How Pandemics Shape History

The 1918 Spanish flu changed Canada permanently. Will COVID-19 do the same?

- SIMON LEWSEN

IN THE FALL OF 1918, the Canadian army began rounding up soldiers at camps in the Maritimes, Quebec, and Ontario. The troops were to join an international coalition to intervene in the Russian Civil War and defend Western liberalism against Bolshevik socialism. Needless to say, the operation failed to reverse the Soviet Revolution, but it succeeded in bringing a second wave of Spanish flu to central and western Canada.

In his groundbreaking 2013 book, The Last Plague, Mark Osborne Humphries charts the cursed journey of the Ocean Limited train, which pulled out of Halifax on September 27, 1918, its cars packed with recruits. The men were to be carried to Victoria, where they would board Siberia- bound ships. Some had been exposed to the flu in Sydney, Nova Scotia, and once the train reached Moncton, several were visibly ill. In Montreal, two of the sickest were carried off to the hospital; in their place, forty-two new soldiers got on.

The Ocean Limited and two similar troop trains continued their journey, picking up men, exposing them to the virus, and depositing the infected in cities across the country  — Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver. Because the mission was secret, local public health authorities weren’t warned of the trains’ arrivals. Soon, cities were inundated: an outbreak in eastern and central Canada had been transformed into a countrywide crisis.