[LINK] "Canadian Cousins With Fleur-de-Lis and Mixed Genes"

[rfmcdonald]

Ian Austen's New York Times article describing the collecting culture surrounding Canadian-brand cars made in the United States for the Canadian market in the two decades after the Second World War made for amusing reading.

To Americans, they look familiar, yet strange. Their brand names don’t ring a bell: Mayfair, Frontenac, Acadian, Meteor, Monarch, Fargo, Laurentian, Beaumont.

These are among the cars once created specifically for Canada, and usually built in Canada, by the Detroit-based automakers. In their heyday, from the end of World War II until the late 1960s — a period of true mechanical distinctions between, say, Chevrolets and Pontiacs — the Canadianized cars shamelessly borrowed parts and styling from their sister divisions.

Once common on Canadian roads, such cars have become, even here, largely forgotten historical footnotes.

When Denise Côté, a retired government secretary in Ottawa, went to register her 1957 Monarch Lucerne, the Ontario Ministry of Transportation would have no part of it. Until Ms. Côté commissioned an auto historian to provide the government a history of Ford Canada’s Monarch brand, the license bureau would register her car only as a Mercury Monarch, a model that wasn’t produced until the late 1970s and was sold on both sides of the border.

“It is a Monarch Lucerne; it is not a Mercury,” said Ms. Côté, a longtime car fancier. Referring to the bureaucrats, she said, “They wouldn’t change it for the world, and they eventually had to call Toronto to do it.”

A variety of factors inspired the Canadian subsidiaries of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler to create Canada-only models. But the sometimes oddball results came into being, and then faded away, largely because of import tariffs.

Until the United States and Canada signed an agreement in 1965 creating cross-border free trade in cars and auto parts, vehicles imported to Canada from the United States were subject to duties of as much as 35 percent. To avoid the duties, automakers struggled to find economical ways to squeeze a wide range of models onto single assembly lines in their Canadian factories.

The models were not adapted to Canadian roads, which aside from the snow and ice, were generally poorer, at the time, than American roads.

“Was there any design or engineering done?” said Sharon Babaian, curator of transport at the Canada Science and Technology Museum. “No, not really. It was very, very cosmetic. I think they probably put more money into the marketing than they did into the actual changing of the style of the vehicle.”