The secret history of the Champlain Bridge

Louis St. Laurent was known for his wicked high-fives 

  
   In fact, I owe my life to former Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent because one of his decisions put a lot of money in my father's pocket, without which dad might not have sought to have a larger family, and I might not have been born.
   Canada's PM from '48 to '57 was born in the Townships with an Irish Canadian mom and a French Canadian dad. He was bright enough to win a Rhodes scholarship but turned it down and became a corporate lawyer. He headed the national bar association but had no interest in politics until Mackenzie King begged him to join the Liberals to fill up a gaping need for Quebec talent. He was already quite well advanced in age when voted in as PM in 1948 and presided in an age of relative wealth. Quebec could thank him for being the father of equalization payments.
   St. Laurent was also the father of the Champlain Bridge, which he announced and funded in the late 50s. The bridge, which spans his great watery namesake river, is Canada's busiest but it was built in a counter-intuitive spot. Logically, it should have been placed further east where the crossing is much shorter.
   My father, however, lobbied hard to have the new bridge built through Nun's Island, which was considered to have no value as it was swamped annually with ice. He had purchased the largely-vacant island on $5,000 of borrowed money a few months before. So with a deadline looming on a second much-larger payment, my father Colin Gravenor kept banging away letters under fake names to newspapers lobbying for the bridge in the area it ended up. His argument was that it would be a longer bridge and therefore more expensive, but the vacant land at both ends would be cheap to expropriate so that would lower the cost.
   To his delight, St. Laurent sided with that view and announced that the bridge would go through this location west of downtown, along with an ice-bridge, and it would even have an exit to his Nun's Island. This decision made my father's property considerably more valuable and he sold out for a profit of $2 million. My father died a rich man, although I never got any of his money.
   And yet there's a spicier version of that story. Another version that my father told others, but not myself, was that he blackmailed Prime Minister St. Laurent, saying that he would expose his fondness for young men if he did not put the bridge in that spot. I do not know whether this was true or not, but my father was quoted in Time Magazine in that era boasting that he knew where a lot of bodies were buried, as he had been involved in the Midnight tabloid.
   Louis St. Laurent died at 91 at his home in Quebec City and was never involved in any known public scandals.
   The new plan to demolish the bridge doesn't make much sense to me. The better and cheaper option would be to build a structure alongside this while it's being repaired, and leaving a wider bridge in the end.