The Dollar a Year Men: How the Best Business Brains in Canada Helped to Win the Second World War

By Allan Levine

Barlow Books, October 2025/400 pages

Reviewed by Anthony Wilson-Smith

October 29, 2025

Canada, for much of its history, could be described as a small place in many ways other than its geography. Despite its enormous landmass, its relatively small population meant that people at high levels of achievement across different fields from journalism to entertainment to business often knew each other directly or were three degrees of separation away from a lunch. As a small country, we had a small, knowable, élite.

That word, “élite”, can have negative connotations in a world of haves and have-nots, and invisible clubs of all kinds that further sort us beyond entrenched social stratifications. Consider, for example, the resentment of many Westerners and others toward the so-called ‘Laurentian Elite’ of people based largely in Quebec and Ontario who, they say, make national decisions based on their own regional self-interest.

But as the Winnipeg-based historian Allan Levine so ably demonstrates in his compellingly written and deeply researched new book, The Dollar a Year Men: How the Best Business Brains in Canada Helped to Win the Second World War, that small world of Canada’s élite was a key factor behind our country’s astonishing economic growth and contribution to the Allied side in the Second World War.

It was achieved with the collaboration of the country’s top political, legal and business brains in places ranging from the Maritimes to British Columbia. Almost to a man (and in those days, they were virtually all men) the country’s top business leaders left workplaces, homes and families behind to direct Canada’s industrial war effort from tiny makeshift offices and improvised headquarters in return for a salary of a dollar a year (although their employers usually continued to pay their regular salaries.)

In addition to discomfort and displacement, the work was sometimes hazardous. In fact, on a December, 1940, trip to the United Kingdom for meetings, a ship carrying the legendary cabinet minister and industrialist Clarence Decatur ‘C.D.’ Howe and several other top executives-turned-wartime mandarins was sunk by a torpedo from a German U-Boat. While Howe and many of the 169 other passengers and crew were rescued, one executive, Gordon Scott, a 53-year-old Montreal chartered accountant and former provincial treasurer on loan to the federal government, died.

Among the other dollar-a-year men, Halifax lawyer Frank Manning Covert left his position in Ottawa to enroll as a navigator in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He served on many dangerous bombing missions, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, and returned after the war to become one of the country’s top corporate lawyers until his death in 1987.

In 1939, when the war began, the country had a largely agrarian economy and a tiny, combined military consisting of fewer than 10,000 members supplied with outdated equipment dating from the First World War. By war’s end, it was the world’s fourth-largest producer of war supplies behind the United States, United Kingdom and Soviet Union. “When you consider that pre-war Canadian industry had never made a tank, a combat airplane or modern, high-calibre, rapid-fire gun,’ noted a 1945 Fortune magazine article (cited by Levine), “the speed with which industry was organized and production started ranks as an industrial miracle.”

While many of these challenges were previously known, Levine brings an eye for telling detail and a human touch to his writing that adds new context.

One of the elements that makes this achievement all the more remarkable is the human factor. Not surprisingly, the business leaders enlisted brought with them large-sized egos, a shortage of self-doubt, and high expectations as to their ability to make sweeping decisions unilaterally, absent politicians. But their patriotism was also larger-than-life for rising to an occasion that while leveraging their expertise, also pulled them out of the most comfortable comfort zones in the country.

They competed with each other for influence and, even more significantly, at times against Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who harboured suspicions as to their motivations even as he recognized the need to work alongside them.

At the same time, they all faced challenges in working with their putative ally in Great Britain. Even as the British desperately needed arms, weapons manufacturers there were loath to share their business, and therefore slow in providing the equipment design specs needed for Canada to produce on their behalf. That did not happen until it became clear they could not meet demand on their own. As well, Canada needed collaboration with the United States thanks to that country’s Lend-Lease Act enabling arms shipments to Britain. That was also not immediately forthcoming.

While many of these challenges were previously known, Levine brings an eye for telling detail and a human touch to his writing that adds new context. The author of 16 books, he has long been a trusted go-to figure for those engaged with our country’s history (including as a contributor to The Canadian Encyclopedia, produced by my organization, Historica Canada.) He understands not only where to go for his research, but also how to read between the lines to understand underlying personal and political currents.

All that has clear relevance measured against the global challenges Canada now faces with ongoing trade wars and political uncertainty among former allies. Business leaders and politicians in Canada have, for the most part, operated at arm’s length from one another, except when they have specifically shared needs. One reason is – rote declarations of goodwill aside – politicians and business leaders often have different priorities.

A federal government facing huge deficits, for example, isn’t likely to be sympathetic to business leaders calling for tax cuts. Similarly, inter-provincial trade barriers exist, at least in part, because they suit regionally based companies and provincial politicians who prefer to avoid competition.

One demonstrated lesson of Dollar a Year Men is the importance of putting those differences aside when unexpected new challenges that put the national interest at risk transcend them. Although today’s war is an economic one being waged over trade, the line between the book’s events and Canada’s present dilemmas is easily drawn.

Can the business and political leaders of a country that is today much larger, less homogenous, and more subject to global economic upheaval than in 1939 work together to meet its challenges in the same way? This important book offers all manner of pointers as to how that could happen – or all too easily, not.

Anthony Wilson-Smith is President of Historica Canada and former Editor-in-Chief of Maclean’s magazine.