In the Power of the Government: The Rise and Fall of Newsprint in Ontario, 1894–1932 by Mark Kuhlberg, and: Allied Power: Mobilizing Hydro-Electricity during Canada’s Second World War by Matthew Evenden (review)

Resource development is a central theme in Canadian history. Mark Kuhlberg and Matthew Evenden contribute to this literature in different ways by asking about the extent to which governments drove resource development. Their work intersects with that of H.V. Nelles, whose imprint on the history Canadian political economy and the history of resource development is profound. Kuhlberg investigates the relationship of the Ontario government to forest sector development in the first three decades of the twentieth century. He focuses on particular paper-making companies and their efforts to garner support in the form of stable timber leases on Crown lands. Evenden traces privately and publicly owned hydro-electrical development during the Second World War under the purview of a federal government that framed it as a national project. While these books do share a common thread, I have considered them separately.

Mark Kuhlberg is well suited to writing about forest industries in northern Ontario, given his twenty-season tenure as a tree planter and project manager in some of the regions he studies. In the Power of the Government singles out pulp and paper manufacturing as running counter to prevailing narratives of government-driven resource development. Kuhlberg divides northern Ontario into four regions as a way of examining the stories of pulp and paper companies in the larger context of forest resource development, a sector that also included pulp wood export and lumber production. On the one hand, he identifies the newsprint industry as a victim of political obstruction, and, on the other hand, he traces the success of several paper-making firms despite the obstacles imposed by four successive Ontario governments of three political stripes. This should sound like a familiar scenario when any industry courts the support of government patronage and policy development. Despite inconsistent attention from the provincial government of the day, pulp and paper production reached its zenith by the 1920s, leading North America and perhaps the world in making newsprint.

One of the fundamental tensions in forest resource development came with the ambitions of successive provincial governments to populate northern Ontario and to develop intensive resource industries such as paper making. Settlers intent on farming had to clear their land, so the argument went, and the spruce they felled was good wood for export to American pulp and paper mills. Having settlers clear the land of its forest did not require the provincial government to negotiate long-term Crown land timber leases that were necessary for a stable domestic pulp and paper industry, nor did it require the provincial government to yield water rights for the development of attendant hydro-electrical generation necessary to power pulp and paper production. Neglecting capital-intensive pulp and paper development by the province meant that settlement was clear to proceed apace, without any obligation to the paper-making industry. However, the federal government also had an interest in resource development, but Kuhlberg provides scant examination of the federal trade policy in Ontario in the decades he considers. He might have considered the federal Commission of Conservation (1909–21) and its subsequent incarnations that supported the establishment of new resource towns, going so far as to produce custom-made town plans for the Kimberley- Clark Corporation and Abitibi Power and Paper Company during the late 1910s. What influence did tangential federal and provincial policies have on pulp and paper in Ontario? Had the federal government played favourites with certain companies just as the provincial government had done?

The archival research undertaken by Kuhlberg is most impressive, especially in the way he reconstructs some of the exchanges between company agents, provincial politicians, and officials...