HISTORY & OBJECTIVES

After the dissolution of the Improvement District of Ajax, came the formation of the corporation of the Town of Ajax. At about the same time, a group of interested Ajax business people met and realized a need for a Chamber of Commerce within the new Town. The first recorded Executive meeting of the Ajax Chamber of Commerce took place on February 26th, 1955 while the inaugural dinner and charter night was held on October 25th, 1955, in the original Recreation Centre, then called Rotary Hall. On December 8th, 1959, after a one year trial, it was decided that the Industrial Association, on a provisional basis, amalgamate with the Chamber as their Industrial section. It was felt that as a unified body, the two organizations could be far more effective to the Town in every way. Even as far back as 1959, the issue of a first class hotel in Ajax was up for discussion.In and around 1970, after the formation of the Region of Durham, a letter was sent to all members informing them that due to a decline in membership and active involvement, the Executive had decided to disband the Chamber of Commerce.

In 1973, the Chamber was revived and in 1978, was re-chartered as the Ajax-Pickering Board of Trade.

The objectives of the current Board haven’t varied over the decades and continue to focus on its ability to

• Help build the economies of Ajax & Pickering
• Facilitate business and social contact among members
• Maintain useful programs and services for our members
• Serve as the voice of the business communities
• To work in concert with the Economic Development Departments in the development implementation and monitoring of effective strategy.
• Ensure the retention, involvement and growth of the Board’s membership
• Communicate information on topical subjects of interest.
• Enhance involvement with the Canadian and Ontario Chambers

In celebration of our 50th anniversary please continue reading the following editorial by John G. Smith of WordSmith Media Inc.

Taking care of business:
Five decades of a common voice in the Ajax-Pickering Board of Trade
By John G. Smith

Fifty years ago, the maze of Defense Industries Limited buildings in Ajax, Ont. could have been dismissed as relics of war. Their shell-producing assembly lines had fallen silent, and the University of Toronto engineering school that filled the halls in 1945 had graduated the last of its students in 1949.

Many members of the fledgling Ajax Chamber of Commerce, however, saw these aging wooden structures as places to fulfill their dreams.

Indeed, the predecessor of today’s Ajax-Pickering Board of Trade can credit much of its history to the presence of the former DIL facility, and the area’s central geography.

“If you take a compass and you draw a radius of [500 kilometres], with Ajax at the center point, at that time you covered 80 per cent of the Canadian population. That was the centre of the marketplace as far as we were concerned,” says Matt Millar, former president of Drew Chemical and president of the Ajax Chamber of Commerce in 1965.

Other southern Ontario municipalities draw similar maps, but the DIL buildings offered an important difference to many entrepreneurs.

“They could come into an old wartime building, set up their business, pay rent, not worry about heating the building, and get started,” says Bill Parish, Ajax’s mayor from 1958 to 1963. Buildings were available for as little as $2,500 a year. Sewage and water treatment facilities were in place, as was a free heat from the local steam plant. And DIL’s 50 kilometres of railway sidings crisscrossed the newly incorporated town.

“We have all kinds of big industries now, but in the early days it was all kinds of small industries with entrepreneurs who worked day and night,” Parish says, referring to local industrialists such as Bob Thompson who invented such things as a machine that stacked bales of hay. He can still name a litany of those early businesses: Bayly Engineering, Stark Electronics, Atlas Tag, Ajax Textiles, and General Wire and Spring. And he suggests George Finley of the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation, who decided how the buildings could be used, was the true father of the local business community.

Ultimately, it’s the individual members of the board of trade who ensured that the local early business community continued to evolve. They were the ones who had their first meeting over an Oct. 25, 1955 dinner at the town’s original recreation centre. And they were the ones who transformed their dreams into industries and careers.

Some found the transition to the community easier than others.

Millar recalls how he and his new bride left Ireland in 1952 to follow stories of prosperity in Canada. But after nine days on a ship, he arrived in Oshawa only to find that the promise of employment wasn’t guaranteed.

“There was a line-up at the labour office like you wouldn’t believe, because there was a change in models at GM. Workers were getting unemployment insurance,” he recalls.

As luck would have it, he was at the front of that line when a call came in looking for a male secretary who could work nights and weekends on behalf of one of Drew’s traveling salesmen. (The job wasn’t considered to be suitable for women because of the hours.)

Jim Witty of Witty Insurance, a former Durham Region chairman and one-time Mayor of Ajax, bought his family’s first local home on Crawford Drive in Ajax because he couldn’t afford the $13,000 price tag on a house in Pickering.

“I said, ‘There’s no way I’ll ever move to the Town of Ajax. There’s nothing but wartime houses and factories,’” he says, laughing at his thoughts of the area before moving here in 1970s. But the thought indicates how the business community had become well established by that time.

A BUSINESS VOICE

In the five decades since it became the voice of local businesses, the board of trade has lobbied for an array of changes and improvements, such as the introduction of an Enunciator Box to offer a quick link to the local fire department -- a particular necessity because of the wooden design of the DIL factory.

Millar clearly remembers the Friday morning in April 1956 when Drew Chemical burnt to the ground, but the company still managed to find replacement space by the following Monday, including office space above an Ajax tire shop.

Meanwhile, as close as Ajax and Pickering are to Toronto, local phone service is a recent phenomenon. When Witty moved to Ajax in 1970, for example, he needed to pay $108 per month for a Pickering phone number, to let him make local calls to Ontario’s largest municipality.

The board also identified the need to promote the local community as a place to conduct business. Souvenir coins were once handed out at the CNE. And one contingent even went to the famed Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City to present a slide presentation to 50 officials from the Chase Manhattan Bank and Bank of America.

“We felt if we invited the bank people, that would be the better way, because they would have the information for their customers,” Millar says.

Granted, there have been struggles as well as successes. In December 1970, the Ajax Chamber of Commerce actually surrendered its charter because of community apathy. A simple hand-written letter drafted after the final meeting notes how a mere eight to 10 members had been left to conduct a majority of the work.

As it turned out, that was hardly a death sentence. Within three years, 30 local business leaders had gathered in the Hunter’s Horn Restaurant, today’s Second Storey pub on Harwood Avenue, to re-form the group.

“It’s like everything else. Unless you replenish it with new blood, it will die,” says Joe Dickson, a long-time Ajax councilor and founder of Dickson Printing. “The chamber of commerce has grown for 50 years. That two to three years in there was a catch-your-breath stage and regenerate and go on… Once it became ‘Ajax-Pickering,’ there was a new feeling of life to it.”

The re-chartered Ajax-Pickering Board of Trade was established in 1978, and more businesses continued to move into the area, with names such as Volkswagen, Chrysler, Binn’s Kitchens, and Hubbel.

“The purpose of the board, of course, was to expand business, to make business part of the community, have business as an entity work hand in hand with government – especially municipal government,” Dickson says, adding that projects like Ajax Home Week would not be possible without business support.

“You’ve got to put something back into the community where you’re making a living,” Witty agrees, referring to why he went to the 1973 meeting at the Hunter’s Horn, and found himself accepting his first nomination to sit on the board. Local retail businesses led the renewal of the organization, he adds

At its peak, the board of trade boasted 600 members, making it the largest of its kind in the region, but the group was sent reeling in 2001 with news of misappropriation of funds. Still, the business community rallied to save its voice.

“I saw the membership willing to keep it going,” recalls current chairwoman Joan Wideman, referring to the handful of executives who remained, addressing the pressure and shouldering the criticism. “People said, ‘Let’s get back to business.’”

Like the group that met in the Hunter’s Horn restaurant in 1973, they did just that, re-working the organization to run more like a corporation, Wideman says, noting how key local politicians and some of the area’s largest businesses also helped the group evolve. “You better believe [Ontario Power Generation] doesn’t need us as much as we need them. And Veridian.”

“When you have 50 years of business, you have hiccups,” she adds. “How you handle it is how you grow.”

AN EVOLVING WORLD

The growth hasn’t been in the number of businesses, either.

In those five decades, Gestetners have given way to photocopiers and scanners. Dictation systems and Underwood typewriters have been replaced by networks of computers. And while Ajax was founded on a free supply of steam in 1955, much of Pickering’s surge in growth can be linked to the nuclear generation station that was completed in 1973, when it was the largest of its kind in the world.

“When Lenbrook came in 1985, we were surrounded by cornfields,” Wideman recalls from her office in a fully developed industrial park near White’s Road and Hwy. 401. “This was mostly on the outskirts of Scarborough.” Not only did it have space, but the region was connected to the surrounding area thanks to the ribbon of concrete that is the 401.

And local businesses continue to help each other along the way, she says. “I have purchased most of my services in this area because of the board of trade.”

The communities and its board of trade are well positioned for future business as well. Ajax companies now employ just over 23,000 out of 82,000 residents, with the 5,620 manufacturing jobs among them making the community one of the most concentrated manufacturing sectors in the region. Employment growth is expected to double within the next 15 years.

The new Hwy. 401 interchange at Salem Road offers particular hope with its 1,000 acres of business land and industrial park that will soon support a hotel and convention centre. And Loblaw’s has announced plans for an 80,000-square-foot distribution facility on the site.

West in Pickering, the 94,200 existing residents are expected to be joined by another 70,000 people in the next 20 years, including 45,000 new jobs. In 2004 alone, another 1.1 million square feet of business-related floor space was added in the municipality, and 1,000 new jobs went along with it.

“We will attract more business if we have the infrastructure and if we have the service lands,” Wideman says. “You’re not going to find companies coming in and putting in services like they used to…They have to provide good industrial parks where you have fast broadband.”

The expanding businesses community, after all, will need to communicate with the outside world.

And the Ajax-Pickering Board of Trade will be there to offer it a voice.