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Minutes of the Hoito Restaurant March 27, 1918 to May 2, 1920

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Minutes of the Hoito Restaurant March 27, 1918 to May 2, 1920 Minutes of the Hoito Restaurant March 27, 1918 to May 2, 1920 Translated and Introduced by Saku Pinta This work is dedicated to the staff of the Hoito Restaurant, past, present, and future. 2 The Origins of the Hoito Restaurant: A History from Below By Saku Pinta Then Slim headed to Bay Street, where he read a sign upon a door Inviting the world workers up onto the second floor Come right in Fellow Worker, hang your crown upon the wall And eat at the Wobbly restaurant, you'll pay no profits there at all - “The Second Coming of Christ” by Pork-Chop Slim1 In continuous operation in the same location for over 100 years, the Hoito Restaurant has served Finnish and Canadian food in the city of Thunder Bay, Ontario while also serving as an important local landmark and gathering place. The restaurant the New York Times called “arguably Canada's most famous pancake house” has, since it opened on May 1, 1918, occupied the bottom-floor of the 109-year old Finnish Labour Temple on 314 Bay Street – a building formally recognized as a National Historic Site of Canada in 2011.2 In recognition of the centenary of the founding of the Hoito Restaurant the Thunder Bay Finnish Canadian Historical Society is proud to publish, for the first time in English-language translation, the entirety of the restaurant's first minute book. This unique and historically significant primary source document begins on March 27, 1918, with the first meeting to discuss the establishment of the restaurant, and concludes over two years later on May 2, 1920. The proceedings record the discussions, debates, and decisions made by the Board of Directors and General Assembly during the course of the first two years of the restaurant’s existence. This translation attempts to adhere as closely as possible to the tone and meaning of the original Finnish. Only minor edits have been made to correct errors and to ensure consistency in spelling. Footnotes have been included to provide additional explanation where necessary. Also, it should be noted that unlike the somewhat scattered order of the Board of Directors and General Assembly minutes in the original document, the translation below has been placed in chronological order, beginning with the original Hoito Constitution and By-laws. This work formed a considerable portion of the 2018-2019 “Increasing Access to the Finnish- Language Archives” project, made possible by funding from the Library and Archives of Canada (LAC) Documentary Heritage Community Programme (DHCP). It is the hope of this author that this document will remain in the public domain in perpetuity for the benefit of working people everywhere, to whom this history rightfully belongs. The aim of this introduction is to place the origins and formative years of the Hoito Restaurant in historical context, and in so doing, provide some insight into the lives of its founders, their motivations, and the times that helped to shape their ideas. It is a short study in class- consciousness in the way that historian E.P. Thompson defined it, as the way that the working-class experience is “handled in cultural terms” and “embodied in traditions, value- systems, ideas, and institutional forms.”3 The story of the Hoito Restaurant is one of immigration and is tied to the seasonal rhythms of the logging industry in northern Ontario, the Finnish-Canadian lumber workers who pooled their resources to establish it, and the 1 Lakehead University Archives, CTKL fonds, MG10, F 15, 22, I 33. 2 May 12, 2015 “Finnish pancakes with a side of Canada's labour history,” New York Times. 3 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 9. 3 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or “Wobblies”) union, with which the restaurant and Labour Temple maintained a close association for decades. For the restaurant's proletarian patrons, the Hoito signified much more than a place to have a meal. It was an establishment that they controlled directly, representing an imperfect, but nonetheless small-scale working model of the society that they sought to build – the guiding principle being that more can be achieved by combining resources collectively than through individual effort alone. Immigration and the Economy of Northern Ontario, 1884-1931 Finnish immigrants began settling in North America in large numbers in the late nineteenth century, a phenomenon popularly known as Amerikan kuume (American fever). Over 300,000 Finns arrived in North America, the majority of whom settled in the United States, before the outbreak of the First World War in Europe stopped immigration. By 1914 some 22,000 Finns had settled in Canada. Less than twenty years later their numbers had nearly doubled.4 Most were economic migrants, landless workers from rural areas who hoped to find work and a better life in Canada. Immigration agents helped to persuade potential migrants with tales of the work and wealth in this new land where one could “carve gold with a wooden knife.”5 Others fled political repression or conscription into the Russian military in the pre- independence period, before 1917, when Finland belonged to the Russian Empire. Similarly, the turbulent post-independence period witnessed a Civil War in 1918, a short but brutal conflict that ended with the victory of the non-socialist “Whites” over the socialist “Reds”. Thousands of Finns left the war-torn and politically divided country. A dedicated minority of these immigrants held socialist views, helping to found newspapers, organizations, and perhaps most importantly, the labour halls that could be found in nearly any urban or rural community with a sizeable Finnish population. Built in 1910, the Finnish Labour Temple in Port Arthur (now modern-day Thunder Bay) is a product of this era. During this same period, northern Ontario was also undergoing a massive transformation. On May 16, 1885, workers near Jackfish, Ontario, on the rugged north shore of Lake Superior drove the last spike on the stretch of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) connecting Winnipeg to Montreal.6 As the Thunder Bay Sentinel newspaper announced in 1884, in typical colonial fashion, “that which has been hitherto a howling wilderness untrodden by the foot of man, will in the course of a few months resound with the rush and bustle of railway life.”7 More than the “rush and bustle” of the railway, the CPR served to open northern Ontario up to mass settlement, as did other short-line railways built soon after specifically for the purpose of hauling the mineral and timber wealth out of the northern hinterland. The population of northern Ontario grew rapidly, from roughly 55,000 in 1891 to more than 360,000 forty years later.8 Immigrants helped to fill the tremendous demand for the cheap, “unskilled” labour that powered the railroad construction, longshore, mining, and logging industries. 4 Varpu Lindström-Best, The Finns in Canada (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1985), 7. 5 Bay Street Project No. 2. Thunder Bay Finnish Canadian Historical Society, A Chronicle of Finnish Settlements in Rural Thunder Bay (Thunder Bay: Thunder Bay Finnish Canadian Historical Society, 1976), 18. 6 Lyle Nicol. Jackfish Ontario: Memories of a Lake Superior Ghost Town. Lake Superior Magazine, February 1, 2009. 7 Quoted in Pierre Burton, The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (Toronto/Montreal: McLelland and Stewart Limited), 270. 8 Mark Kuhlberg, In the Power of Government: The Rise and Fall of Newsprint in Ontario, 1894-1932 (Toronto: Univeristy of Toronto Press, 2015), 11. 4 The logging industry, one of the key segments of the northern Ontario economy, reflected this ethnic diversity. “It looked like the goddamn United Nations out there,” as one logger recalled.9 As historian Donald MacKay noted, lumber workers in Canada have called themselves by many names: lumberers, shantymen, timberbeasts, lumberjacks, loggers, forestiers, and bûcherons.10 To this list may be added the kämppäjätkät (camp lads), a Finnish-Canadian term that applied not only to lumber workers but also to railroad construction crews who toiled seasonally and lived in camps close to their work. In the early 1930s the District of Thunder Bay alone accounted for roughly 20 percent of the total Finnish immigrant population in Canada.11 It was in this District, along with the Algoma Central Railway north of Sault Ste. Marie and along the Canadian Northern Railway west of Sudbury, that Finnish lumber workers dominated the pulpwood camps.12 From the 1920s to the mid-1940s, with few exceptions, logging in Ontario employed between 20,000 to 30,000 workers per year. The seasonal work of felling and bucking timber typically began in the late autumn, stretching through the winter, and ending in the early spring with the log drive. Along with the softwood destined to become dimensional lumber in sawmills, an astounding quantity of railway ties were cut in the north woods. It is estimated that between 1875 and 1930 – in the period before railway ties were treated to prevent rot and had to be replaced more frequently – lumber workers in northwestern Ontario produced more than 55 million railway ties by hand, through the skillful use of the broad axe.13 However, pulp and paper would become the most significant segment of the logging industry in northern Ontario, in terms of the large amounts of capital invested in pulp and paper mills and the rising demand for paper, especially from the United States. The pulpwood cutters and paper mill workers of northern Ontario supplied much of the newsprint for the mass daily papers in the northeastern and midwestern United States.14 The Finnish-Canadian Wobblies Life in the remote logging camps of northern Ontario was often dangerous, difficult, and poorly paid.
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