Remembering The Day A Submarine Surfaced in Niagara, Ontario’s Black Creek

By Doug Draper

Fifty years ago today, residents living in the Black Creek area of Niagara, Ontario were startled to find an American submarine forced to surface in their community due to the shallowness of the creek waters.

An American sub, on a covert mission, gets tangled up in reeds in Niagara, Ontario's Black Creek. Image courtesy of Paul Kassay.

The  sub allegedly crossed the Niagara River from a port upstream in Buffalo, New York and was on a Cold War-era surveillance exercise when it got tangled up in the mud and reeds in Black Creek. Authorities on the Canadian side of the river quickly reported the incident to Ottawa, and then-Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, furious over what he regarded as a serious breach of Canada’s sovereignty and an act of provocation on the part of the United States, responded with a hotline call to then-U.S. president John F. Kennedy.
Diefenbaker suspected the surveillance mission may have had something to do with concerns some in the U.S. government had, at the time, that Canada was moving dangerously closer to a brand of Soviet-style socialism with a desire to establish a system of universal, publicly paid for health care for all of its citizens.

And to this day, no hard evidence has surfaced to we will never know if American fears over a plague of ‘socialized medicine’ overtaking Canada had anything to do with this botched surveillance mission. The only thing we do know is that President Kennedy was able to use his famous charm to convince Diefenbaker the ‘Black Creek sub incident’ was nothing more than a botched April Fool’s Day joke.

Niagara At Large hopes this wasn’t a completely bad stab at an April Fool’s Day joke.  Feel free to share one of your own in the space below.