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.
In 1966 it terminated coal operations. This led in 1967 to the creation of a crown corporation, the Cape Breton Development Corporation, or DEVCO, which took over operations.
Corporate predecessors
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.
Dominion Coal Company
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 on 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.
On February 1, 1893, Dominion Coal Company Ltd. (DOMCO) was incorporated with Whitney as president, B.F. Whitney as secretary and F.S. Pearson as chief engineer. Early investors in the enterprise included Whitney's younger brother, William Collins Whitney; his brothers-in-law, Henry F. Dimock and Charles T. Barney; and Almeric H. Paget, who later married William's daughter Pauline.
Properties
The new company included the following properties:
Gowrie
Schooner Pond
Clyde
Glace Bay
Caledonia
Reserve
Lorway
Emery
International
Bridgeport
Gardiner
Lingan
Victoria
and several smaller collieries
Railway lines
DOMCO also inherited a mixed variety of railway lines linking the various mines. These were consolidated and operated as a department of the company, and in 1895 were extended south to Louisbourg. The railroad lines were incorporated in 1910 as the Sydney and Louisburg Railway.
By 1912, DOMCO operated 16 collieries, comprising 40% of Canada's coal production. The company effected numerous efficiencies and improvements. There were, however, costly mistakes, prominent among them the tendency to become locked into low-price contracts (such as to Whitney's companies), thus missing a large market at higher prices. By 1901 some 90 percent of its output was committed to such low-price contracts. The company made a large public offering of stock, which tumbled in price when Whitney failed to get the American import duty on coal removed or at least reduced.