When Canada Couldn’t Agree Which Side to Drive On

When Thomas Wilby and Jack Haney set out from Halifax in their REO touring car in August 1912, bad roads were only part of the problem. There were few reliable road maps, almost no directional signs, and enormous stretches where roads barely existed—and, remarkably, Canadians could not even agree on which side of the road to drive on.

For Haney, who drove the automobile while Wilby observed from the rear seat, this was no academic matter. Crossing a provincial boundary could mean switching sides of the road.

Wilby identified the problem in the introduction to A Motor Tour Through Canada. Describing the primitive state of Canadian motoring, he complained:

The sentence appears immediately after Wilby describes Canadian roads as “generally uncharted and unsignposted.” For him, the absence of a common rule was another indication that Canada might have been a single political country, but it did not yet function as a unified country for the motor traveler.

A Coast-to-Coast Change of Sides

The reason was historical. British influence remained particularly strong in the Maritime provinces and British Columbia, where traffic traditionally kept to the left, as it did in Britain. Quebec, Ontario, and the Prairie provinces followed the North American practice of driving on the right. That meant the 1912 expedition encountered a significant change as it traveled west. Wilby later recalled:

The phrase “several narrow escapes from accident” gives some sense of what the inconsistency meant in practice. There were no modern divided highways, painted center lines, or standardized traffic signs to remind Haney what to do. He was driving a touring car on narrow roads shared with horses, wagons, bicycles, pedestrians, and the occasional other automobile.

After hundreds of miles, Haney became accustomed to keeping right through Quebec and Ontario and would continue to do so across much of western Canada. Then came another surprise. Wilby writes:

The journey therefore effectively went left, right, and left as the REO traveled from Atlantic Canada toward the Pacific.

Wilby Wants National Uniformity

Wilby's reaction is particularly interesting because it fits directly into the broader argument of his book. He was not merely recording an amusing peculiarity of Canadian travel. He believed that Canada's transportation system required greater national coordination. He wrote:

That observation is significant. Wilby's expedition was intended, in part, to demonstrate the need for a Trans-Canadian highway. Again and again, he found that the obstacles were not merely mud, mountains, muskeg, and missing roads. The deeper problem was fragmentation.

Roads were primarily provincial matters. Standards varied. Signs were inconsistent. Municipalities imposed different regulations. Bridges could have their own restrictions. Even the basic rule on which side of the road a motorist used could change as the traveler crossed provincial boundaries.

Wilby's complaint about driving left or right therefore belongs to the larger story of Canada's gradual transformation into a country that could be traversed by automobile from coast to coast.

Wilby Rather Liked Driving on the Left

There is another revealing twist. Wilby was not initially arguing that everyone should necessarily drive on the right or the left. As an Englishman, he could see considerable merit in the British system. His principal concern was uniformity. He makes this explicit:

Wilby then makes a spirited case for the old left-side convention. With the driver's seat on the right side of the vehicle, he believed a motorist could judge more accurately the distance between his car and an approaching vehicle:

He even returned to an oft-repeated explanation for why people keep to the left. Wilby argued that earlier travelers benefited from keeping their right hand free when passing another person:

Wilby acknowledged that left-hand traffic was already losing ground internationally, yet he still defended it:

The argument may sound quaint today, but it reveals how unsettled the conventions of automobile travel still were. Rules modern drivers take for granted were still being debated.

Canada Eventually Chooses the Right

Within a little more than a decade of Wilby's journey, the inconsistency he identified was largely eliminated.

British Columbia transitioned from left- to right-side traffic in stages in the early 1920s. New Brunswick followed in 1922, and Nova Scotia in 1923. Prince Edward Island was the last Canadian province still driving on the left. On May 1, 1924, Islanders switched to driving on the right.

Relatively Few Accidents

Surprisingly, the provincial changeovers produced relatively few reported accidents. Prince Edward Island was a notable exception. When the island switched to right-hand traffic on May 1, 1924, a local newspaper (possibly the Charlottetown Guardian) reported less than two weeks later: “On May the first the new law, drive to the right, came into effect and already two accidents have been reported.” Both incidents involved horse-drawn wagons rather than automobiles, a reminder that cars were still relatively uncommon on Prince Edward Island.

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There is an important historical qualification. Newfoundland continued driving on the left considerably longer. It shifted to the right on January 2, 1947, but at the time it was still a separate Dominion and did not become a Canadian province until 1949.

So, if we ask when Canada, as it then existed, stopped driving on the left, the answer is May 1, 1924, when Prince Edward Island changed sides. If we include all the territory that makes up Canada today, the last change occurred in Newfoundland in 1947.