During the 1960s and 1970s, it was the most powerful and best known conglomerate in Canada,[1] at one time controlling the companies making up 10 percent of all shares traded daily on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Among these were Dominion grocery stores, Orange Crush soft drinks, Massey Ferguson farm machinery, Domtar wood products and Carling O'Keefe breweries.

[citation needed] Argus was founded as an investment holding company in 1945 by E. P. Taylor[3] with minority partners Colonel W. Eric Phillips, Wallace McCutcheon, Bud McDougald, and other less influential investors.

In the 1970s, it controlled large companies including Canadian Breweries Limited, Dominion Stores,[6] Hollinger Mines,[6] Crown Trust, Domtar,[6] Standard Broadcasting[6] and Massey Ferguson,[6] as well as at some point or other having control or significant shareholdings in other Canadian companies such as Dominion Malting Co., Orange Crush Ltd., British Columbia Forest Products Limited and the St. Lawrence Corporation, a wood pulp processor.

[7] The company's importance was so great that when Paul Desmarais of the Power Corporation of Canada attempted, but later failed, to acquire Argus, the federal government of Pierre Elliot Trudeau responded by creating the Royal Commission on Corporate Concentration in 1975, which is held to be a token of the influence of the Desmarais clan over the affairs of the nation.