The Cold War became tenser by 1961. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the Berlin Crisis, and US worries about a missile gap with the USSR caused North Americans to fear that nuclear war would break out. Canada’s Department of National Defence thought that a Soviet nuclear strike would also attack Canadian cities. Civil defence organizations, including St. John Ambulance, prepared for a potential war.
Across the country, the Federal Government created 100 emergency hospitals housed in train boxcars that could be moved wherever they were needed. One of these mobile hospitals was set up by the Workers Compensation Board Hospital in the Emery neighbourhood in northwest Toronto (the hospital was torn down in 2007). St. John Ambulance and civil defence personnel visited the mobile hospital.
Several months later, twelve St. John Ambulance nurses and personnel from the downtown hospitals underwent a training session for setting up the emergency hospital. The training occurred at a school in Newmarket, where St. John nurses had to set up a 50-bed ward in the auditorium. They used crowbars to pry open large wooden crates and take out their contents: bed parts, blankets, pillows, and enamelware. The St. John nurses were the first unit to complete their assigned task, thanks to their ability to work together as a disciplined team. Their success attracted the attention of local media, which showed them on TV.
St. John Ambulance also advised on another part of the civil defence plan, which was to evacuate the downtown hospitals to a safer location. That location was a building underneath the Gardiner Expressway near the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) grounds. The building was close to a railway, Lake Ontario, and major highways (the Gardiner Expressway and the Queen Elizabeth Way), so it looked like an easily accessible place. However, in retrospect, one wonders whether it was far enough away from downtown to be protected from a nuclear blast.
The US and USSR came closest to a nuclear war in October 1962; during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US discovered that the USSR had placed missiles on Cuba – a mere 90 miles away from the American border. Fortunately, the nuclear war did not happen, though St. John Ambulance was ready if the crisis occurred.
