Matthew J. Bellamy - Brewed in the North: A History of Labatts

BREWED
in the
NORTH

BREWED
in the
NORTH

A History of Labatts

Matthew J. Bellamy

McGill-Queens University Press

Montreal & Kingston London Chicago

McGill-Queens University Press 2019

ISBN 978-0-7735-5915-8 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-7735-5965-3 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-0-7735-5966-0 (ePUB)

Legal deposit third quarter 2019

Bibliothque nationale du Qubec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Brewed in the north : a history of Labatts / Matthew J. Bellamy.

Names: Bellamy, Matthew J., 1967 author.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190119330 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190119373 | ISBN 9780773559158 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780773559653 (ePDF) | ISBN 9780773559660 (ePUB)

Subjects: LCSH: Labatts Canada LimitedHistory. | LCSH: Beer industryCanadaHistory.

Classification: LCC HD9397.C24 L3 2019 | DDC 338.4/7663420971dc23

Contents

Tables and Figures

,

,

Figures

Unless otherwise specified, all figures are from The Labatt Brewing Company Collection, University of Western Ontario Archives, and are provided courtesy of the Archives and Research Collections Centre.

.

.

,

.

.

.

.

,

.

.

.

,

,

,

,

,

.

.

.

,

,

,

.

.

,

.

,

,

,

,

.

,

,

,

,

.

,

.

.

,

.

,

,

.

,

Acknowledgments

This book was long in the making, so I have a number of people to thank. It is not an exaggeration to say that this book would have been impossible without the help of Amanda Oliver and Bev Brereton at the Archives and Research Collections Centre at Western University. Their talents as archivists allowed me to locate the needles of primary material in the haystack of the Labatt Collection. Many times, I was not exactly sure what I was looking for, or what might be in the collection. But Ms Oliver and Ms Brereton patiently listened to my ramblings and then went about finding the principal material that undergirds this book. Robin Keirstead, at the Western University archives, was also generous with his time and advice during the research phase of this project. Thank you to Jean Hung at the Archives Research and Collections Centre for putting up with my multiple requests for images, many of them coming toward the end of this project and thus with tight time restrictions. I also thank Sharon McKay, Labatt Breweries of Canada director of public affairs, for supporting this project and for taking an interest in my work and Labatts history more generally. And to everyone else at the Western University archives: thank you for creating such a welcoming and friendly environment in which to conduct my research.

I am lucky to work in the history department at Carleton University. It has long been my home away from home. The current chair, Dominique Marshall, like all the chairs before her, has created an environment that is convivial, scholarly, and professional. I thank the former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton University, Wally Clement, for his encouragement and support. Many of my friends and colleagues have allowed me to bounce ideas off them in the course of writing this book. Thank you to Dimitry Anastakis, John Bellamy, Rafael Castro, Craig Heron, Teresa da Silva Lopes, Dan Malleck, Brian McKillop, James Opp, Patricio Siz, and Andrew Smith. I particularly want to acknowledge the late Adam Day for his insights. I am sure that wherever he is perched, he is smiling and nodding. My thanks to the editors of Brewery History, the Canadian Historical Review, Histoire Sociale/Social History, and Business History for giving me permission to use some of my previously published material in this book. Once again, it has been a pleasure to work with everyone at McGill-Queens University Press. I would particularly like to thank Jonathan Crago, Kathleen Fraser, Casey Gazzellone, and Eleanor Gasparik for helping me get this book ready for publication.

I also need to thank my mother, Annette Bellamy, for proofreading every chapter and offering a few suggestions. Finally, I extend my deepest thanks to Dr Duncan McDowall. He, too, read most of this book while it was being written. He constantly remarked on the substance and the tone of this work and made numerous suggestions on how it might be improved. I can never repay the debt that I owe him. His advice has made this book much better. That being said, where mistakes exist, they are solely my responsibility.

BREWED
in the
NORTH

Introduction

The past is littered with examples of firms that have risen from lowly beginnings to the pinnacle of their industries; remained there for a while, overshadowing the competition; and then, usually because of some combination of managerial folly and external shock, tumbled from their perch, either going bankrupt or, as was the case with Canadas John Labatt Limited, falling into the hands of another firm. In many ways, Labatts story reads like a classic Greek tragedy in which the protagonist is brought down not by blind accident but by fatal flaws in judgment, by hubris, and by other self-inflicted wounds.

Just a few decades ago, the name Labatt was synonymous with beer in Canada. The company controlled roughly half of the national beer market, and its flagship brand Blue accounted for almost one in every five beers sold. Its huge breweries dotted the Canadian landscape. Not a single Canadian province was without a Labatt plant. The breweries stood as monuments to mass production and the great Canadian thirst for beer. Flush with cash in the 1970s and 1980s, Labatt bought a major league baseball team, the Blue Jays; a football team, the Toronto Argonauts; The Sports Network (TSN); Torontos entertainment palace, Sky-Dome; Discovery Channel; and Canadian chocolatier and ice cream company Laura Secord. At the same time, through its subsidiary Concert Productions International, the company promoted rock spectacles featuring the likes of David Bowie, Pink Floyd, and The Rolling Stones. Red may have been the predominant colour of our national flag, but blue hued many of our national pastimes. And that was not all. Labatts also owned all sorts of other food and beverage companies. John Labatt Limited was everywhere a genuine Canadian conglomerate in an age of corporate bigness. It was one of Canadas largest corporations, up there in the rarefied air with such other late twentieth-century high flyers as Bell Canada Enterprises, Power Corporation, Manulife, and the Royal Bank of Canada. Labatt sat proudly in the pantheon of national enterprise.