CANADA: Monarch of the Forest

Along with his many other distinctions, Chicago Tribune Publisher Robert R. McCormick is probably Canada’s largest single foreign investor. His holdings, worth some $50 million by his own estimate, are scattered from western Ontario to the St. Lawrence River. Canada’s McCormick-land now includes two big paper mills, two hydroelectric plants, some 8,179 sq. mi. of leased timber lands.

Last week aging (72) Bertie McCormick traveled north to inaugurate, with the help of Quebec’s Premier Maurice Duplessis, the latest McCormick power project, a $15 million, 90,000-h.p. hydroelectric plant on Quebec’s north shore of the St. Lawrence. Built by the colonel’s Manicouagan Power Co. and dominated by McCormick Dam, the plant will supply reserve power for McCormick’s paper mill in nearby Baie Comeau (pop. 4,200).

In the humming din of the plant’s control room last week, Premier Duplessis pressed a button to start a 45,000-h.p. generator. Nodding at it and the other big dynamo, he shouted to McCormick: “Do you think they produce more light than the Chicago Tribune?” The colonel chortled appreciatively. Later, at a banquet in the Manoir Comeau the Premier, himself a man who knows his own worth, told 215 guests: “We’re somewhat alike, the colonel and I. We’re both criticized, but we both do some good work.”