GREAT CANADIAN BUSINESS QUIZ

David Olive tests your knowledge of the country’s industry,

1. Forsaking his early career ambition to become a Methodist preacher, a) Garfield Weston b) George Weston c) Galen Weston in 1882 at age 18 went into business as a bread salesman in Toronto, laying the foundation of a food processing and grocery retailing business with 2016 revenues of $48 billion and a payroll of 195,000 employees. 2. Launched in 1883 by the Phelan family as Canada Railway News Co., selling newspapers and confections at railway stations, Cara Operations Ltd. (Swiss Chalet, Harveys, East Side Mario’s, et al) bolstered its status as Canada’s leading “casual dining” restaurant operator with its 2016 purchase of Swiss Chalet’s Quebec counterpart a) Groupe St-Hubert Inc. b) Chez Cora c) Lafleur Restaurants 3. In 1891, a) Deere & Co. and International Harvester Co. b) J.I. Case Co. and New Holland Machine Co. c) Massey Manufacturing Co. and A. Harris, Son and Co.

merged to become the biggest maker of farm equipment in the British Empire. 4. True or false: Donald Trump traces his family fortune to the roughly $500,000 that his paternal grandfather, German émigré Friedrich Trump, earned from operating a restaurant/boarding house/bordello in Whitehorse during the Klondike gold rush in the late 1890s, a grubstake Friedrich used to launch the family into real estate, beginning in New York City. 5. By 1900, Toronto’s William Davies Co., under managing director and philanthropist a) Joseph Flavelle b) Hart Massey c) William Mulock had become the biggest pork-processer in the British Empire, earning Toronto its “Hogtown” nickname. 6. In 1904, Canadian pharmacist John J. McLaughlin of Enniskillen, Ont., eldest son of Robert McLaughlin, founder of the Oshawa-based McLaughlin Carriage works, invented a soft drink he called a) Trillium Sparking Soda b) Orange Crush c) Canada Dry Pale Ginger Ale 7. Founded in 1869, the T. Eaton Co. was one of the earliest post-Confederation firms destined for greatness, accounting for about half of all Canadian retail sales by the 1950s. In 1905, Irish émigré Timothy Eaton launched which of these enduring commercial icons: a) Canada’s first annual Santa Claus parade, in Toronto, 19 years before the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and by 1950 the biggest event of its kind in North America b) the Eaton’s catalogue, used as shin-protection by young hockey players nationwide c)a huge general store in Winnipeg, T. Eaton Co.’s first step toward being the only department store chain with stores in every province d) a and c e)a an db 8. Name the Stevensville, Ont., cheesemaker who relocated in 1905 to Chicago, where he built one of the world’s largest food-processing companies. a) L.J. Parmalat b) J.L. Kraft c) S.M. Saputo 9. At issue, primarily, in the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 was a) unsafe working conditions b) low pay in contrast to war-profiteering by employers c) six-day work weeks 10. Before he first became prime minister, in 1921, Mackenzie King was an adviser to a) Andrew Carnegie b) the Rockefeller family c) Sweden on industrial-relations reforms. 11. Starting in 1924 with a single Imperial Oil gasoline pump erected on a corner of his father’s farm near Bouctouche, N.B., K.C. Irving built a conglomerate by which he transformed New Brunswick into something of a company town. The “K.C.” stands for a) King Cash b) Kenneth Colin c) King Cameron 12. The 1928 acquisition of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons of Waterloo, Ont., gave the Bronfman family’s already substantial distilling operations a) a world #1-ranked whisky brand in Seagram’s VO (“very old”) b)a large Seagram inventory of aged whisky ready for sale when U.S. Prohibition was lifted five years after the merger c)a distinguished Seagram brand name in place of a Bronfman enterprise tainted by bootlegging allegations. d) all of the above 13. Debates over Canadian pipelines are not new. Controversy over the financing of a 1950s pipeline to bring Western Canadian natural gas to Central Canadian homes and industry culminated in the 1957 electoral defeat of prime minister a) Mackenzie King b) Louis St. Laurent c) John Diefenbaker 14. The company that emerged from that debacle, today’s TransCanada Corp., is the sponsor of which two the following controversial proposed projects. a) Northern Gateway Pipelines b) Keystone XL Pipeline c) Line 3 Replacement Program d) Energy East Pipeline e) b and df)b and c 15. A Canadian firm, Imperial Oil Co. Ltd., dominated the Canadian industry in its first decade, accounting for about 45 per cent of all Canadian refined oil by 1891, until it was acquired in 1898 by its current offshore owner, a) Royal Dutch Shell PLC b) Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon Mobil Corp.) c) British Petroleum (now BP PLC) Answers 1)b.2)a.3)c .4) True .5) a.6)c.7)d. The Eaton’s catalogue, Canada’s first, dates from 1884. 8) b. 9) b. 10) b. 11) b. 12) d. 13) b. 14) e. 15) b.