Accession consists of textual records including minutes, correspondence, memoranda, reports, financial records, registers and publications, as well as artwork, architectural and technical drawings and photographs, created during the day-to-day business operations of The Confederation Life Insurance Company, Toronto, Ontario. Film and video cassettes (moving images) and sound recordings have been entered in the Mikan system as Accession Record #87526 having been assigned BAN number 1997-02275-3. With the concurrence of the media archivists involved, these three media records were eliminated from the Manuscript Division's Accession record 28550.
Architectural drawings of various Confederation Life Insurance Company head offices in Toronto, Ontario.
In general the photographs concentrate either on the company's employees, or on the company's buildings -- particularly the Toronto headquarters. Building photographs are concerned primarily with (a) models/plans/maquettes (b) construction exterior views (c) interior views of public spaces within the office buildings. While there are naturally many shots of company officers and senior management, the number of photographs of employees -- at conferences or conventions, annual meetings, or at company-sponsored events -- is quite high as a proportion of all photographs. There are, however, relatively few photographs of employees at work in the work-place; and there are relatively few photographs of operations outside of Toronto. The life-insurance industry was one of the first commercial areas to use computers, and there are several files which are concerned with the implantation of computers at CLI. As a Centennial project CLI commissioned Rex Woods and other painters to create images of events in Canadian history; a number of files are related to these works -- primarily their showing in gallery spaces; there are also four colour-shifted film strips covering the entire series.
The photography was acquired with the textual and other documentation from an area which had been identified as "archival materials", rather than being acquired from a known source such as the Public Relations, Internal Publications, or other areas of the company. The reasons for the existence of the photography therefore can be imputed only from internal evidence.
Many of the photographs from the post-war period -- particularly those relating to building construction, activities at CLI's Toronto headquarters, conventions and annual meetings and the like -- were evidently taken by contract photographers; many prints are stamped with the photographers' names. Some series, such as those relating to Presidents, Directors and other CLI Officers, include the earliest photographs found in the collection, although many of these are copy prints. There are, however, some original 19th century prints: indeed, one carte-de-visite portrait by Toronto photographer Elihu Palmer of the company's founding president John Kay MacDonald pre-dates Confederation. Pre-World War II photographs and many of those showing employees activities were taken by a variety of unknown hands, as many of these are snapshots. The largish number of panorama photographs were, of course, all taken by professional photographers; many of these pre-date the War.
Artwork consists of drawing of the newest Confederation Life Building, interior plan drawings, and architectural design drawings dated 1992, all by John Izod. Accession also consists of reproductions of Courier Co. Buffalo N.Y., W.D. Hutson & Sons, Roofers Toronto, ca. 1894/97 ?, a wood engraving of Cheney's Foundry, Toronto 1840, and colour reproductions of drawings of architectural details.
Accession consists of 40 m of textual records (112 PANL boxes) containing correspondence, memoranda, registers, financial records, publications and printed material created by the Confederation Life Insurance Company (formerly Confederation Life Association).
