Mackenzie King’s Cabinet War Committee approved an expenditure of up to $4,000,000 capital [$71 million in 2024 dollars] and $750,000 [$13.3 million in 2024 dollars] for operating expenses for a strategic nuclear laboratory at the University of Montreal on April 12, 1944.
The next month, the British physicist John Cockcroft became the director of the Montreal Laboratory, and Edgar William Richard Steacie of the National Research Council of Canada his deputy. The British placed an order for twenty and then another hundred tons of refined uranium from Eldorado and obtained heavy water to moderate a nuclear reaction from the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company in Trail, B.C.
For Canadian research in Montreal to create a nuclear reactor that could convert uranium into plutonium using heavy water, see Gilles Sabourin’s Montreal and the Bomb published by Baraka Books in 2021.