The fascinating, scandalous, and true story of Viola MacMillan and the Windfall mining scandal

Viola MacMillan had it all: success, money, and respect. Influence, even. But in 1964, after three decades in the mining industry, one of the most fascinating women in Canadian business history was the central character in one of the country’s most famous stock scandals.

MacMillan, who started out as a prospector in the ’30s, had developed lucrative mines and put together big deals. But she still wanted “a major discovery.” Early in July 1964, shares in Windfall Oil and Mines, a company she and her husband controlled, traded for around 56 cents. Then one day, the stock took off. In the absence of any information from the company about what it had found near Timmins on its claims, rumors and greed pushed the share price to a high of $5.70. MacMillan stayed quiet. Finally, after three weeks, Windfall admitted it had nothing.

So many small investors lost money when the stock crashed that the Ontario government appointed a royal commission to examine what had happened, which led to changes at the Ontario Securities Commission and the Toronto Stock Exchange. Although MacMillan spent a few weeks in prison, she later received a pardon and the Order of Canada.

TIM FALCONER is the author of Bad Singer: The Surprising Science of Tone Deafness and How We Hear Music, which the Globe and Mail named to The Globe 100 Best Books of 2016. He’s also written books on activism, our love-hate relationship with the car, end-of-life ethics, and parenting. Falconer teaches creative nonfiction at the University of King’s College in Halifax, is a faculty editor in the literary journalism program at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and taught magazine journalism at Toronto’s Ryerson University for two decades. A former writer-in-residence at Berton House in Dawson City, he returns to the Yukon as often as he can, but lives in Toronto.

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