ABSTRACT
MacMillan Bloedel (MB) was 'in the bone' of British Columbia (BC). Its founding companies helped develop the entrepreneurial foundations of BC's modern forest economy. During the booms and busts of the interwar period, H.R. MacMillan became a respected and feared competitor, linking initial interests in export trading with wood processing and logging. In the 1950s, he was the driving force underlying the mergers of his company with Bloedel, Stewart and Welch (in 1951) and the Powell River Company (in 1959), large BC-based firms with substantial pulp and paper interests. As the largest, most integrated forest-product corporation in the province, MB quickly expanded internationally. In 1968, MB owned the then tallest head-office building in downtown Vancouver, housing over 1800 managers and staff, symbolic of the city's emerging metropolitan status and the remarkable resource-led (Fordist) boom enjoyed by postwar BC (Hayter, 1976). In the 1970s, however, the winds of change blew strongly and the recession of the early 1980s devastated MB and the provincial forest economy, signalling a process of restructuring and volatility that continues to present times. MB's struggle for stability and survival, however, ended in late 1999 when Weyerhaeuser, a US-based giant, acquired MB. Within a year, even the MB logo had all but disappeared from view.
