Dr. Paul Anthony Chastko

I am currently working on the second volume of what I am now conceiving of as a trilogy on Alberta oil in the 20th century. Tentatively titled The Bust, the book examines the period from 1924 through the Great Depression as the pivotal moment when Alberta’s relationship to oil shifts from material dependence to mythic identity. Rather than interrupting or displacing the origin story of Alberta’s unique petroleum culture, established in The Boom, the Depression cements it. Economic collapse, regulatory failures, and political upheaval transformed Alberta’s petroleum experience into a narrative of frustrated potential as expectations were never fully realized.

A central event in this volume is the collapse of Solloway, Mills & Company, a long-forgotten brokerage that, nevertheless, revolutionized the way Canadians bought and sold mining securities in the 1920s. The company’s collapse in the aftermath of 1929’s stock market crash may very well be the largest financial scandal in Alberta history, exceeding that of the Principal Group (1987) as a proportion of the economy. Solloway, Mills’ losses of $10 to $17 million equaled 4–8 percent of Alberta’s entire provincial income in 1929 and erased the equivalent of one half to a full year’s worth of provincial government revenues.
 

The scandal exposed the contradictions at the heart of Alberta’s petroleum culture: the celebration of bootstrap individualism and entrepreneurialism at the expense of protecting the “people” versus the “interests.” The culture that celebrated risk-taking and independence but resulted in a lack of regulatory structures to protect investors from predatory practices. Solloway, Mills & Company’s implosion, brought on by a provincial investigation that revealed a shocking pattern of abuses and illegalities, shook the confidence and drained the savings of many Albertan and Canadian investors alike. This can be seen as the pivot point of the Alberta’s 20th century culminating in the 1938 McGillivray commission that was created to determine whether the provincial government should assume control over the development of the petroleum industry.

“‘Build Your Own Damn Road!’ High Modernist Visions and Limited Government Philosophy: Ernest Manning and the Great Canadian Oil Sands Megaproject, 1966-1972” examines the first commercial oil sands development in Alberta as a revealing case of contested agency within the tensions of high-modernist ambition and limited-government ideology. Approved by Premier Ernest Manning’s Social Credit government in 1963, the Great Canadian Oil Sands (GCOS, today Suncor) project embodied mid-twentieth-century confidence in large-scale engineering to reorder landscape and society. Yet Manning’s deeply rooted theological commitment to small government, individual liberty, and free enterprise prevented the province from assuming the infrastructural, planning, and social responsibilities typically associated with such megaprojects.

This article argues that the resulting mismatch transformed GCOS into a site of negotiation, resistance, and improvisation. Drawing on oral histories, company records, government documents, and contemporary journalism, it traces how remote location, untested technologies, harsh environmental conditions, and rapid industrialization produced chronic labour shortages, technical failures (including a catastrophic 1967-68 freeze-up), and boomtown chaos. Indigenous and Métis communities asserted Treaty 8 rights through political organization (e.g., the Nistowoyow Association) and selective engagement with wage labour, while workers formed the independent bargaining association that led to the 1969 strike. Far from a top-down technocratic triumph, the project’s outcomes were profoundly contingent—shaped by multiple actors operating within the constraints of Manning’s laissez-faire philosophy.