Canada Steamship Lines

Canada Steamship Lines (CSL) is a Canadian shipping company with headquarters in Montreal, Quebec. The business has been operating for well over a century and a half.

CSL had humble beginnings in Canada East in 1845, operating river boats on the Saint Lawrence River in general commerce. Subsequent growth over the years was tied to expansion of the canal system on the upper St. Lawrence River (the precursor to the Saint Lawrence Seaway), and to a new Welland Canal connecting to the upper Great Lakes. The year of 1913 saw the merger of CSL with Northern Navigation Company[circular definition], the Richelieu and Ontario Navigation Company, and the Niagara Navigation Company, which resulted in the acquisition of several passenger vessels, including the vessels Chicora, Carona, Chippewa and Cayuga; built 1864(?), 1896, 1893 and 1907 respectively, with Cayuga being the last of them to be in service by 1936. She was sold in 1954 and scrapped by 1961. CSL had also acquired the new ships SS Hamonic (1909), Huronic (1901), and the ill-fated Noronic (1913). By 1924, CSL purchased its first self-unloaded bulk carrier, Collier, and also owned a shipyard in Collingwood, Ontario where CSL and competitor lakers were being built. CSL also came into ownership of one of Canada's largest shipyards, Davie Shipbuilding, in Lauzon, Quebec for a period in the 1960s-1970s and was at one time a major passenger line on the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River.

CSL's growth through the industrial booms of both world wars was largely tied to the increasing importance of the steel industry in Ontario, where mills were built, or soon to be built, in Sault Ste. Marie, Hamilton, and Nanticoke. CSL also tapped into the last of the remaining coal traffic from Pennsylvania across the Great Lakes to railways in Canada. Following railway dieselization, subsequent coal traffic would be moved by CSL to large fossil-fuel burning electrical power plants.