Eventually, they found the Quebec village of Rapides-des-Joachims on an island in the Ottawa River, and its sole hotel.
“The upper portion of the building was merely an unfinished, dirty loft, unlighted and quite unfurnished, except for one or two shake-downs, on top of which a weary logger could throw his blankets,” wrote Gomery, a mild-mannered bank manager in his day job. “Partitioned off at one end was a space containing bedroom furniture on a floor that snapped like a noisy haycart.” The Gomerys were tired from their long drive and passed through a double line of “degenerate-looking” patrons to get to their room.
Highway 11 in Scotia, Ont.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
I wanted to find that old hotel as part of research for a book about the original pathfinders who attempted to drive across Canada before the Trans-Canada Highway was built. I drove north from Ottawa for a couple of hours in a 2024 Cadillac Escalade, much more comfortable than the Gomerys’ 1920 Russell. Unlike them, I had maps to show me exactly what to expect, and where. Even more remarkable was that the Cadillac could access a virtual GPS map directly from the cloud, so detailed that it knew about road conditions down to the last few centimetres.
That map, combined with a raft of sensors and cameras inside and outside the car, are the foundation of General Motors’ Super Cruise system of semi-autonomous driving, a system I was about to test.
A map of Super Cruise enabled roads after 2024-2025 expansion to 1,200,000 kilometres.Courtesy of manufacturer
It’s similar in principle to Ford’s BlueCruise system, though Super Cruise has a larger network of mapped roads, covering 650,000 kilometres in Canada and the United States today and expected to almost double by the end of next year. It will let you drive without hands on the wheel or feet on the pedals for as long as it’s active, provided the car’s internal camera sees you watching the road, ready to take control at any moment. It will even overtake slower vehicles automatically if you’re on a multi-lane, controlled-access highway, with a wide or solid median intended to keep oncoming traffic well away from your side of the road. Its biggest flaw is that you get used to it quickly, and come to resent when it doesn’t work because you’re driving on an unmapped road, or a highway that’s under construction and still paying $25 a month for the feature.
Most other semi-autonomous driving systems available in North America require you to hold the steering wheel after absences of anywhere from 15 seconds (Honda) to up to two minutes (Hyundai). Even Tesla’s Full-Self-Driving program makes you hold the wheel and not let go for too long, though it will use its cameras and navigation program to drive the car to your chosen destination.
On the Trans-Canada Highway just south of Mattawa, Ont.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
Stellantis launched its Hands-Free Active Driving Assist system last year, and has already announced its replacement next year with a more advanced system that does not require the driver to watch the road (considered to be Level 3 autonomy). The only system sold in North America that does not require eyes on the road is Mercedes-Benz’s DrivePilot, which is available on certain EQS and S-Class models. It’s legal only in California and Nevada, will not overtake automatically, and works only up to 65 kilometres an hour, in daylight.
The green light on the steering wheel indicates Super Cruise is activated and automatically steering the vehicle.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
In case there’s any doubt, you cannot buy a fully autonomous vehicle in Canada right now, no matter what the sales and marketing folks would like you to believe. They aren’t for sale. The driver is still legally responsible for whatever happens behind the wheel. Just read the fine print or ask your insurance company.
I set the Cadillac’s navigation system to show me the way to Rapides-des-Joachims and settled back in the driver’s seat, not touching anything once I was up to speed on the highway and had activated Super Cruise. It uses cameras, sensors and highly detailed map data to gauge the road position and driving conditions.
However, when the Trans-Canada lost its wide centre median near Renfrew, and whenever the road narrowed from four or three lanes to just two, the system would no longer make its own lane changes to leave the merging lane and would shut off if I didn’t do the steering myself. This is a safety feature, to ensure there would be no oncoming traffic in the lane. Whenever we approached a traffic light, the system would also shut off, not reading whether it was green or red.
One time, coming up to a red light, I purposely ignored the instructions to take the wheel. The car’s internal warnings flashed and buzzed more insistently until an extremely loud voice came through the speakers, ordering me to take control. I did so, and the Cadillac refused to allow Super Cruise to resume until I eventually stopped the vehicle and shut everything down to reset. If I had still not taken the wheel – if I’d suffered a heart attack, say – the car would have applied the brakes and the hazard lights and alerted an OnStar operator that I was in trouble.
Lodge owner Said Abbassi, who bought the place a few years ago and is renovating it to be a fishing lodge.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
I found the old hotel fairly easily – it stands out in the village – and spoke with its owner, Said Abbassi, who bought the place a few years ago and is renovating it to be a fishing lodge. The river is renowned for its stocks of sturgeon, sunfish, walleye, whitefish, catfish and bass. He said he would visit from his home in Newmarket, Ont., and one day the previous owner told him he wanted to sell. “He said, ‘I’m sick and tired of here,’ and bang, bang, bang, after three or four days, he was gone and I owned the place. Now, I go fishing every day.”
Percy Gomery in his 1920 Russell.Supplied
I showed him the description from Gomery’s book, when Percy and Bernadette were kept from sleep by the woodsmen in the bar below: “I must admit that the occasional concerted rendering of one of the old French-Canadian chansons lent a picturesque air, but these were outnumbered, and out-hollered, by strictly up-to-date and strictly unprintable songs of the rivermen,” wrote Gomery. “I cannot say that the night hung heavily, because nothing is more enlivening than a series of fights which you hear, but cannot see, and the frequent smashing of bottles proved at least that interest was not flagging.”
The next day, the exhausted Gomerys left and pressed their way through the woods and swamp on trails barely passable on horseback, let alone motorcar, asking directions along the way. They were stuck many times but made it to North Bay before finally having to load their car onto a lake steamer west of Sudbury. The Escalade, however, drove me comfortably and without incident to the village of Scotia, about an hour south of North Bay.
Jack Haney fixing a flat tire on the 1912 Reo.Supplied
Scotia was immortalized in Thomas Wilby’s 1914 book, A Motor Tour Through Canada. He and his driver, Jack Haney – two men who despised each other – tried to be the first motorists to ever drive across Canada, again with no maps. After leaving Halifax, Scotia is where they first got well and truly stuck on a sandy hill. “Scotia Junction was a geographical expression set down promiscuously and irrelevantly in a swamp in the heart of Ontario,” wrote Wilby. “Scotia Junction was the end of the world.”
The Reo being hauled out of the sand by horses at Scotia Junction.Supplied
The Escalade on the sand at Scotia.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
Their 1912 Reo car twisted its drive shaft when it was yanked from the sandpit by a team of horses, and the pair had to wait at the local hotel while a new shaft was sent up by train from Toronto. Like Gomery, Wilby is disparaging about the place, but I drove the Escalade down a sandy road next to a railway track, just off Highway 11, and found Will Wilkes living at the end of it with his kids. “My landlord says this used to be the old hotel, way back when,” he said of his house.
On the Trans-Canada Highway from Rapides-des-Joachims, Que., to North Bay, Ont.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
When Wilby and Haney finally fixed their car and continued north, they ran into more sand and hills and broken bridges that almost did them in. “Slowly we advanced along the grass-grown, corduroy path,” wrote Wilby. “We had been five days covering the 200 miles separating us from Toronto. The road had teased and insulted us, had defied us and goaded us to herculean efforts, exasperated us, indeed, beyond the ordinary lot of human endurance. For days we had coaxed and cajoled the car along, then bullied it and made its life a torture. We had tossed it and rocked it and pitched it and then broken it once, nay twice, and bombarded it with an infinite number of tricks and devices to advance it on its way.”
And they made it, all the way to Vancouver, though they also had to load the car onto a steamer across the Great Lakes and then a train to Winnipeg. Me? I waved goodbye to Wilkes and his kids, drove the Cadillac back down the sandy road to Highway 11, then set the navigation and pressed the button to activate Super Cruise. The Escalade glided me home on the smooth Trans-Canada Highway in less than three hours, barely touching the wheel or pedals except for a short stop along the way for an afternoon cappuccino. What a difference a century makes.
Mark Richardson reading a map near Ottawa while trying to figure out the route to Rapides-des-Joachims, Que.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
General Motors provided the vehicle and covered basic expenses for the trip. Content was not subject to approval.
Mark Richardson is the author of The Drive Across Canada: The remarkable story of the Trans-Canada Highway and its adventurous pathfinders, to be published next year by Dundurn Press.
To download a free copy of A Motor Scamper ‘Cross Canada (1922) by Percy Gomery, click here.
To download a free copy of A Motor Tour Through Canada (1914) by Thomas Wilby, click here.