The Past Speaks

AS: My former colleague Mark Kuhlberg has published an important new book in the field of Canadian business history.

For forty years, historians have argued that early twentieth-century provincial governments in Canada were easily manipulated by the industrialists who developed Canada’s natural resources, such as pulpwood, water power, and minerals. With In the Power of the Government, Mark Kuhlberg uses the case of the Ontario pulp and paper industry to challenge that interpretation of Canadian provincial politics.

Examining the relationship between the corporations which ran the province’s pulp and paper mills and the politicians at Queen’s Park, Kuhlberg concludes that the Ontario government frequently rebuffed the demands of the industrialists who wanted to tap Ontario’s spruce timber and hydro-electric potential. A sophisticated empirical challenge to the orthodox literature on this issue, In the Power of the Government will be essential reading for historians and political scientists interested in the history of Canadian industrial development.