How the Château Laurier helped win the Second World War

In the early 1940s, Ottawa’s downtown hotel became the nerve centre of C.D. Howe’s “dollar-a-year men” and Canada’s wartime boom.

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One night in 1940, Henry Borden, Gordon Scott and Robert A.C. Henry invited their boss, C.D. Howe, Canada’s wartime Minister of Munitions and Supply, to the Château Laurier, where the three men were living. The trio wanted Howe to consider their solution to a thorny problem: how to discreetly purchase the raw materials Canada needed to help fuel the Allied campaign in Europe — silk, rubber and the like — without driving up prices. Article content

Borden was a Toronto corporate lawyer, Scott a chartered accountant from Montreal, while Henry, also from Montreal, had worked in both business and government. The group’s proposed fix involved est