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

We now have available the Minutes of the Hoito Restaurant, March 27, 1918 to May 2, 1920, newly translated and with an introduction by Saku Pinta. The minutes can be downloaded as a 99 page PDF file.

Introduction: 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 Slim [1]

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 minutes 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 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.

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. A letter published in the Port Arthur-based Työkansa (The Working People) newspaper in October 1911 provided the following vivid description of the abysmal conditions that workers commonly encountered.

The rugged old-growth forest is felled by the sweat of thousands living in intolerably cramped and dirty camps, often a haven for small vermin that do not even grant these tired limbs a good night’s rest. Unhealthy, rotten meat, eggs, butter, and so on, passed over in the cities by the hungriest customers, are regularly shipped to the camps. Surely they will even eat excrement in the camps, muse the merchants as they pack and dispatch this filth to the woods. The wretchedly low wages are the final indignity. [15]

Food never strayed too far from the minds of the lumber workers. The average logger burned more than 7,000 calories a day in the era when trees were felled using hand tools. As a result, inadequate or poorly prepared food could, and often did, result in walkouts and other forms of protest. The topic even furnished material for songs and poems. The “Lumberjack’s Prayer”, penned by T-Bone Slim (the pen name of Matti Valentinpoika Huhta), used humour to discuss the poor quality of the food in the logging camps. The final stanza suggests the earthly means to improve it.

I pray dear Lord for Jesus’ sake
Give us this day a T-Bone steak
Hallowed be thy holy name
But don’t forget to send the same

Oh hear my humble cry, oh Lord
And send me down some decent board
Brown gravy and some German fried
With sliced tomatoes on the side

Observe me on my bended legs
I’m asking you for ham and eggs
And if thou havest custard pies
I like, dear Lord, the largest size

Dear Lord we know your holy wish
On Friday we must have a fish
Our flesh is weak and spirit stale
You better make that fish a whale

Oh hear me Lord, remove these dogs
These sausages of powdered logs
Your bull beef hash and bearded snouts
Take them to Hell or thereabouts

With alum bread and pressed beef butts
Dear Lord, you damn near ruined my guts
Your white wash milk and margarine
I wish to Christ I’d never seen

Oh hear me Lord, I’m praying still
But if you won’t, our union will
Put pork chops on the bill of fare
And starve no workers anywhere [16]

Before the widespread presence of labour unions in the industry, workers would simply leave to find employment in other camps where wages, food, or conditions might be better. But these individual acts did little to improve the lives of the lumber workers in any meaningful way, much less provide any sort of mechanism with which to make or enforce demands. Around the same time that the famous IWW-led Fraser River Railway strikes broke out in western Canada, Finnish-Canadians emerged as the main driving force behind labour union organizing efforts in the logging industry in northern Ontario.

In the spring of 1912 Finns established the first lumber workers local of the IWW in Ontario in the camps along the Algoma Central. By the spring of 1918 the IWW lumber workers there had conducted what is in all likelihood the first successful strike to be carried out under a union banner in the logging industry in Ontario, winning improvements in pay, hours, and conditions. [17] The union soon spread to logging camps across northern Ontario aided considerably by the much larger Finnish-American IWW movement, the network of Finnish socialist halls, and an already combative working-class movement. The IWW had been active in province since 1906, establishing its first locals in the mines of northeastern Ontario, under the auspices of the Western Federation of Miners. [18] The arrival of the IWW into the logging camps in Ontario owed much to the traditional union militancy of the miners.

Founded in Chicago in June 1905, the IWW positioned itself as a rival to the dominant craft or trade union federations like the American Federation of Labor. The rise of machine production in the twentieth century, the founders of the union concluded, had made unions organized on the basis of the tools used in production outdated and conservative. The craft or trade method of organization now divided rather than united the working class. A single workplace or industry could include multiple trade unions that often would not or could not honour the picket lines of a separate union or local on strike. Moreover, the craft distinctions previously common in manufacturing simply did not correspond to the realities of the new mass production industries.

In the opening lines of the 1905 Industrial Union Manifesto the founders of the IWW maintained, in terms that could easily be applied to current discussions on automation and the divide between rich and poor, that:

Social relations and groupings only reflect mechanical and industrial conditions. The great facts of present industry are the displacement of human skill by machines and the increase of capitalist power through concentration in the possession of the tools with which wealth is produced and distributed.[19]

As an alternative, the IWW promoted a new union vision whereby workers would be organized by industry – all workers in the same industry should belong to the same union, and all unions combined into a single labour organization. This industrial form of union organization would enhance the bargaining power of the working class and its ability to make improvements in wages and conditions. But the Wobblies had long term goals in mind too. Rather than seek to return to the past they embraced the potential of new technology, looking forward to a new social order where labour and human ingenuity would finally be harnessed for the common good. As an organization with revolutionary commitments, the seeds of the new society were also to be found in the industrial unions. “The army of production,” states the Preamble to the IWW constitution, “must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown.” [20] The IWW envisaged a new society – sometimes described as “industrial democracy” or the “co-operative commonwealth” – where the workers’ themselves would directly control all land, factories, and infrastructure that produced the wealth of the world, to be distributed on an equitable basis.

Also, unlike the craft unions of the early twentieth century, the IWW welcomed all workers regardless of nationality or gender. Solidarity was to be built through inclusivity. No worker could be denied membership as long as they did not possess the power to hire or fire. Additionally, low initiation fees and monthly dues removed financial obstacles to membership.

Tens of thousands of workers, above all immigrants and those employed in the resource industries, flocked to the union in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Along with their inclusive approach, the IWW represented one of the only labour organizations on the continent concerned with organizing “unskilled” workers on a large scale during this period. For many immigrants, the revolutionary vision of the IWW came to be viewed as the best method to realize the promise of material prosperity that had attracted them to North America in the first place.

The experiences of Nikolai “Nick” Viita, the manager of the Hoito Restaurant from 1925 to 1931, serve as a fairly typical example. [21] Viita was born in Kankaanpää, Finland in 1902, the oldest of three children. His father immigrated to Canada in 1908, first finding employment in the mines in Cobalt before working in the logging camps. After six long years Viita’s father had earned enough money to send for his wife and children. Upon arrival in 1914, at the age of twelve, Nick Viita began working alongside his father felling and bucking timber with a crosscut saw in Camp Mile 26-27 along the Algoma Central Railway line north of Sault Ste. Marie. Viita’s father built a tarpaper shack near the camp bunkhouses where the family lived year-round. He would attend school for three months of the year when the logging season ended.

Like most of the logging camps along the Algoma Central, stretching from Sault Ste. Marie to Hearst, the lumber workers that the Viita family lived and worked with were mainly Finnish immigrants, and nearly all of them belonged to the IWW. It is not known if Viita’s father had encountered the union while working in the mines, but by 1914 he had become an strong supporter of the Duluth, Minnesota-based Finnish-language IWW daily newspaper Sosialisti (The Socialist, later renamed Industrialisti or The Industrialist). The camp had a sauna and workers would gather on weekends for improvised entertainments, often featuring Finnish folk and labour songs, recitations, and short speeches. At age fifteen Viita joined the IWW on his own request, as the camp delegate only made union membership obligatory on adults. One year later he participated in the successful 1918 Algoma Central IWW strike witnessing, first hand, how an organized movement can harness the potential of ordinary workers to effect change. Viita would later complement his meagre elementary school education by attending the Work People’s College, a residential labour college financed and operated by Finnish Wobblies near Duluth. [22] Viita’s experiences in the logging camps, the hardships that his family endured, and the robust culture and egalitarian vision of the union had drawn him, and thousands like him, to the IWW movement.

A Good Meal at a Reasonable Price

The story of the Hoito Restaurant begins with this revolutionary union vision. The idea originated in Kallio’s logging camp outside of Nipigon, Ontario. While the precise location of the camp remains unknown, it was most likely somewhere along the Black Sturgeon River pulpwood concession west of Nipigon. [23]

Armas Topias Mäkinen (better known as A.T. or “Tom” Hill) had toured the logging camps in the District of Thunder Bay, promoting the new Finnish-language newspaper Vapaus (Liberty) and supporting union organizing efforts. Hill arrived at Kallio’s logging camp in January 1918, where the workers had formed an IWW union committee, winning some improvements in working conditions. Discussions soon focused on the quality of the food in the camp. As Hill recalled, the “first discussion with the camp cook resulted in an expressed suggestion that a co-operative restaurant again be opened in the basement of the Labour Temple.” [24]

This solution satisfied one of the workers’ problems beyond the “shop floor”. Affordable accommodations could be easily obtained while lodging in the city in one of the many boarding houses located in the Finnish quarter around Bay Street, where lumber workers from the region frequently assembled in the off-season. However, finding a good meal at a reasonable price proved to be much more difficult. A co-operatively operated restaurant, controlled by the workers’ themselves, best suited their values as union members. Such an establishment could also serve as a vital centre to support union recruitment efforts.

The workers at Kallio’s camp sought support for the idea from other workers in the District. The proposal first arrived, by letter and word of mouth, at a logging camp in Linko Siding, some 75 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay, and then to other camps soon after. When the logging season drew to a close in the early spring, discussions about establishing a new restaurant carried on in the city. [25]

As recorded in the minutes below, the first formal meeting was held on March 27, 1918 at the Finnish Labour Temple. Alex Lehto, Niilo Nurmi, Frank Laine, Ed Mäki, and Väinö Pelto unanimously decided to proceed with the establishment of a “poikatalo.” Before the restaurant had a name it was simply referred to as the poikatalo, a uniquely Finnish North American term meaning “boarding house,” or literally “bachelor house.” In the twentieth century, these boarding houses could be found in nearly every community in the United States and Canada with a sizeable Finnish population, forming an important part of the support network for immigrant workers. Despite the fact that the hall and the restaurant did not offer lodging, poikatalo has remained one of the nicknames for both the Labour Temple and the Hoito ever since. The actual name Hoito (meaning “care” in Finnish) was chosen on April 28, 1918, only three days before the restaurant opened.

During the March 28, 1918 meeting it was announced that the Port Arthur Finnish Socialist Local, the organization that controlled the Labour Temple at this time, had responded to the restaurant committee request that the basement of the hall be used for the new “poikatalo”. They demanded that some definite information be presented to demonstrate support for the initiative.

The Finnish Socialist Local’s Board of Directors had good reason for proceeding with caution. The space that the Hoito Restaurant now occupies had, since 1910, served as the location for multiple restaurants, both co-operatively and privately operated, as well as other enterprises, including the offices of the Työkansa newspaper, a poolroom, and a soft drink foundry. The Board wanted to ensure that this new initiative had some likelihood of success. Also, as historian Jorma Halonen observed, the Finnish immigrant neighbourhood surrounding the Labour Temple had seen a major upsurge in co-operative activity, not matched since, in the years leading up to the founding of the Hoito. However, these co-operative enterprises had gone bankrupt in 1915 owing, in part, to the effects of an economic recession and the outbreak of the First World War.[26] The Labour Temple itself had gone into receivership in 1915 after defaulting on a loan payment. [27]

To comply with the demand of the Finnish Socialist Local, the restaurant committee decided to compile a list of supporters to present to the Board. They also made the decision to collect $5.00 “comrade loans” from prospective customers in order to raise the necessary start-up money. They hoped to collect at least $300.00 (the equivalent of about $4,750.00 in 2019). They came to within $5.00 of this goal. The names of 45 of the original 59 individuals who contributed “comrade loans” to establish the Hoito appear on receipts contained in the Canadan Teollisuusunionistinen Kannatus Liitto (Canadian Industrial Unionist Support League) fonds in the Lakehead University archives. [28] They are as follows:

• A. Halonen
• Leonard Hanqiste (or possibly Hanqvist)
• Antti Johnson
• Jack Koski
• Fred Lahti
• Alex Lehto
• John Mammi
• A. Niemi
• A. Oja
• Emel Ojala
• J. Rahkonen
• Kusti Rajala
• Victor Ronkka
• J. Sado (also spelled Sato)
• Wikki Seikkula
• Kalle Sutinen
• Heila Santeri
• J. Ware (also spelled Wäre or Väre)
• Kalle Anttila
• Emil Elo
• O. Hanninen
• Elias Holsa
• E. Outinen
• F. North
• John Pelto
• Eland Perho
• W. Rinneri
• F. Leppänen
• E. Pantynen
• Jan Anttila
• H. Blom
• Henry Mustonen
• Gusti Norman
• E. Outinen
• J. Santanen
• J. Seppälä
• Kalle Waranen
• O. Kolehmainen
• E. Niemi
• Lauri Inki
• F. H. Vuori
• Arvid Seppala (Seppälä)
• Edward Sjon (Mathias Edward Sjön)
• Matti Ramppi (Ramppainen)
• Oskar Paananen (alias Oskar Johnson)

Unsurprisingly, all of the individuals above, with the possible exception of F. North, have Finnish first names or surnames. Several names are partially anglicized by omitting the diacritical marks above some of the vowels in surnames, while a few first names and surnames are apparently fully anglicized.

A Workers’ Restaurant

The Hoito Restaurant opened its doors on May 1st, 1918, the day celebrated as “May Day” or International Workers’ Day. It is noteworthy that Aarnio, the owner of the restaurant that immediately preceded the Hoito, had agreed to vacate the space by May 2nd. Although the decision is not recorded in the minutes, it appears that the founders of the Hoito had insisted on moving that one day earlier so that they could officially launch the restaurant on May Day. The symbolic act of opening the restaurant on the day that workers around the world celebrate the achievements of the labour movement is but one indication of their beliefs, also concretely embedded in the rules that governed how the Hoito functioned.

The original Constitution and By-laws reveal a highly democratic structure and egalitarian approach. These rules prohibited the payment of dividends to members and amassing large sums of money. A reserve fund of $300-$500 would be maintained to help deal with the unknown. Prices would be lowered or money invested in higher quality food stuffs if the reserve fund exceeded this amount. After most of the “comrade loans” had been repaid, the Board of Directors decided that all patrons who purchased weekly meal tickets would be equal in terms of their decision-making power. When the restaurant opened, a weekly meal ticket cost $6.00. This not only entitled the ticket holder to three meals a day, but also provided the right to attend the monthly General Assembly – the highest decision-making body in the organization – and eligibility for election to the Board of Directors, which oversaw auditing and other day-to-day matters. Terms on the Board of Directors, limited to three months, ensured a frequent rotation of members. This rotation was designed to prevent the formation of an entrenched bureaucracy or controlling elite.

The Hoito had, early on, been set up explicitly as a consumers’ co-operative. As can be seen in the original Hoito Constitution, the word “co-operative” was crossed out due to the term’s association of with traditional shareholder co-operatives. As was made abundantly clear in a report delivered during the Hoito Restaurant’s ten-year anniversary celebrations, published in Industrialisti, traditional co-operatives were to be regarded as middle-class organizations, not suitable to the needs of the working-class movement. Traditional co-operatives, the report stated, had been formed by small producers to combat the dominance of large-scale capital in production, exchange, and consumption, and in the process, frequently lowered workers’ wages and standard of living in an effort to compete in the market. In contrast, the consumers, rather than shareholders, held all decision-making power in consumers’ co-operatives. Furthermore, the consumers’ model provided practical benefits directly to wage workers by purchasing goods in larger quantities, resulting in increased affordability and quality. Although the report did not discuss how those working in consumers’ co-operatives benefit from this model it is notable that, even during the Great Depression, the Hoito paid wages at more than twice the pay of private restaurants, and more than three dollars above the rate of other establishments. [29]

The restaurant operated in accordance with these rules until 1974, when the Hoito came under the full control of the Finlandia Club, with only a few changes. In the late 1920s, the reserve fund amount had been increased to $3000-$5000 and this was again increased in the 1950s to $10,000. Also, in the 1950s voting rights in General Assemblies had been limited only to those with a full-year record of patronage on any matter pertaining to rules, money, or property. The final significant change to the rules prohibited the contribution of any assets to any political organization or towards furthering their aims. [30] The influence of the IWW is again evident, as the union remained skeptical, if not outright hostile, to the notion that political parties or electoral methods could improve the lives of working people. The IWW vision of social change has its basis in the action of workers’ organizations alone, without political intermediaries.

The values of democratic rank-and-file control extended to the management of the restaurant. The manager was to be elected from among the patrons themselves and answerable to the Board of Directors. A.T. Hill was hired as first manager of the Hoito, the first of many union organizers to hold the manager position, receiving a salary of $50 per month. Hanna Hill (apparently no relation to A.T. Hill) was hired as the first head cook of the Hoito Restaurant, earning a monthly salary of $40 per month. The other members of the original Hoito Restaurant staff were Hulda Viertola (Mäki), Eva Taskinen (Nurmi), Hilja Klint, Ventla Haapala, Naimi Oja (Laine), and Saimi Kölövi. Their wages ranged from $30 a month for the cook’s helper to $27 a month for servers and other staff. The Hoito maintained a tradition of including meals in addition to wages for all staff for decades.

The manager traditionally did not interfere much with the day-to-day activities of the staff, particularly in the kitchen, contributing to the development of a fiercely independent, proud, and largely self-managed workforce. Servers and kitchen staff organized their own schedules for their respective areas and regularly brought their concerns forward to the Board of Directors and General Assembly. In the mid-1920s they too joined the IWW, forming a local of the General Recruiting Union. In 1938 the Hoito workers voted on a mandate to strike to enforce a demand for a six day work week, with no reduction in pay, and an eight-hour day on all jobs. However the matter appears to have been resolved without strike action.

The Hoito followed the rhythms of the logging season in its early years. In the late fall and early winter, lumber workers migrated from the city to remote logging camps in droves to begin the work of felling trees and skidding and hauling logs over frozen trails and roads. This would typically be a quiet time for the restaurant. In some years the manager would be laid off for part of the winter season with all administrative tasks jointly managed by the staff and Board of Directors. With the arrival of the spring and the log drive, lumber workers flooded back into the city. The Hoito regularly served between 200 to 300 customers daily who, during the first 15 years of the restaurant, sat at long communal tables that seated 12 people.

The restaurant dealt with its share of troubles thanks to its association with the radical-wing of the Canadian labour movement. In September 1918 – less than five months after the Hoito was established – the Canadian federal government outlawed the IWW along with several other, primarily immigrant, organizations. As the minutes show, the Board of Directors provided loans or collected donations so that their fellow workers who had violated the government ban would be able to secure legal defense. The ban on the union remained in place until 1923. Lumber workers joined the legal One Big Union of Canada (OBU) in the interim, and reflecting this change, the Finnish OBU Support Circle became the majority shareholder of the Finnish Labour Temple in 1920. Large numbers of lumber workers rejoined the Wobblies when the union re-appeared in northern Ontario in 1924, with control of the Labour Temple shifting to the Canadian Industrial Unionist Support League, a Finnish-Canadian IWW support organization. By this time the District of Thunder Bay had become the single-largest stronghold of the IWW movement in Canada.

While each generation has left its distinctive mark on the Hoito, the menu has remained largely unchanged for a century. It represents the culinary embodiment of the “Finglish” dialect spoken in Thunder Bay – a distinct combination of working-class Canadiana with Finnish characteristics – with its origins in the food served in logging camps 100 years ago. As one of the oldest restaurants in Canada “The Hoito”, as it is known to locals, remains a living monument to Finnish-Canadian history, culture, and heritage.

Endnotes

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.
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: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 11.
9 Andrew Neufeld and Andrew Parnaby, The IWA in Canada: the Life and Times of an Industrial Union (Vancouver: IWA Canada/New Star Books, 2000), 8.
10 Donald MacKay, The Lumberjacks (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited, 1978), 8.
11 See Seventh Census of Canada, 1931, Volume II – Population By Areas, 426-427.
12 Ian Radforth, Bushworkers and Bosses: Logging in Northern Ontario, 1900-1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 108.
13 J.P. Bertrand, Timber Wolves: Greed and Corruption in Northwestern Ontario’s Timber Industry, 1875-1960 (Thunder Bay: Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society, 1998), 41.
14 For a summary of the scale of the newsprint industry in Ontario and the political issues related to it see Kuhlberg, In the Power of Government, 297-311.
15 Työkansa, October 13, 1911.
16 The “Lumberjack’s Prayer” has been reproduced multiple times since it was first published in 1920. See for example The Little Red Song Book to Fan the Flames of Discontent, 36th Edition (Ypsilanti: Industrial Workers of the World, 1995), 40-41. For a selection of T-Bone Slim’s other writings see Franklin Rosemont (ed.), Juice is Stranger than Friction: Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1992).
17 See Saku Pinta, “The Wobblies of the North Woods: Finnish Labor Radicalism and the IWW in Northern Ontario” in Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer (eds.), Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 140-167.
18 Ibid.
19 Industrial Union Manifesto, issued by Conference of Industrial Unionists at Chicago, January 2, 3 and 4, 1905: https://www.iww.org/history/library/iww/industrial_union_manifesto.
20 Preamble to the IWW Constitution: https://www.iww.org/culture/official/preamble.shtml.
21 The following biographical details of Nick Viita’s life have been drawn from “Notes from reminiscences of Nick Viita,” recorded by Fred Thompson, Lake Worth Florida, February 1968, included in a letter to Jean Morrison, October 20, 1970; Jean Morrison’s interview notes with Nick Viita (not dated, c. 1972); Industrialisti October 25, 1966; and Chronicle Journal March 14, 1977.
22 For an account of the Work People’s College as an IWW school see Saku Pinta, “Educate, Organize, Emancipate: The Work People’s College and the Industrial Workers of the World,” in Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 45-68.
23 J.J. Carrick and S.A. Marks won the lease to the Black Sturgeon River pulpwood concession in 1916. There is at least one account of a predominantly Finnish logging camp 50 miles up the Black Sturgeon River in 1919. See Kuhlberg, In the Power of Government, 124-125 and MacKay, The Lumberjacks, 222.
24 A.T. Hill, “Historic Basis and Development of the Lumber Workers Organization and Struggles in Ontario,” unpublished manuscript, 1952, 4.
25 Vapaus, April 23, 1968.
26 Jorma Halonen, “Short History of the Hoito,” Thunder Bay Finnish Canadian Historical Society (not dated). See also Marc Metsäranta (ed.), Project Bay Street: Activities of Finnish-Canadians in Thunder Bay before 1915 (Thunder Bay: Finnish Canadian Historical Society, 1989), 212-213.
27 This situation persisted until the Finnish One Big Union Support Circle assumed both the debt and control of the hall in 1919. See Industrialisti, October 13, 1970.
28 See Lakehead University Archives, CTKL fonds, MG10, Box 1, Folder 1. It should be noted that the names listed above are transcribed as they were written on the “comrade loan” receipts, with any further information available following in parentheses.
29 Industrialisti May 16, 1928 and Halonen, “Short History of the Hoito.”
30 Industrialisti May 16, 1928; Industrialisti April 23, 1968; and Halonen, “Short History of the Hoito.”