This series provides detailed information on company administrative, corporate and operational activities. It includes:
- Negotiation documents produced during the merger of founding companies;
- By-laws and other incorporation documents;
- Minutes of directors' meetings;
- Executives' files produced by Stelco's presidents and vice-presidents;
- Annual reports;
- Corporate guidelines, standards and procedures.
The negotiation documents include correspondence written by directors of founding companies, financial statements, lists of stocks, and lists of shareholders, lists of employees, traveler reports, mortgages and agreements. They relate to the history of negotiations and explain why these companies decided to be associated. Of particular interest are traveler reports and prospectus of various smaller steel and iron companies, which describe the state of this industry from the Maritime Provinces to British Columbia between 1908 and 1913 (see volume 693).
By-laws and patent letters dated from 1910 to 1975 include rules of The Steel Company of Canada on the following issues: members' roles and responsibilities, titles and rights, directors' elections and terms of office, officers' appointments and responsibilities, meeting procedures, finances, notice requirements for the board of directors and adoption of By-laws.
The minutes of directors' meetings cover the administrative and operational activities of The Steel Company of Canada and they are dated from 1910 to 1951. The executives' files are significant from a business and political perspective, documenting presidents' or vice president's activities from 1910 to 1980. They include all types of administrative records of a general nature required by the President for daily operations. They relate to a wide variety of operations controlled by the President's office including committees and task forces groups, policies and strategic planning. The main subjects are: contracts with customers, earnings, agreements for coal and coke supplies, expenditures, appropriations and construction of mills, shareholders, dividends, labor relations and labor conditions, strikes, subsidiaries, mining operations, property rights, wages, costs of work, production and capacity, pension and benefits, tariffs, ore and coal transportation, corporate identification program and public relations.
The correspondence and memoranda form the most vital part of this documentation. These documents are very useful for studying the relationship between the company, its clients, its personnel and its unions. The files are arranged by presidents' names and then by alphabetical order. Only few corporate records survived during the period when H. H. Champ, F. H. Whitton and R. Hobson were president of the company (1910-1925). The R. H. McMaster's and H. G. Hilton's office files are more complete (1925-1958). Researchers could also consult the microfilm reels and microfiches. They contain almost all documents produced in the presidents' offices. This series contains all annual reports published by Stelco from 1910 to 1979. They provide a financial summary of the company's activities for each year along with management's analysis of its financial position and future plans. Shareholders to evaluate the company's financial performance used annual reports.
Policies, guidelines and procedures are necessary for companies to operate effectively. This series contains files pertaining to guidelines, standards and procedures that were prepared to determine all major decisions and all activities that took place over the years. The files describe specific standards and terminology employed to express policies in action in day-to-day operations of the organization. Photographs, maps, technical and architectural drawings of this series pertain to Stelco properties, mills and facilities.
This series contains one item of art. It consists of a cartoon illustrating Stelco managers at the Annual Dinner Meeting in 1925 (see volume 784 item 2) and a medal produced by the artist Dora de Pédery-Hunt in 1974 and representing Celia Franca profile.
