Business View Magazine Feb 2023

210 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 2 any years ago, the Cree people settled on the shore of a bend in the river. That is the meaning of Kapuskasing in Cree, “bend in the river.” It would not be until the turn of the century, 1900 when the Bureau of Colonization of the Ontario Department of Agriculture sent parties to survey the region north of the Canadian Pacific Railway between the Quebec border and Lake Nipigon. Their main interest was to seek out new farming regions – but what they found were trees, and Kapuskasing became a lumber town. Kapuskasing was founded in 1911 after the National Transcontinental Railway, the forerunner of the Canadian National Railway, was built throughout the area. Kapuskasing lies in the heart of an area of Northern Canada called the Great Clay Belt – it is a beautiful but rugged landscape: very flat, with numerous small lakes and muskeg bogs, and Boreal Forest. All the rivers here drain North to James Bay instead of East to the Atlantic or West to the Pacific. The district is heavily forested, mostly by thick stands of black spruce that have commercial value as pulpwood. M