In 1900 the construction of a large primary steel mill at Sydney provided the local market for coal which the industry's supporters had long anticipated. The integration of coal and steel commonplace in other industrialized nations by this time and already begun to some extent in Nova Scotia by the Nova Scotia Coal and Steel Corporation in the 1880s was given a tremendous boost by the establishment of the Dominion Steel Corporation in 1900. The largest plant of its kind in the country, it was designed to meet the basic steel requirements rails, barbed wire and ingots of central Canada's expanding industries and of the West. In the decade preceding World War I, Nova Scotia produced over half the nation's primary steel. Iron ore for the Sydney mill was obtained from Bell Island, Newfoundland. The formation of the Dominion Steel Corporation represented one of the great accomplishments of Canadian capitalism up to that time. But for Maritimers it was also another stage in the alienation of the region's resources to central Canada; the integration of the coal and steel industries required massive amounts of capital and promotion which seemed unobtainable in the region. The entire industry came increasingly under the control of financiers in central and western Canada who managed the national economy from MontrΘal and Toronto.
The Sydney Steel Mill was one of the most modern of its day. It successfully mastered and applied an expanding technology at a very advantageous time. This photograph shows the massive coke ovens essential for conversion of coal to coke for use in the plant's Bessemer-type blast furnaces. The complex occupied several square kilometres, including more than three kilometres of waterfront property in downtown Sydney. Employing several thousand men and consuming over a third of the total output of the mines, the mill provided an important stimulus for expansion. The mines, however, increasingly became "captive mines" to the steel industry, with coal output keyed to the demand for Sydney-produced steel The price of coal was deflated somewhat to improve the competitive position of the steel industry. Generally, the upshot of the alliance was to make the Nova Scotia coal industry extremely vulnerable to the vagaries of the market for steel, while at the same time forcing growth more rapidly than was healthy for the industry.
Courtesy: National Photography Collection, Public Archives of Canada (PA-1552)
