Defence Industries Limited was a subsidiary of Canadian Industries Limited, founded in 1939 to manufacture munitions for use in World War II. The company operated in number of locations in Canada, and built a large factory in the Township of Pickering, Ontario, Canada, along with nearby housing which grew into the town of Ajax.
History
Explosives manufacture
C-I-L set up DIL in September, 1939, and arranged a contract with the Canadian government to operate two small plants which manufactured TNT and cordite. In 1940 the Canadian government's Department of Munitions and Supply contracted DIL to refurbish the defunct British Munitions factory in Verdun, Quebec for the manufacture munitions. The plant began operations in May of 1941. By 1943 the company had constructed about 40 more buildings at the site. In 1941 DIL also set up a facility in Windsor, Ontario to manufacture carbamite, a component of cordite; other explosive components were manufactured in Beloeil, Shawinigan, Quebec, Nobel, Ontario and Winnipeg Manitoba.
Shell-filling
DIL set up facilities in St. Paul l'Hermite and Ste Thérèse, Quebec, to fill shells with explosives. The company purchased 3,000 acres of farmland in Pickering Township, Ontario for the purpose of building a large munitions factory. Construction began, and the DIL plant was opened in 1941. It employed about 9,000 people, including about 7,000 women, and was the largest munitions production factory in the British Empire. By the end of the war the workers had filled more than 40 million percussion caps, detonators, bombs, anti-tank mines, armour-piercing and anti-aircraft shells. Although the houses built for the DIL employees were intended to be temporary, after the war the occupants petitioned to buy them, and, after permanent foundations were built, the homes became part of a new town, which was named Ajax after HMS Ajax, a light cruiser of the Royal Navy during World War II.
DIL's Montreal and Brownsburg plants made small arms. In Cornwall the company manufactured mustard gas.
Post-war
As World War II drew to a close, most of the DIL plants were shut down. DIL was contracted by the federal government to co-ordinate the construction and operation of Chalk River Laboratories, a pilot plant for the production of plutonium using heavy water as a moderator, which was being built in northern Ontario as part of the Manhattan Project. Temporary houses from DIL's plant in the town of Nobel were moved to the area, creating a new town, Deep River, to house the workers. In 1947, operation of the partially completed facility was taken over by the National Research Council; a number of DIL employees were hired by the NRC to provide continuity in the process. DIL continued to oversee construction in progress.
