Rethinking the Rideau Canal

In Februari, I received a phone call from a friend who was supposed to meet with local MP Yasir Naqvi and the Minister of the Environment, Steven Guilbeault who, to my surprise, is also responsible for Parks Canada. After months of going back and forth, a meeting was finally set up, just on the day that my friend was going to ski up north. Could I replace him?

I never turn down a meeting with a minister and Yasir Naqvi to get my 30 minutes of advocacy in, so it was on a very snowy Monday afternoon that we met at the Experimental Farm and the Hartwells Locks to talk about better cycling connections all the way from the Sawmill Creek pathway along the Airport Parkway and Mooney’s Bay station to the Experimental Farm. Parts are in place, such as the short stretch from Sawmill creek to Mooney’s Bay Station, and the new Rideau River Bridge near Carleton University, but a few more short connections should be built to complete this connection.

Getting quieter

In preparing my meeting, I looked up some more data about the Rideau Canal. I definitely had noticed the Rideau Canal is getting quieter and the pathways busier, but that the average daily number of boaters is as low as I found was a bit of a shocker.

Rideau Canal is a gem in downtown Ottawa

I think most of us agree that the Rideau Canal is a gem in downtown Ottawa. Not only as an historic site, but also as a quiet place in an increasingly busy city. In wintertime, when the NCC builds a large skating rink, we like to skate the Rideau Canal’s full length at least once a week. We were very lucky this winter with many days of happy skating. It takes us about an hour to skate back and forth (15.6 km/10 miles) and we really enjoy being out on the ice. It was kept in great condition too.

Not only the skating ‘an sich‘ (‘on its own’ – that’s German) is a pleasure, observing all the people having fun is just as entertaining: the first attempts of a skater, the kids in their little snow suits, the guy with his morning coffee skating by. I saw some numbers of users after the first ten days the canal was open and those boiled down to about 23,000 people skating the canal daily on average and closer to 30,000 on a good weekend day. Those are incredible numbers. After the canal closed, the NCC reported 1.1 million visits.

Compare that to boating on the canal.

Downwards trend

The numbers are not telling a good story. Ken Watson maintains a very interesting website with lots of details about the Rideau Canal. Since the record of around 100,000 vessel passages in 1982, the boating numbers were fairly stable until around 2000 with about 80,000-85,000 vessel movements annually. It has been a steady drop ever since to around 50,000 vessel passages in 2024 (the closure of the Lasalle Causeway lift bridge didn’t help).

Few people sail the entire canal though, the majority stays on the lakes in the central part at the Narrows, Newboro, Chaffeys and Davis Locks. The vessel passages there are 4 to 5 times as high as in Ottawa and those four locks together count for 35% of all traffic on the entire canal system.

Zooming in at the Ottawa stretch of the Rideau Canal

If we zoom in at the three locks closest to downtown, the Ottawa Locks downtown, the Hartwells Locks near Carleton U. and the Hogsback Falls Locks at Hogs Back, the numbers are shockingly low. How low?

Let’s have a look.

The downtown Ottawa Locks saw 1102 vessel passages in 2024, down 10.2%. The numbers for the Hartwells Locks are not available on the website but the Hogsback Locks numbers are 1356 passages, down 10.5% for the entire 2024 season. I am assuming that vessels going through the Hogs Back Locks in all likelihood also travel through the Hartwell Locks, so let’s use the Hogs Back numbers for Hartwells Locks too. I think that is a fair assumption.

The canal is open from May 16 to October 13, that is exactly 150 days. That means that the Ottawa Locks station sees roughly the same vessel movements in an ENTIRE SEASON than it sees cycling movements along the canal on an average DAY. Another number: there are on average 9 vessel movements per day at Hartwells Locks (1356/150).

Lower numbers in downtown

The numbers are even lower at the downtown Ottawa Locks, where we see only 7 vessel movements a day (1102/150). In comparison, around 200,000 cycling trips were made at the same time on the Colonel By pathway along the canal in 2022 (the latest number I have), or 1333 on average per day.

The west side pathway, along Queen Elizabeth Drive has similar numbers. Tens of thousands of residents cross the locks at Hartwells by bike every season. Parks Canada employs throughout the season a number of people at the locks: a lockmaster and often at least two or three summer students to open the locks for the vessels. If you want to cross the locks in Ottawa with your bike though, Parks Canada is not making it easy for you.

If you think about it, it is kind of odd that we put so much resources in catering to really just a handful of pleasure boats, while we expect seniors to lift their 35 kg e-bike awkwardly onto a lock. This is basically what my ask was: better access, especially for seniors and less abled residents to improve access across the locks. Active seniors are a win for society.

Rethinking priorities of the Canal in Ottawa

If you skated the canal this winter, you may have noticed that the canal wall is -in places- in terrible condition. Meters long chunks of concrete have fallen off and in the last few years I have not see any attempts to repair it anymore. (There will be a new 417 bridge built over the canal though in a few years).

Parks Canada should probably rethink how it manages our canal downtown. It is probably time to take a closer look who Parks Canada wants to cater to. The Farm, the Arboretum and the Locks are incredibly popular places for landlubbers like (dog) walkers, runners and cyclists (commuters and tourists alike), so I am hoping I had the ear of the minister, who is not surprisingly also an hiker and cyclist himself, when I asked for better access across the Locks at Hartwells. As a start, I don’t think that is a big ask.

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Some more data on the Rideau Canal

• There is a bike counter near the Canal Ritz restaurant on the Rideau Canal too, that counted in 2024 between June 1 and August 19 (79 days – then the counting stopped for some reason) a total of 96,161 bike movements or on average of 1217 bike movements a day. The Trillium pathway counter (just north of Gladstone) counted 205,955 bike movements, or 2607 movements a day between June 1 and September 30 2024 (data from the City of Ottawa website)

• Canal traffic in 2024 was down 10.3% compared to 2023 (56,308 in 2024 vs 50,484 in 2023). Overall, boat traffic from Ontario was down by 12.7% compared to 2023, Quebec boater numbers were down 4.6% and U.S. boaters down by 10.9%. Note that these are vessel movements, not vessels. One vessel might pass the same locks many times during the season. More canal data: https://www.rideau-info.com/canal/statistics.html

• Using the locks is not free for boaters. A six day permit allowing passages through any number of locks is $5.75/ft. That is CAD 172.50 for a 30 feet (10 m) boat. A one day lockage is CA $ 2/ft, or CA $60 for your 30 ft boat.

• “On average, smaller pleasure yachts with fuel capacities ranging from 200 to 1,000 gallons tend to be more fuel-efficient. They often feature modern technologies and hull designs optimized for reduced resistance and better fuel economy. As a rough estimate, these yachts can consume around 20 to 50 gallons of fuel per hour at cruising speed”. (https://marinedieselspecialists.com/yacht-fuel-capacity.html#:~:text=As%20a%20rough%20estimate%2C%20these,per%20hour%20at%20cruising%20speed.) Which means that they use 3-6 gallons per minute.

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