Ian Jelf:
(The company ran the original Toronto - Montreal line before Canada
became a Dominion as such when Ontario and Quebec were the provinces
of Upper and Lower Canada respectively. It was an important factor
in joining the two very different provinces.)

Canadian history nitpick: Upper and Lower Canada were already history
when the Grand Trunk was started in the 1850s. In 1841 they had been
united under a single colonial government as the Province of Canada.
Denying a separate government to the largely French-descended population
of Lower Canada, then called Canada East, was an attempt to force their
assimilation into British culture; it ended in 1867 when the dominion
of Canada was created and the old boundary becaue the Ontario/Quebec
provincial border.

James Robinson:
The railway was primarily supported by British financiers. It was
one of the first constructed in North America, starting in Portland,
Maine, USA, and was then routed through Montreal and Toronto to Chicago.

And thus it was a notable example of a company that put its business
interests ahead of national ones. Which in turn meant that Canadian
governments weren't too fond of them. And so:

... the Canadian government didn't like the idea of serving the
western part of the Dominion through the USA. The Canadian Pacific,
which was also British financed, won the right to build around the
north of the lakes.

The Conservative government of the day first awarded the contract
to build the line to a syndicate whose intentions proved to be
fraudulent. After the syndicate was caught making a political
payoff, the government fell and the Liberals got in. They tried
building the railway as a government project, which they in turn
proceeded to botch. When the Conservatives were reelected, they
reprivatized the line and this time put it in the hands of the right
people, whose successors are the CPR company that still exists.

The CPR got its financing wherever it could, Canadian and American
money as well as British; I don't remember the proportions. Canada's
then largest bank, the Bank of Montreal, was into the railway to
such an extent that if the company had gone bankrupt during con-
struction, as was feared several times, the bank would probably
have failed as well.

The Grand Trunk eventually went bankrupt, and became part of
the government-owned Canadian National in 1919,

Not formally part of CN until a bit later, but in practice yes.

During WW1 the Canadian government encouraged the building of more
railways. In the end *two* more transcontinental lines were built.
In western Canada one was built by the GTR while the other was an
extension of the existing routes of a regional railway called the
Canadian Northern. I believe it was because the two companies
were too pigheaded to consider cooperating that they ended up
building routes that ran practically side by side for some 1,000
miles out of Winnipeg, as far as Jasper in the Rocky Mountains.

The result was that both companies went bankrupt just after the
war, and were united as the Canadian National Railways. The CNR,
or in later years CN for short, operated as a government agency
for many decades, before eventually being privatized (and along
the way, losing the S in Railways). In an echo of the old GTR's
internationalism, a few years ago they bought the former Illinois
Central Gulf Railroad, giving CN access to the Gulf of Mexico as
well as Canadian ports on the Atlantic and the Pacific. (Their line
to Hudson Bay, however, has been sold off to a separate comany.)
--
Mark Brader | "...most people who borrow over $1,000,000 from a bank
Toronto | would at least remember the name of the bank."
| -- Judge Donald Bowman, Tax Court of Canada

My text in this article is in the public domain.