The Hoito

The Hoito Restaurant is a Finnish-Canadian restaurant in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada established in 1918 and housed in the bottom floor of the historic Finnish Labour Temple. The Hoito has operated continuously on 314 Bay Street, in the historic Bay & Algoma neighbourhood, for 98 years and is perhaps the oldest co-operatively owned and operated restaurant in Canada.BeginningsThe name "Hoito" is Finnish for the word "care". The idea for the restaurant came about in a logging camp outside Nipigon, Ontario. IWW union organizer A.T. Hill had come to organize the camp into the union and promote the new Finnish-Canadian socialist newspaper Vapaus (Freedom). After winning some improvements in the camp, the workers expressed a concern that while being able to find cheap accommodation in the city of Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay), they were unable to find reasonably priced, home-cooked meals. The request to open a co-operative restaurant was taken to the board of directors of the Finnish Labour Temple and approved. 59 people pooled their money together in the form of 5-dollar “comrade loans”. Union organizer A.T. Hill was chosen as the restaurant’s first manager.For several decades, workers in the restaurant belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union and later to the Canadan Teollisuusunionistinen Kannatusliitto (CTKL or Support League of Canadian Industrial Unionists), the Finnish section of the union, and not, as is often mistaken, to the Communist Party of Canada. The IWW was active in the bushcamps in Northwestern Ontario primarily among Finnish-Canadian bushworkers, and effectively operated as a radical alternative to their rivals in the communist-led unions. The Finnish Labour Temple itself was the Canadian administration for the IWW for a number of years.