Dominion Coal Company

The Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation (also DOSCO) was a Canadian coal mining and steel manufacturing company.

Incorporated in 1928 and operational by 1930, DOSCO was predated by the British Empire Steel Corporation (BESCO), which was a merger of the Dominion Coal Company, the Dominion Iron and Steel Company and the Nova Scotia Steel Company. DOSCO was one of the largest private employers in Canada during the 1930s-1950s. In 1957, DOSCO was purchased as a subsidiary of A.V. Roe Canada Ltd. and was later assumed in 1962 by Hawker Siddeley Canada. The company was dissolved in 1968 after the majority of its coal mining and steel mill industrial assets in Industrial Cape Breton were expropriated and nationalized by the federal and provincial governments.

Industrial Cape Breton consisted of two distinctive geographic regions for industrial activity: the "north side" of Sydney Harbour, and the "south side". The north side was dominated in the 1800s by the General Mining Association (GMA), which had been formed in the 1820s after the Colony of Cape Breton Island was amalgamated back into Nova Scotia. Several independent collieries opened on the south side and by the 1870s, Canada's federal government had implemented its National Policy of economic protectionist measures. It was during this decade that the leading operators on the "south side" foresaw the benefits of amalgamating and modernizing to replace lost American coal markets in eastern Canada with Cape Breton coal.

In 1889, Henry Melville Whitney and Frederick Stark Pearson of Boston, Massachusetts, formed the Whitney coal syndicate with Benjamin Franklin Pearson of the People's Heat and Light Company of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The group purchased one mine and obtained options on others south of Sydney in eastern Cape Breton Island. Premier William Stevens Fielding and the Liberal provincial administration favored Whitney's entry into the coal business because his steamships and street-railway electric generators consumed large quantities of coal. The Whitney syndicate was offered an unprecedented 99-year lease on a fixed royalty; the group exercised its options, acquiring most of the existing bituminous coal mines in eastern Cape Breton and co-opting such local figures as John Stewart McLennan and David MacKeen. This process took some months, and Whitney was not ready to consolidate operations at Sydney until early 1893.

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