Marine Industries

Marine Industries Limited (MIL) was a Canadian ship building, hydro-electric and rail car manufacturing company, in Sorel-Tracy, Quebec, with a shipyard located on the Richelieu river about 1 km from the St. Lawrence River. It employed up to 8,500 people during the World War II support effort.

Opened in 1937 by the Simard family after taking over the smaller Manseau Shipyard, the yards early contracts were tugs and coastal tankers used on the Great Lakes and Canada's Atlantic coast. In the 1940s, MIL built 11 British Corvettes, beginning a growth as one of the most significant exporter of ships in Canada's shipbuilding history, with exports to Britain, France, USA, Venezuela, Greece, Holland, Indonesia, Cuba and Poland. This required a major modernisation of the yard in the early 1960s plus the growth of a significant in-house design capacity to create what became known as MARINDUS designs, from which 45 ships were built of 9 unique designs for coasters, fishing vessels, tankers and cargo liners. MIL also began building railroad cars in 1957, with production focused mainly on flat cars, gondolas and covered hoppers for the domestic and export markets and then opened a Hydro-Electric Division in the 1960s that designed and built generators and turbines for numerous projects in Quebec (Churchill Falls, Outardes, Manicouagan, La Grande etc.) with smaller ones in Ecuador and India.

In 1986 the federal government asked Quebec to rationalize its shipyards, which saw MIL merge with Davie Shipbuilding[1] in Lauzon; the Sorel shipyard was called M.I.L. Tracy (for Tracy, Quebec) and the Lauzon shipyard was called M.I.L. Lauzon.

Not long after the merger, the new company MIL Davie Shipbuilding closed the Sorel shipyard (in 1988) along with the Versatile Vickers shipyard in Montreal, resulting in a total loss of 1,700 jobs. The shipyard buildings were demolished, drydock still visible and Structure D'Acier DMR Incorporated now operating at the site.