Marisa Maslink

The Port Weller dry docks are a marvel to behold: two rectangular gashes in the Earth, more than 225 metres long—like laying Toronto’s TD Bank Tower on its side. The bigger of the two, 24 metres across, is as deep as a three-storey house, its walls made of pockmarked concrete and dark corrugated metal. Monstrous double doors, like the gateway to a Tolkienesque fortress, keep at bay the flat, blue-green waters of the Welland Canal on the other side. For much of the latter half of the 20th century, this was home to one of the biggest shipyards on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes, near where the canal spills into Lake Ontario, in St. Catharines, Ont. At the shipyard’s height in the 1950s and ’60s, as many as 2,000 people worked here, welding the steel hulls of dozens of tankers and cargo ships for commercial customers. By the early 2000s, however, the place had fallen into disrepair after a series of operators became insolvent and the North American boat-building business foundered in the face of cheaper Asian competitors. The shipyard, with its cavernous workshop hung with wrenches the size of baseball bats, was soon a shadow of its former self. Too often, its dry docks have sat empty, their sunbaked floors speckled with weeds and puddles. But Ontario Shipyards Inc.'s CEO Shaun Padulo hopes this place will soon be crawling with hundreds of welders, shipwrights and engineers, building the Royal Canadian Navy’s next generation of corvette-class warships—and reviving Ontario’s shipbuilding industry in the process. theglobeandmail.com/business…