In the Power of the Government: The Rise and Fall of Newsprint in Ontario, 1894–1932 by Mark Kuhlberg (review)

Why did Canadian newsprint come to dominate world markets by the 1930s? H. V. Nelles’s 1974 The Politics of Development has provided the standard interpretation, showing how the Ontario government’s requirement that pulpwood cut on Crown Land be processed within the province led to massive investment in new manufacturing capacity alongside hydroelectric sites in Northern Ontario. Mark Kuhlberg takes aim squarely at that interpretation. He says flatly that the so-called manufacturing condition was never intended to stop the flow of spruce to United States mills; indeed, exports rose. Successive provincial governments, according to Kuhlberg, were much more interested in promoting settlement in Northern Ontario and letting settlers sell their timber as they wished than they were in encouraging a domestic pulp and paper industry. Although those governments were receiving advice from highly qualified forestry experts, they preferred to make decisions about pulpwood leases on the basis of partisan political advantage. Moreover, for established mills, government pressure to maintain employment levels collided with firms’ desires for more efficient, less labor-intensive, production techniques.

While a provocative and vigorously presented position, some of the argument is familiar to the point of being obvious. That firms well connected to the party in power were more likely to be treated favorably by the government and that governments did not always follow the good advice of technical experts is doubtless true, but hardly a discovery. In other respects the argument is incomplete. The Underwood Tariff, allowing free entry of Canadian mechanical pulp and newsprint, which is so crucial to Nelles’s original argument, is not even mentioned. If it was not government policy that best explains the success of the industry, what was it? Kuhlberg doesn’t really tell us, except to say that it was based on “competitive advantages” (p. 91)—what were those advantages?

Some of the evidence is used a bit selectively. The only mention of the government’s Ontario Research Foundation is buried in a footnote, and it only highlights the contribution to its budget made by one relevant business, Canadian International Paper (CIP), the one firm in the industry which Kuhlberg says the government did favor. But a quarter of the money pledged by industry in support of the ORF came from Ontario’s pulp and paper industry with, for instance, twice as much offered up by Abitibi Power and Paper as by CIP, indicating closer ties between the industry and the government than his account implies.

In other places the argument seems to go too far. Kuhlberg comes very close to saying, if he does not actually say, that successive governments actively obstructed the newsprint industry. That is truly surprising as everything else we know about Ontario government policies of the period suggests to us that governments were interested in promoting resource-based industrial development. As Kuhlberg admits, firms did manage to get their pulpwood; indeed the lack of the huge government-guaranteed supply they wanted motivated Ontario newsprint firms to adopt better harvesting practice, make better use of alternative species, and commit to programs of in-house industrial research. At times the argument is simply incoherent. Kuhlberg criticizes Premier Howard Ferguson for pressing kraft paper firms to expand at a time of oversupply, but in the same sentence says that the increase in firms in the industry came as a result of an “explosion” (p. 270) in demand for their product.

Am I saying this is a bad book? No. It is a good book. The empirical part of this work is first-rate, informed by Kuhlberg’s deep and thorough knowledge of the forest and forestry. As he shows, the relationships among tree species, accessibility, the technology of processing, and finished product are extraordinarily complex and the details highly relevant to the particulars of how this industry developed. Highly knowledgeable scholars of the pulp and...