BMC Abroad: Canada. Six Months of Winter, Six Months of Showing Off

Canada is roughly forty times the size of the United Kingdom. It has a tenth of the population. It spreads across six time zones, produces genuinely serious winters over most of its territory, and applies road salt to its roads in quantities measured in the millions of tonnes annually. It also, against all reasonable odds, has one of the most enthusiastic and well-organised classic British car communities on the planet, which is either a tribute to Canadian determination or evidence that some people specifically seek out a challenge that could be avoided, depending on your perspective. Both interpretations are correct.

The title of this entry in the BMC Abroad series is not entirely fair to Canada. The country has rather more than six months of winter in many of its provinces, and in the warmest parts of British Columbia the winter is mild by comparison with what the rest of the country endures. But the spirit is accurate: a compressed show season, a fierce and brief summer, and a classic car community that emerges from its annual hibernation with an enthusiasm entirely proportional to how long it has been waiting to get out.

How British cars got there

Canada was one of BMC’s most significant export markets through the 1950s and 1960s, and the relationship began well before the BMC merger itself. The Commonwealth connection made British cars the natural default for a country still closely tied to Britain, and the postwar export drive that was selling Morris Minors to anyone willing to pay for them found a particularly receptive audience north of the 49th parallel. By 1950, Morris was shipping several thousand Minors a year into Canada alone, at a time when the total North American production allocation was itself a significant number. Fred Deeley in Vancouver had been the official Austin distributor for British Columbia since 1932, building the kind of established network that takes decades to develop and that BMC was not about to let lapse.

Unlike some of the other destinations in this series, Canada was an import rather than a manufacturing market. British cars arrived fully built, shipped from Cowley and Longbridge and processed through a Pre-Delivery Inspection centre in Burlington, Ontario, where they were de-waxed, prepared, and dispatched to a network of around 140 dealers across the country. BMC (Canada) Limited coordinated the operation from Burlington, becoming British Leyland of Canada Limited after the 1968 merger, and at the height of its operations it could claim Canada as its second-largest export market worldwide. The MG TC, which had arrived in North America before the merger and effectively started the entire postwar British sports car craze on the continent, had given BMC the cultural foothold that the MGA, MGB, Austin-Healeys, Triumphs and the Mini were subsequently able to exploit. Canada never missed a model. The Mini, which American emissions regulations killed off south of the border, kept arriving in Canada as the Austin or Morris 850 long after its US career had ended. The Austin Marina made it to Canadian showrooms while the US watched from across the border with carefully maintained disinterest.

The small problem of six million tonnes of salt

Canada uses somewhere between five and seven million tonnes of road salt annually, depending on the severity of the winter and which estimate you find most convincing. This is a large number applied to a country that is already doing everything else it can to accelerate the oxidation of ferrous metals: temperatures that swing between minus thirty in January and plus thirty-five in July, monsoon-level spring thaws that drive accumulated moisture into every seam and cavity simultaneously, and a vehicle inspection regime that will fail a car with compromised structural metalwork with the kind of thoroughness that makes rust not merely an aesthetic inconvenience but a genuine roadworthiness concern.

The salt dissolves into a fine brine that works its way under wheelarch liners, into sill cavities, along subframe rails, and around the brake and fuel lines that classic cars were never designed to protect because nobody in Longbridge in 1964 was planning their product’s survival in Ontario winters. The cars that suffered most were the ones driven through winter in the most heavily salted provinces, essentially Ontario and Quebec, where road treatment is heaviest. The cars that survived best were the ones parked from October to April in heated garages by owners who understood that a classic British car is not, fundamentally, a Canadian winter vehicle, however committed their enthusiasm. It is entirely possible to own a forty-year-old MGB in Toronto. It is considerably harder to own one there in the condition it would naturally achieve in, say, Edmonton, where winters are colder but historically drier and the salting lighter, or in the Okanagan or the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, where winters are mild enough by comparison with the rest of the country that some areas go entire winters without salt being applied at all.

This geographic sorting has produced a country-wide hierarchy of classic car survival that any British enthusiast browsing Canadian listings quickly learns to read. A “rust-free BC car” or an “Alberta car, always garaged” carries the same premium in Canadian classic car circles that a “California car” carries in America. The best British survivors come from the west. The most determined owners are found everywhere else, doing what is necessary to keep them alive.

The most Canadian story in British motorsport history

Al Pease was born in England, moved to Canada, became a commercial illustrator in Toronto, and somewhere along the way developed an attachment to BMC machinery that produced one of the more enjoyable Canadian motorsport careers of the 1960s. He won the 1964 Sundown Grand Prix of Endurance at Mosport Park in an Austin-Healey 3000, campaigned a supercharged MGB through the Canadian club racing circuit with considerable success, helped design the Mosport circuit itself, and was inducted into the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame in 1998. Any of these things would be a satisfying legacy.

His footnote in Formula One history is different in character. At the 1969 Canadian Grand Prix, driving an Eagle that was several seasons past its competitive prime, Pease was black-flagged and disqualified after completing 22 laps while the leaders had completed 46. He is the only driver in Formula One history to have been shown the black flag for being too slow. The officials, reviewing their regulations, concluded that a car lapping a full minute slower than the leaders was creating a hazard to faster traffic, applied the rule, and made motorsport history in the only way Pease was going to make it that particular afternoon. He took it with equanimity, returned to Canadian club racing, continued campaigning British machinery, and left behind a supercharged MGB that still appears at vintage events and is considerably faster than the Eagle was at the 1969 Grand Prix. His reputation in Canada is, quite rightly, that of a genuine motorsport pioneer who happened to have an especially good anecdote.

The Vancouver All British Field Meet: showing off, properly organised

In May 1985, a group of British car enthusiasts gathered in the parking lot of MCL Motor Cars on Burrard Street in downtown Vancouver and held what they called an All British Field Meet. There were no botanical gardens, no Hagerty sponsorship, no 5,000 spectators and no sixty-plus classes of vehicle. There was a car park, some British cars, and the specific optimism of a first event that is not entirely sure how it will go. The following year they moved to VanDusen Botanical Garden on Oak Street, and it went considerably better.

The Vancouver All British Field Meet now runs on the Saturday of the May long weekend, which is the traditional start of the Canadian classic car season and one of the most important diary entries in British Columbia’s motoring calendar. More than 450 vehicles in a typical year, over sixty classes, roughly 5,000 spectators, a Carriage Trade high tea in the botanical gardens, and a record of continuous annual running since 1985 that makes it one of the longest-established British car events in North America. Western Driver, who organise it, call it the greatest show on British wheels. The Rolls-Royces share the gardens with Minis. The Aston Martins park alongside Morris Minors. The overall effect, against the backdrop of VanDusen’s mature planting in late May when Vancouver is at its best, is one of the genuinely good classic car events on either side of the Atlantic.

The event’s timing is also its defining characteristic: it announces that the show season has begun, and in Canada the show season beginning is an event worth marking. The cars come out of storage, the battery tenders go away, the tyres that spent winter on carpet squares rather than concrete are refitted, and somewhere in a garage across the country a fuel stabiliser smell dissipates from an SU carburettor that has not run since October. The May long weekend ABFM is the signal that all of this has happened, and that the next four months are going to be worth the previous six.

The community

Canada’s classic British car community is regional by geography and necessity: the country is simply too large for a single national club to serve effectively, and the scene has evolved accordingly into a dense network of provincial and city-level organisations that between them cover the country from Prince Edward Island to Victoria.

The Antique and Classic Car Club of Canada (ACCCC), founded in the late 1950s and formally incorporated in 1963, is the country’s longest-established multi-marque organisation, spanning thirteen regions across Ontario and publishing The Reflector for members who appreciate a club that takes its history seriously enough to have kept records since Aubrey Marshall chartered the Ontario region of the AACA in 1956. The British Car Council provides an umbrella presence for enthusiasts of the marques specifically, and is worth a look for anyone arriving in Canada wanting to understand where the community is organised.

On the marque-specific front, the MG Car Club of Toronto represents one of the most active MG communities in North America, operating in the province where the cars are hardest to keep alive and doing so with cheerful determination. The Calgary MG Car Club serves Alberta’s considerable MG population from one of Canada’s friendliest classic car provinces. The Old English Car Club of BC, based in Victoria, covers the province where the survivors are most plentiful and the weather least punishing. The British Saloon Car Club of Canada covers a broader range of British machinery across multiple provinces, and smaller regional clubs from the Okanagan British Car Club to the British Motoring Association of Prince Edward Island fill the geographical spaces between the larger organisations. There is, in short, a British car club within reasonable reach of virtually anywhere in Canada. In a country of that size, this is an achievement.

Parts and the border

Canada has no equivalent of the British specialist parts supply network that allows a UK MGB owner to receive a full set of gaskets and a new set of SU needles by next-day delivery from any of half a dozen suppliers within a hundred miles. The major American suppliers, Moss Motors, Victoria British, and their equivalents, serve Canada by post, and a modest network of Canadian distributors and stockists supplements them, including Red Bearing, Robert Pièces d’autos Anglaises in Quebec (the name contains both a French accent and an unambiguous statement of purpose), and a handful of long-established independent specialists in the major cities. The recurring discussion on Canadian British car forums is not which part to order but how to order it without triggering customs brokerage fees that occasionally exceed the value of the component itself. UPS brokerage in particular is discussed with a passion that British owners reserve for arguments about valve timing. The solution most commonly arrived at, after one expensive lesson, is either to use Canadian stockists, order directly from the UK and self-clear at customs, or develop the kind of forward planning that means the carburettor rebuild kit is ordered in July rather than discovered to be needed in October.

The cars today

There are very good British classics in Canada. There are also British classics in Canada that have clearly spent significant portions of their lives in Ontario in February, and these two categories should not be confused when browsing Canadian listings. The western survivor, stored carefully and driven seasonally, is a genuinely excellent thing: corrosion-free floors, solid sills, original paint that has not had to fight through thirty salt seasons to survive. The Ontario driver, however lovingly maintained, carries the accumulated evidence of Canadian winters in its undercarriage in ways that a careful inspection will reveal.

What unites both is the specific quality of enthusiasm that the Canadian climate requires. Nobody in Canada owns a classic British car because it is the path of least resistance. They own one because they want to, and the salt, the storage logistics, the parts border, and the six months of winter are the price they have agreed to pay for six months of showing off in one of the most scenically dramatic countries on earth. At VanDusen in May, with the rhododendrons in bloom and 450 British cars lined up across the gardens, it is very difficult to argue that the price is not worth it.

For technical guidance specifically relevant to Canadian ownership conditions: our rust prevention guide covers the treatments that matter most in high-salt environments, our winter storage guide covers the hibernation procedure that Canadian owners run every October without fail, and our springtime safety check covers the re-emergence inspection that every car needs after six months of storage. For the wider series: the BMC Abroad landing page covers all entries to date.