When you can't go to an auto museum, these cars Zoom to you

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If you can’t come to history, history will come to you. That’s the idea at the Canadian Automotive Museum in Oshawa, Ontario.

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The museum has had to close its doors to visitors several times due to COVID-19 restrictions, and that was a hard blow after new exhibits on Canadian automotive history had just been unveiled. To get the word out, Alex Gates, the museum’s executive director and curator, came up with the idea of online presentations through Zoom.

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When you can't go to an auto museum, these cars Zoom to you Back to video

“We call it Third Thursday Talks, because they’re on the third Thursday of each month,” Gates said. “It was going to be a 2021 lecture series, but we started it last December.”

The museum has a DeLorean, and while it isn’t a Canadian car – John DeLorean was American, and the cars were built in Ireland – the marque has enough followers that it was the focus of the first show, hosted by DeLorean restorer Justin Sookraj.

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Then, starting in January, the lectures focused on home-grown information. Canada once had a large number of independent auto companies, ranging from those that turned out only a few cars before they went under, to far more successful brands with names like McKay, Tudhope, Regal, and Gray-Dort.

The McLaughlin Carriage Company, located in Oshawa, would go from horse-drawn to horseless carriages, and eventually become General Motors of Canada. Ford of Canada started when Gordon McGregor, president of the Walkerville Wagon Company near Windsor, Ontario, approached Henry Ford in 1904 to build his cars under license. Walter Chrysler had taken over an automaker called Maxwell, which had a factory in Windsor. After he started making cars under his own name in 1924, that Ontario factory would become the Chrysler Corporation of Canada.

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To get around tariffs designed to protect the local auto industry, all three would build Canadian-specific models based on U.S. cars, including such brands as GM’s Beaumont and Acadian, Ford’s Meteor and Monarch, and Chrysler’s line of Fargo trucks.

All of this is common knowledge to Gates. The museum owns what is considered the most significant collection of Canadian-only vehicles anywhere. That includes an Ontario-built 1909 Kennedy, and it’s the only one known to exist; a 1910 McKay, built in Nova Scotia; a 1925 Brooks, made in Toronto and powered by steam; and a 1971 Manic GT, a short-lived sports car made in Quebec. One of the museum’s rarest and most unusual cars is a 1914 Galt. The Ontario-based automaker made two experimental gas-electric hybrid cars, and this is the sole survivor. It’s currently on loan to the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.

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For the January lecture, Gates called on Ron Foss, of Burlington, Ontario, whose grandfather may have built the country’s first gasoline-powered automobile. No one knows what happened to the original, but Foss is creating a replica of it based on vintage photographs, and which he said will be going into the museum’s collection when it’s finished.

The February lecture was by Dale Johnson, of Regina, Saskatchewan – the same city where GM opened an assembly plant in 1927, closed it in 1931 due to the Depression, and started work on it in 1937 for its reopening a year later. It was taken over by the federal government in 1941 to build munitions for the Second World War, and never made cars again. Johnson recounted the plant’s history, and the lecture can be viewed on YouTube.

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For March, the subject was the museum’s new Oshawa Automotive Community exhibit. General Motors isn’t connected to the museum, but it’s been a vital part of Oshawa since the McLaughlin Motor Car Company built its first Buick-based car there in December of 1907 , and became General Motors of Canada in 1918. The GM plant there closed, but plans are to reopen it to assemble pickup trucks once again. Gates, along with the museum’s project manager Dumaresq de Pencier, covered the city’s history until the 1930s. A second presentation, with Lisa Terech from the Oshawa Museum , looked at a strike at the GM plant in April of 1937, which led to improved working conditions and recognition of the workers’ union.

“In May, we’ll talk about the Second World War, covering war production in Oshawa during the 1940s,” Gates said. “I’m surprised it hasn’t been done before. Everyone loves talking about World War Two, but Oshawa war production has never really been covered in-depth in this way in recent years. In June, we’ll continue with the story post-war.”

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Each lecture lasts about an hour, including a question-and-answer session with viewers. Gates plans to record more of them and make them available to people in different time zones – including one viewer who tunes in from South Africa. “It’s given us an opportunity with this type of programming,” he said. “We can only comfortably seat 25 people in our gallery for an in-person talk, but this can have hundreds of people watching live. We’re planning on doing this even when the museum reopens, because there’s a lot of interest and so many topics. We can have an automotive story from each province or territory, and we’re only touching the surface of these stories.”

The lectures are free for viewers to register, although the museum wouldn’t mind if you send a donation, and anything over $25 generates a tax receipt. For more information, and to get in on future Third Thursday Talks, visit the Canadian Automotive Museum’s Events Page.