In this absorbing narrative, Barry E.C. Boothman traces the history of Abitibi Power & Paper Limited alongside the rise and fall of the newsprint industry and the advent of Canadian corporate capitalism. In the first half of the twentieth century, Abitibi was Canada’s biggest manufacturer – an apparent success story after the Wall Street crash of 1929 and a company deemed "too big to fail" – but the company eventually ended up at the centre of the longest and most controversial bankruptcy in Canadian history.
Moving from the frontier areas of northern Ontario to the heart of the continental economy, Corporate Cataclysm shows how competitive strategies, industrial organization, corporate finance, and law combined with the empire-building dreams of entrepreneurs and the concerns of politicians to generate an economic disaster. It then chronicles the disputes and intense strife that plagued Abitibi’s fourteen-year receivership.
Author(s): Barry E.C. Boothman
Series: Themes in Business and Society
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 697
City: Toronto
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Praecipe
Abbreviations
1 Empire Ontario
A young, giant land
A grasping colonial mind-set
Corporate capitalism and law
2 Anson’s Folly
Make haste slowly
An excellent speculative opportunity
A few strokes of the pen
3 An Industry in Transformation
Who could lack faith with this record?
Struggles for dominance
Rather good statements
4 Building the Corporate Realm
A romance of Canadian industrialization
Businesslike politics
Economical business coordination
Capitalists of all degrees
5 From Prosperity to Crisis
Johnny Canuck’s material assets
One of the greatest industrial coups
Cat out of the paper bag
6 From Crisis to Catastrophe
Your market had run away
Crack of doom
An almost impossible condition
Plates
7 The Vale of Receivership
A loose and irregular administration
In an entirely friendly way
Too many chickens
8 A Time for Investigations
A pretty good business
A public accounting
Posterity does not vote
The royal inquisition
9 The Search for Stability
Now nearly useless
Snugging up
The liquidation of the liquidator
I never met a group of men so disloyal
10 Reorganization Plots
We, the insolvent
A spider web of intrigue
I am bewildered
11 The Battle of the Plans
Hopes, squabbles, and plagiarism
All interests asunder
Paying for the show
12 Darkest Hours
The anomalous position
Abolish the whole thing
Abitibi fat in the frying pan
From sitzkrieg to blitzkrieg
13 A Constitutional War
The unfortunate, extravagant, and futile course
Wartime paper
Pith and substance
14 The Path towards Dawn
Clean up the Abitibi mess
The dirty end of the stick
The longest receivership
15 Epilogue
Destinies
Concluding perspectives
Appendices
Appendix 1 Newsprint Annual Supply and Demand, 1899–1946
Appendix 2 Traits of the North American Newsprint Industry, 1890–1940
Appendix 3 Capitalization of Paper Companies, 1920 and 1930 ($ Millions)
Appendix 4 Reorganizations among Canadian Newsprint Companies
Appendix 5 Abitibi Power and Paper Ltd.: Capital Structure and Major Proposals, 1932–1946
Appendix 6 Battle of the Plans, 1937
Participants
Notes
Bibliography
Index
