CANADA: Billion-Dollar Empire

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Model Towns. The old town of Blind River is neither equipped nor located to house and supply the 8,000 to 10,000 workers and families who will be needed when the mines and mills are all at work. For the families of the 2,000 miners who will go to work for Algom and Consolidated Denison, the Ontario government has set aside a lakeside site of 396 square miles for the new town of Elliot Lake, within easy commuting distance of the mines. The mines will be taxed to support the schools, hospitals and public agencies of Elliot Lake. The townsite has already been carefully zoned, should begin to materialize by 1956.

Algom, unable to wait, moved into Elliot Lake this year, and began building bachelor dormitories for its construction workers, can convert them later into apartments for families. "If uranium proves to be a long-range proposition," said one of Elliot Lake's planners, "we see no reason why this town shouldn't grow to 20,000." For Pronto's executive and professional staff Hirshhorn put up a community of ultramodern ranch houses along the shore of Lake Lauzon.

Hirshhorn also has drawn tentative plans for a second new model town along the shore of Lake Huron's Bootlegger's Bay. Hirshhorn stipulated, however, that his town will be built only if Blind River fails to provide essential services (schools, water and sewage systems, etc.).

So far, Blind River has not let Hirshhorn's proposition deter it from the more immediate business of making a fast boomtown buck. The town council turned down a plan for a general tax reassessment to provide revenue for urgently needed public improvements; all the improving underway is motivated by the familiar old law of supply and demand. Two of the town's hotels have built or are planning to build more bedrooms. Menard's department store, whose basement is given over to the only undertaking establishment in town, has prospered enough to plan a separate $30,000 funeral parlor.

On Saturday nights the improvised jail in the cellar of the Masonic Hall is often too small for the traffic (maximum thus far: 22 inmates, mostly overnight drunks). So far the town has attracted only transient prostitutes. "A couple of weeks back, two good-looking women drove into town in a big Cadillac," reported Police Chief Leo Trudeau. "They had one price for the motel and one for the use of the Cadillac, but they stayed on just long enough to do a fast business, and moved on before we got to them." Busiest of the boom enterprises is a broker's office (a branch of a Toronto firm), where residents have begun dab bling with growing enthusiasm in the stock market. One staff geologist at Pronto has made $100,000 tax-free in two months investing in uranium stock, and the town is full of taxi drivers, store clerks, and even high-school students who have parlayed modest stakes into four-and five-figure bankrolls. One of the brokerage offices' steadiest customers, Joe Hagger, sold his restaurant in order to play the market full time, recently built a new $30,000 house, and now plans to open a new business — Blind River's first pawn shop. "I know it will be lucrative," says he.