 An attack of yellow fever forced Heenan to move to Canada in 1902, where he first worked on a Western ranch, and then as a locomotive engineer for the Canadian Pacific Railway on the run between Winnipeg and Kenora.The experience he had acquired in Costa Rica as a diver also proved useful when he was called to help out in a train wreck just outside Kenora, where the locomotive had plunged down underwater.Heenan became involved in the labour movement in Northwestern Ontario, becoming its most prominent leader by the beginning of World War I.