La Baie (, ) is one of three boroughs in the city of Saguenay, Quebec, Canada. It was created during Quebec's municipal reorganization in 2002. From 1976 to 2001, it was known as the Town of La Baie, a municipality composed of the Grande-Baie, Bagotville and Port-Alfred sectors.
It is located on the bank of the Ha! Ha! Bay (French: baie des Ha! Ha!) at the mouths of the Ha! Ha! River (French: rivière Ha! Ha!) and the Mars River (French: rivière à Mars). La Baie was the first colony built in the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean region. It was founded by the Société des Vingt et un who settled the area in 1838. The depth of the banks of the Ha! Ha! Bay's waterways facilitated the rapid development of the region's largest harbour facilities after the railways were built in 1910.
The borough's main sources of socio-economic development have been the logging and the pulp and paper industries since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively. Aluminum production began in the early 1980s. After the Abitibi-Consolidated paper mill, one of the main employers of the borough, shut down in 2004, Saguenay's elected officials decided to invest in La Baie's tourism industry by building and operating a port of call for cruise ships in 2008.
Bagotville Airport, the main civilian airport in Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean, is also located in La Baie. The Canadian Forces Base Bagotville, which shares the same airfield, is one of only two Canadian military bases that use the Royal Canadian Air Force's CF-18 fighters. The military base is the borough's largest employer.
While Chicoutimi and Jonquière, the two boroughs that constitute the main urban core of Saguenay, are located close to each other, La Baie is at a moderate distance from the city centre. This has created some unique issues for the borough — for example, while a full-power television or radio station in Saguenay can serve the entire city from a single transmitter without difficulty, La Baie is distant enough from the city's urban core that some low-power broadcasters, such as CKAJ-FM, have had to add separate transmitters to rebroadcast their signals in La Baie.
History
Exploration of Ha! Ha! Bay
thumb|left|A monument dedicated to the [[Société des vingt et un]]
The Saguenay's nomadic Innu tribes once inhabited La Baie. The Chicoutimians lived on the banks of the Saguenay River well before European colonization. Unlike important meeting places like Chicoutimi, Ha! Ha! Bay was far from portages to Saint-Jean Lake (French: lac St-Jean) and was not frequented by First Nations or the region's first explorers.
Although it was not on eighteenth century fur trade routes, Ha! Ha! Bay was used by the Hudson's Bay Company's commercial fishing boats at the mouths of the Ha! Ha! (Wissuscoué) and Mars (Vasigamenke) Rivers.
In 1828, the Crown mandated land surveyor J.-B. Proulx to explore the bay area; he later reported on its hilly landscapes and logging potential. a monopoly which would only expire in 1842. It was popular pressure from Charlevoix and especially La Malbaie that led to the tenuous beginnings of colonization in the Saguenay region. After an 1829 report which led to the government and the Hudson's Bay Company to finally cede cutting rights to a company from La Malbaie called the Société des Vingt et un.
The company's schooner sailed from La Malbaie on April 25, 1838, and made several stopovers along the banks of the Saguenay. After setting up temporary camps near Tadoussac, they built their first sawmill at L'Anse St-Jean. Their goal was to reach Ha! Ha! Bay to build a permanent facility.
Bagot Township and the evolution of Grande-Baie and Bagotville
thumb|The "King of Wood" [[William Price (merchant)|William Price]]
The Société des vingt et un arrived in what is now the Grande-Baie sector on June 11, 1838. and jack pine and Eastern white pine logging operations began in 1839. The hydraulic power of the two main rivers, Ha! Ha! and Mars, and the bay's tributaries was used to run several sawmills.
The Société des Vingt et un began to struggle after it lost two years worth of cutting when log-booms breached in 1840 and 1841. The territory organized itself independently and Jean-Baptiste Duberg was mandated to survey land for the new Bagot Township (named after Sir Charles Bagot) and divide county seats for the new constituency. Duberg was also responsible for mapping a road to Chicoutimi during the summer of 1842, which would eventually become Saint-Jean-Baptiste Boulevard and Grande-Baie Nord Boulevard. John Kane, a land agent originally sent by the government to collect fees for use of Crown lands, became the township's first mayor in 1850. The clergy began to register the population of Grande-Baie in 1842 and Bagotville in 1845. On October 15, 1844, the Oblates arrived in Grande-Baie to found a mission. A fire destroyed most of the township in 1846. The parishes of Saint-Alexis-de-Grande-Baie and Saint-Alphonse-de-Bagotville were canonically erected in 1857 and 1861 respectively. In 1851, the population around Ha! Ha! Bay reached 2,438; they mostly depended on logging and agriculture for their livelihoods.
Grande-Baie built its first post office in 1855, and was proclaimed a municipality in 1860.
An economic downturn occurred during this period and demand decreased for Saguenay timber. The slowdown during the 1870s led many mills to shut down or convert from pine to spruce.
St-Urbain Road was opened in 1870 and connected Grande-Baie to Baie-Saint-Paul. Telegraphs linked the two towns in 1880. Three years later its first quay was built, which was later purchased by the Canadian government in 1876. Journalist Joseph-Dominique Guay and banker Julien-Édouard-Alfred Dubuc founded the Compagnie de Pulpe de Chicoutimi in 1898. Because its activities soon became too extensive for Chicoutimi's port facilities, the company's directors decided to build a loading port on the Ha! Ha! Bay to ship pulp. The Ha! Ha! Bay railway was built in 1909 to facilitate transport to the quay in Bagotville. The first train shipment was on December 13, 1910.
Some sawmills had difficulty staying afloat before the arrival of large industry. Price Sawmills, the largest on both the Ha! Ha! and Mars Rivers, closed their doors in 1904 and 1912 respectively.
thumb|left|The [[Compagnie de Pulpe de Chicoutimi's Ha! Ha! Bay Sulphite plant, Port-Alfred, 1918]]
Plans for a chemical pulp plant on Ha! Ha! Bay were drawn up by the Compagnie de Pulpe de Chicoutimi in 1914. Meanwhile, the pulp and paper industry suffered a crisis of overproduction, leading to the rapid bankruptcy of the Compagnie de Pulpe de Chicoutimi and the disposal of the Ha! Ha! Bay Sulfite Company on June 30, 1922. It was succeeded by the Bay Sulfites Company Limited, which was also disposed in 1923.
thumb|The old Port-Alfred Town Hall, which was built during the Great Depression
On July 26, 1924, the Port-Alfred Pulp and Paper Corporation acquired the plant and began converting its production from chemical to paper pulp in 1925.
The community continued to grow despite the economic difficulties of the Canadian pulp and paper industry in 1928. In 1927, the increasing population led to the opening of new schools in Port-Alfred such as the Bagotville Boys' Academy (French: Académie des garçons de Bagotville) and the Saint-Édouard College (French: Collège Saint-Édouard). The newly created Consolidated Paper Corporation bought the Port-Alfred paper mill on August 28, 1930, and reopened it on June 8, 1932.
The Great Depression led to the construction of public works like the Port-Alfred and Bagotville Town Halls. Credit unions were established in Grande-Baie in 1927, Port-Alfred in 1933, and Bagotville in 1936.
During the Second World War, the Canadian government and the Allies trained pilots and built several bases including one in Bagotville in 1942. The base was responsible for training pilots and protecting the Arvida aluminum smelter and the regions' dams until October 1944. The base was shut down in 1945. In 1945, Bagotville's civilian airport was run by Canadian Pacific Air Lines.
thumb|left|110th [[Royal Canadian Air Force Squadron, Bagotville, 1942]]
From 1946 onward, new services such as public transportation linked Ha! Ha! Bay communities from the Bagotville terminal. The Voice of La Baie (French: La Voix de la Baie) newspaper began publication in 1948. The uneven expansion and development of the bay's three urban centres and two rural sectors led to the first municipal mergers in 1953. The Village of Grande-Baie was absorbed by Port-Alfred. That same year, the new Saint-Marc-de-Bagotville Parish was established in Bagotville. Nearly a decade later, Notre-Dame-de-La-Baie Parish was founded in Port-Alfred in 1967.
The Cold War led to the reopening of the Bagotville military base in July 1951. Four chase squadrons were stationed there, including the 413th and 414th until 1953, the 440th until 1957, and the 432nd until 1961. Their mission was to intercept any intrusion in the Canadian northeast. In 1962, the 425th squadron was stationed in Bagotville with CF-101 Voodoo interceptors. It was responsible for protecting the 22nd NORAD. Bagotville and Port-Alfred's mayors, Hervé Tremblay and Laurier Simard, strongly opposed each other on the issue. The Saguenay Fjord National Park was created in 1983 to open the Saguenay Fjord to tourists. That same year, the relocation of the Port of Chicoutimi to Grande-Anse began, moving the port from Ha! Ha! Bay to the Saguenay River. The Grande-Anse Maritime Terminal was inaugurated in October 1986. The Bagotville military base put its first CF-18s in operation in December 1984.
Saguenay Flood
thumb|left|The [[Ha! Ha! Pyramid, a monument commemorating the 1996 Saguenay Flood]]
From July 18 to 21, 1996, a major depression resulted in 260 mm of rain falling within a fifty-hour period on the Laurentian Wildlife Reserve and the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region. The soil, which was already oversaturated after a particularly rainy month, could not absorb the excess water from the Saguenay River's drainage basins. The heavy rainfall rapidly increased the discharge from the Ha! Ha! Bay's tributaries' river basins and other Saguenay waterways. The first signs of disaster appeared on the night of July 18 to 19. Land erosion caused a house in Grande-Baie to be ripped apart and sewers located near the banks of the Ha! Ha! River began to back up. The Ha! Ha! and Mars Rivers' discharges quickly became dangerous and blocked access to the bridges that crossed them. The situation was at its lowest point when a dam on Ha! Ha! Lake ruptured and washed away central Grande-Baie.
La Baie, and especially the Grande-Baie sector, was the town that was the most heavily hit by the Saguenay Flood. Fifty million dollars were required to rebuild public infrastructure and an additional thirty million were needed to stabilize the Ha! Ha! and Mars riverbanks. The railways were heavily damaged, which paralyzed the city's economy, cut off drinking water supplies, and isolated areas east of the Mars River. Transportation to lower Saguenay was impossible, leaving sectors of Port-Alfred and Grande-Baie completely isolated.
Reconstruction of the Grande-Baie sector and the development of the commemorative Ha! Ha! Park began in 1997. The Ha! Ha! Pyramid was built in 1998 and officially inaugurated in 2000.
Uniboard built the Panneaux MDF La Baie Inc. plant in 1997, which made medium-density fibreboard out of wood residue. In 2001, rumours about the Abitibi-Consolidated mill in Port-Alfred shutting down began to surface after eighty-nine people were laid off.
As 2002 approached, the Town of La Baie began opposing the Quebec government's plan for municipal mergers after the Department of Municipal Affairs published a white paper called Municipal Reorganization: Changing the Way We Do Things to Better Serve Citizens (French: La Réorganisation municipale: changer les façons de faire pour mieux server les citoyens) on April 25, 2000. Some of La Baie's elected officials expressed opposition to the imminent municipal mergers in the Saguenay region by joining Laterrière in refusing to sit on transition committees. Despite this, the mergers were officialized and the November 25, 2001, municipal elections for borough representatives were held for the new city of Saguenay.
City of Saguenay and the La Baie Borough
thumb|left|City of Saguenay logo
La Baie was merged into the City of Saguenay on January 1, 2002.
thumb|Construction of the A-Lepage Quay's port of call
Despite everything that was proposed and done to keep the Abitibi-Consolidated mill open in Port-Alfred, it was temporarily shut down on December 10, 2003, as part of a major restructuring plan. It was officially closed on January 26, 2004; 640 jobs were lost. Having learnt from its difficult and costly experience while trying to save the Gaspésia paper mill, the Quebec government withdrew from plans to reopen the plant in 2005. The mill was demolished in 2006.
Two years after the mergers, the Quebec government allowed merged municipalities to hold public consultations starting on May 16, 2004, to organize demerger referendums to be held on June 20, 2004. Although La Baie was the centre of demerger support in Saguenay at the time, demerger support was not widespread enough to affect the borough's status. By the May 21, 2004, deadline, only fifty of the required 1,502 signatures were missing to hold a referendum.
Since its creation in 2002, the City of Saguenay, Promotion Saguenay, and the Quebec government have worked together to increase tourism in the La Baie Borough by building port facilities for cruise ships. Originally, these groups had planned to develop Port-Alfred's Powell Quay and the Grande-Anse Maritime Terminal and set up a shuttle service. However, it was eventually Bagotville's Algélias-Lepage Quay that was selected for the installation of cruise ship facilities because of the shorter disembarkation distance and increased safety for the boat passengers. After the Office of Public Hearings on the Environment (French: Bureau d'audiences publiques sur l'environnement) held consultations, work began in August 2007 despite a small opposition movement to the project in 2006. The quay welcomed its first ships in September 2008.
Geography
Territory
thumb|left|The urban core of the La Baie Borough
thumb|The southeast bank of Ha! Ha! Bay (Grande-Baie)
La Baie is located in the eastern part of the city of Saguenay. It lies between upper and lower Saguenay and surrounds Ha! Ha! Bay. The borough borders the Saguenay River to the north, Saint-Félix-d'Otis to the east, Ferland-et-Boilleau to the southeast, La Zec Mars-Moulin to the south, the Laterrière sector to the southwest, and the Chicoutimi Borough to the west.
La Baie is or 23% of Saguenay's total area. The urbanized zone is located on the mouths of the Ha! Ha! and Mars Rivers. Urbanized areas cover only a small part of the bay area and the neighbouring plateaus.
Like the Saguenay Fjord's steep relief, altitude rises sharply from the bay's shores, particularly on the northwest banks. Overlooking the bay, the Centennial Cross (French: Croix du centenaire) is from the shore and is located on the des Écorceurs Cove at an altitude of . On the other side of the bay is Mount Bélu, which has an altitude of . The town's outskirts stretch along a fluvial terrace down the Ha! Ha! and Mars Rivers toward Chicoutimi and Laterrière and go all the way to the Laurentians. The plateaus to the east and southeast are flat enough for both agriculture and large infrastructure such as the Bagotville Airport and the Grande-Baie aluminum smelter.
The borough's soil is clayey like much of the Saguenay region because of river-ice deposits in the ravines that face the bay. There are seventy-one scars from old landslides in the La Baie Borough's urban core.
Climate
thumb|left|Ha! Ha! Bay and the des Écorceurs Bay in the wintertime
Like most cities alongside the Saguenay River and east of St-Jean Lake, La Baie has a continental climate that is milder than the surrounding Laurentian Plateau. La Baie has an average annual temperature of with temperatures varying between . Even though it is located on the same latitude as warmer European cities such as Paris or Vienna, La Baie has long, cold winters and short, mild summers.
The borough receives an average of of rain and of snow annually. July is the rainiest month while February is the driest. Skies are overcast 60 to 65% of the time; the borough has an average of 1,720 hours of sunshine per year.
During the winter, the average thickness of the ice on Ha! Ha! Bay is . Icebreakers keep the Saguenay River open for ships until Port-Alfred, where tides can reach up to .