While it is axiomatic that trees are at the root of any story about the forest industry, woodlands have long been a unifying thread that have woven their way through Ontario’s social, political, and economic fabric. In many respects, the development of the province, especially in its nascent stages, has been dictated by the nature of its forests. Even today, with scant evidence in the southern part of the province – where the overwhelming majority of Ontarians live – of the rich woodlands that once covered this region, many residents of this area remain intimately connected to the province’s forests...

A number of forces made northern Ontario a highly attractive place to construct a pulp and paper mill by the mid-1890s, and its attributes in this regard attracted the attention of a string of industrialists from both the New World and Old. The region’s prodigious supplies of readily accessible spruce pulpwood and water power, the construction of new railway lines into the hinterland, the rapid rise in the demand for news­print in the nearby Midwestern United States, and the opportunity to build mills on the Great Lakes all drew the interest of paper makers to the province’s northern reaches. In...

The Conservatives under James Pliny Whitney defeated the Liberals in the 1905 provincial election, and their victory held the promise of a new age in Ontario. A major plank in the Tory platform was a commitment to correct the deficiencies which they argued had pervaded the Grit administration of Crown resources, particularly timber. This task fell to a trio of ministers of lands and forests: Frank Cochrane (1905–11), William H. Hearst (1911–14), and G. Howard Ferguson (1914–19).

This triumvirate shared a few traits. Considering they held the portfolio that dealt with the province’s northern reaches, it was...

Prior to 1905 the Liberals had awarded pulp and paper makers pulpwood concessions and/or water powers in northwestern Ontario and the “Spanish River” territory (i.e., Sault Ste Marie, Espanola, and Sturgeon Falls), and industrialists had erected mills in the latter region and prepared to do so in the former. Nevertheless, the Grits had demonstrated that their priority in terms of northern development in these areas was to protect the lumbermen’s interests against intrusion by the paper makers. This was only natural considering the sawmillers had represented the major manufacturing industry in these areas for some time and enjoyed tight connections...

The victory of the Conservatives in 1905 signalled both continuity and change in terms of the Ontario government’s handling of the pulp and paper industry in the Thunder Bay District and on the northern Clay Belt. Certainly filling these areas with settlers remained the provincial state’s primary goal during the Tories’ fifteen years in office, but they pursued this agenda with unprecedented vigour. There was a particularly pressing reason for them to have done so. The millions of home­steaders who flocked to Canada’s prairies in the early 1900s represented living, breathing proof of that region’s irresistible allure to aspiring farmers....

The election of the upstart United Farmers of Ontario (UFO) in 1919 held the potential to effect a dramatic shift in focus as far as northern development in general and forest administration in particular were concerned. The premier, E.C. Drury, demonstrated a keen interest in issues involving the province’s trees, and his campaign platform had explicitly identified the need to end the government’s penchant for allowing patronage to dictate how it handled Crown timber. In addition, Drury selected Beniah Bowman to be his minister of lands and forests. A farmer from Manitoulin Island, Bowman was also involved in the local...

The Farmers’ approach to dealing with the pulp and paper industry in both northwestern Ontario and the Spanish River territory revealed how quickly and tectonically relations between the provincial state and this business could change. Since at least the turn of the twentieth century, and much to the dismay of pulp and paper entrepreneurs, the provincial state had given its highest priority to assisting the local saw­millers in both regions; the Tories had gone one step further during their decade and a half in office by actively hindering the establishment and development of pulp and paper mills in these areas....

In the Thunder Bay District and on the northern Clay Belt, the Farmers dealt with the pulp and paper industry while considering a host of factors both old and new. The former included the state’s traditional drive to realize its pre-eminent goal in both regions, namely to populate them, by creating for the settlers the most dynamic market possible for their spruce. The UFO was committed to furthering this agenda and did so both by denying most existing mills’ requests for fibre resources and by facilitating the work of the pulpwood exporters, a group whose close association with the government...

As with every newly elected administration in Ontario since the turn of the century, the Conservatives won power in 1923 under G. Howard Ferguson promising to modernize the government’s administration of its hinterland Crown resources, particularly timber. One of the crucial challenges they faced was dealing with the province’s newsprint industry, which had matured and now represented a major presence in the hinterland. By this time, converting spruce into newsprint had become Ontario’s and the country’s primary manufacturing activity, and it led the nation in terms of gross value of production and wages paid and was second in employment. It...

Nothing spoke more directly to Ferguson’s preoccupation with political expediency in handling Ontario’s pulp and paper industry than his dealings with the mills in the Thunder Bay District during the first few years of his premiership. This region was home to three newsprint interests that lacked pulpwood concessions, but by early 1925, each had hammered out an agreement to obtain one with the blessing of the minister, James Lyons, and senior departmental officials. In fact, these deals embodied some of the fundamental changes for which government bureaucrats had been lobbying for years. These included accepting that the industry’s requests for...

By the end of 1925, Ferguson had yet to address Fort William Paper’s application for Crown pulpwood on the west side of Lake Nipigon, but when he finally did so, the firm may have wished he never had. The company had built its newsprint mill four years earlier on the promise that the Ontario government would provide it with a pulpwood concession. Soon after the Tories had won power in 1923, the company reached an agreement on an area with James Lyons, the Conservatives’ Minister of Lands and Forests, and on this basis it tendered for one of the tracts...

The northern Clay Belt was home to three pulp and paper mills when the Tories won the election of 1923: Spruce Falls Company in Kapuskasing, Mattagami Pulp and Paper in Smooth Rock Falls, and Abitibi Power and Paper in Iroquois Falls. While all these enterprises looked to the Ferguson administration for assistance in procuring Crown resources on favourable terms, the premier decided for a host of political reasons that only one of them would succeed in this endeavour. Kimberly-Clark (KC) had taken over the mill project in “Kap” in 1920, at the very time when the Ontario government desperately needed...

One could hardly have faulted newsprint makers E.W. Backus in north­western Ontario and Spanish River Pulp and Paper Mills in the north­east for fretting that the Conservative victory over the Farmers in the 1923 provincial election potentially represented the beginning of their worst nightmares. The Tories had proven inhospitable to these firms during the Conservatives’ earlier reign, particularly during Ferguson’s tenure as minister (1914–19), and both feared that this icy treatment would continue – if not intensify – now that “the chief” was premier. This foreboding was particularly acute for Backus, who had plugged into the Farmers’ patronage network...

By 1927, the operations of Ontario’s newsprint makers were being fundamentally altered by the paradoxical forces that were shaping the industry across Canada. After practically a decade of prodigious growth, the Dominion had emerged as the world’s largest newsprint producer and most firms were still highly profitable. The country’s industry as a whole was operating well below capacity, however, causing some mills to suspend their operations for months at a time. Under these trying conditions, intense conflict began marking relations among the players in the industry. What emerged between the late 1920s and early 1930s was a struggle for survival...