One of the products of the Cold War of the 1950s was the creation of Canada’s Emergency Measures Organization, popularly known at the time as EMO.
Some readers will certainly remember the local unit, the Guelph and Wellington EMO, and its head, George Moon.
The concept of preparedness for civilians was a popular one in the 1950s. World War II was still in recent memory and many people were very fearful of a Soviet nuclear attack.
Planning for a civilian defence and preparedness organization began at the Federal-Provincial Conference in August 1950. The federal and provincial governments agreed on a plan to set up training schools for leaders, and to publish information brochures for the general public. The federal government would look after those chores, while the provinces would create local organizations to co-ordinate planning for civil defence.
Between 1951 and 1954 the federal government offered courses at the Civil Defence Staff College at Ottawa. There was special emphasis on dealing with and preparing for nuclear attacks. The number of people trained under the program though was small, and there was little done at the provincial and local level during those years.
In 1954 a new Civil Defence College opened at Arnprior, under the jurisdiction of the Department of Health and Welfare. The new facility taught about 2,000 people per year through the 1950s. The courses dealt with nuclear preparedness, leadership and the co-ordination of medical and other resources after an attack. There were also conferences for civic leaders and politicians. Those activities at the Civil Defence College continued until 1972, when they were discontinued as a consequence of budget cuts and waning public interest.
John Diefenbaker’s Conservative government, elected in 1957, took civil defence more seriously than the previous Liberal government.
In 1959 the government issued a Civil Defence Order, creating the Emergency Measures Organization, which reported directly to the cabinet and the privy council. The new EMO took over civil defence training in 1962. The following year, the government transferred the organization to the Defence Department.
Locally, the renewed interest by government in civil defence in the late 1950s led to the creation in 1957 of the Wellington County and City of Guelph EMO, under the direction of George Moon and a full-time staff that included Jock Smith as deputy co-ordinator and Ellen Boyd as public relations officer.
The staff of the local EMO spent much of their time speaking to church and service clubs, and giving short courses and demonstrations to school groups and Boy Scout troops. Some of that instruction was useful in dealing with emergencies of any type, and some was focussed on procedures to take in case of nuclear attack.
Much of the training was an expansion of material in the pamphlet, “11 Steps to Survival,” which was distributed widely locally and by the millions across Canada. Few households did not have at least one copy.
The Wellington and Guelph EMO set up its headquarters in a small building constructed on the north side of Guelph, on the west side of Highway 6. The site was considered an optimum one for servicing the city and county populations. The basement included a fallout shelter to protect the staff of the organization.
The promotion of fallout shelter construction was one of the main aims of the organization. They provided plans and guidelines for constructing a shelter as part of the basement of new houses, and ways to retrofit a shelter in existing buildings.
The EMO also issued lists of provisions to stock the shelters, consisting largely of containers of drinking water and canned and other non-perishable food, plus fuel for a small stove. The guidelines indicated that after a nuclear attack, it would be safe to leave the shelter after 14 days.
To those with actual experience of war conditions, the assumptions made by the EMO seemed laughable. There were no plans of what to do after the 14 days of food and water ran out, or how to cope should an attack occur in the midst of winter. The EMO literature suggested that most things would return to normal after two weeks. Public school children were trained to hide under desks to withstand the initial blast of a nuclear explosion.
Despite the naivety of EMO’s assumptions of the aftermath of a nuclear attack, the organization received considerable support. It’s most ambitious plan, developed during the summer of 1960, was a series of communal fall-out shelters. On July 6 of that year, the EMO committee and officials of the City of Guelph agreed on a plan for a large, completely equipped shelter in Guelph.
Guelph was much smaller then, with a population of about 32,000. Nevertheless, a shelter to accommodate even a portion of that population would be an immense undertaking. The schedule was an impressive one: EMO officials hoped to have the facility ready to occupy by late fall of 1960, though they had yet to draft detailed plans and had not yet considered any sites. And there was no budget to cover the construction, or even an estimate of the costs.
George Moon and other EMO officials approached the Guelph Builders Exchange, an organization of contractors and building material suppliers, for help.
The president of that organization was C.M. Hammond, a city councillor and the manager of Barber’s Building Blocks, a manufacturer of concrete blocks and other materials. Hammond expressed strong support for the EMO organization, pledging the support of the Builders Exchange, and offering to donate all the concrete blocks required for its construction.
During early July, Moon met with the councils of several municipalities in Wellington County. He planned further shelters for Harriston, Mount Forest and Fergus, or in the immediate areas of those towns.
Though many councillors had private misgivings about the value of the shelters and their usefulness in the event of an attack, few raised questions about the concept and councils endorsed the plan in principle.
Supplying funds though, was another matter. None of the councils had included anything in their 1960 budgets for a fall-out shelter, and none even considered issuing debentures or including the project in their 1961 budget discussions.
As well, it appears there were no discussions on fund-sharing by municipalities that would not be the site of a shelter, but whose residents might use the facility in case of emergency.
Consequently, no construction took place on any of the proposed local fall-out shelters. Enthusiasm for the EMO concept and organization peaked in the early 1960s, but by the mid-60s it began a decline that never ended.
Many of the responsibilities of the EMO organization in Ontario were transferred to the Ontario Provincial Police Auxiliary, an organization whose members were trained in meeting a wide range of emergency situations as well as a potential enemy attack.
With its responsibilities parcelled out to other organizations, and its operations stifled by a series of budget cuts at the federal level, the local EMO wound down its activities. In 1976 the EMO headquarters building, just north of Guelph, was purchased by the Halwell Mutual Fire Insurance Company for its headquarters.
Halwell undertook a major extension and renovations to the building in 1992, which more than doubled the floor area to 4,300 square feet. The renovation plans called for the retention of the original bomb shelter as an artifact of the cold war and as a piece of local history.
Today, the old EMO is largely forgotten, but its history, combining dedicated public service with hopelessly naive and ill-planned projects, and little understanding of the true effects of war, is a significant phase of our local and national history.