MacMillan Bloedel Ltd

MacMILLAN BLOEDEL LTD, once BC's largest forest company, was formed by a merger of 3 older companies and numerous small ones. The H.R. MacMillan Export Co was established in 1919 by H.R. MacMILLAN, a former chief forester, to market BC lumber abroad. The business was an enormous success and in 1924 a shipping company, the Canadian Transport Co, was established to carry lumber to foreign buyers. In 1926 the company acquired its first SAWMILL, Canadian White Pine in VANCOUVER, and 2 years later it began operating several portable mills on VANCOUVER ISLAND to cut railway ties. That year most of the mills supplying the company formed their own marketing agency, SEABOARD LUMBER SALES. When this group attempted to cut off MacMillan's source of supply in the 1930s, he acquired more sawmills, beginning with Dominion Mills in Vancouver. In 1935, in partnership with Blake Ballentine, he opened a plywood plant; the following year he bought the Alberni Pacific Lumber Co in PORT ALBERNI, along with large timber stands in the area owned by the Rockefeller family. By 1938 he was the largest lumber producer on the coast, and during WW II he acquired extensive timber holdings on Vancouver Island and built a plywood plant in Port Alberni. Near the end of the war he took over the VICTORIA LUMBER & MANUFACTURING CO's CHEMAINUS mill and its large timber holdings on Vancouver Island, and in 1949 he opened a pulp mill at Harmac, near Nanaimo (see also PULP AND PAPER).

In 1951 the company merged with BLOEDEL, STEWART & WELCH, MacMillan's major competitor, founded in 1911 by J.H. BLOEDEL, a Bellingham lumberman. By aggressively acquiring timber rights, BS&W had come to control 1,210 sq km of timber on Vancouver Island and operated sawmills and a pulp mill at Port Alberni. The new company, MacMillan and Bloedel Ltd (M&B), spent the next few years modernizing its mills and acquiring additional timber rights. In 1960 M&B merged with the POWELL RIVER CO, operator of the world's biggest newsprint mill in POWELL RIVER. This company was set up in 1909 by the Brooks, Scanlon & O'Brien Lumber Co, which had acquired huge areas of pulp leases originally granted for the construction of other pulp mills that were never built. After 50 years of successful operation it was the leading newsprint producer in BC and still held extensive timber rights. At the time it joined M&B it was headed by Harold Foley, who became vice-chairman of the new company, MacMillan, Bloedel and Powell River Co. His brother Joseph was president and J.V. (Jack) CLYNE, a former BC Supreme Court judge, was chairman. Within a few months the upper echelons of the new company were engaged in the most intense internal corporate bloodbath in Canadian business history. When it was over, the Foley brothers had resigned and the company name had been changed to MacMillan Bloedel Ltd. During the 1960s and early 1970s, under Clyne, the company was transformed into a diversified multinational corporation, with forestry operations around the world and investments in many non-forestry businesses, including aircraft and electronics manufacturing, real estate and pharmaceutical equipment. By 1975 the company was in serious financial trouble, largely the result of losses incurred by turning the Canadian Transport Co into a general shipping company. That year, a few months before H.R. MacMillan died, MacBlo recorded the first loss in its 56-year history. MacBlo was later restored to its original business as a FOREST PRODUCTS company, with all of its operations in North America. In 1998 the company operated several sawmills, panel board and container board plants and dozens of FORESTRY and LOGGING operations in various parts of the US and Canada, most of them in BC. The company suffered a serious downturn in the mid-1990s; early in 1998 it responded by slashing its staff by 20% (1,300 jobs in BC alone), selling its paper mills to a new company, PACIFICA PAPERS INC, and closing some other operations. MacBlo also stunned the FOREST INDUSTRY by announcing that it would no longer use clear-cut techniques in its logging operations. In 1999 there was another, even greater surprise: MacMillan Bloedel was purchased by the American timber giant Weyerhaeuser Co (see also WEYERHAEUSER CANADA LTD), based in Washington state.
by Ken Drushka