Stephen J. Thorne, Legion Magazine‘s late senior staff writer, enjoys a visit from the Canadian Veteran Service Dog Unit from nearby White Lake, Ont., at Ottawa’s Legion House in June 2024. [Aaron Kylie]

Remembering Stephen J. Thorne

STORY BY AARON KYLIE

“Stephen?”

“No, I’m Aaron,” I responded to the question from a Legionnaire at a hotel in Saskatoon in September 2025.

But I understood the confusion. After all, Legion Magazine’s senior staff writer Stephen J. Thorne was a regular, covering Royal Canadian Legion events across the country since he joined the publication in 2016. If there was a man with a camera roaming around, there was a good chance it was him.

“Oh, sorry,” said the Legionnaire. The apology, however, felt as though it had double meaning—sorry for the mistake; but also, a tinge of regret that I wasn’t actually Stephen. I get that, too.

After a sudden illness, Stephen died on Dec. 5, 2025, at age 66.

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“We’re always looking back on the Second World War and seeing it as an important time in Canadian history,” said historian Allan Levine, “but this is one story that’s never really been told.”

It has now, however, in the award-winning author’s most recent book The Dollar a Year Men, published by Barlow Books.

Rather than any battle blow-by-blow or front-line testimony, Levine’s narrative largely remains within the confines of Canada at a time when the country needed to mobilize its industry to support the Allied cause. Civil engineer-turned-politician C.D. Howe, then serving as minister of munitions and supply—and nicknamed the Minister of Everything for his far-reaching influence—took on that challenge, enlisting dozens of business leaders from across the country, their task to bring about the “greatest economic metamorphosis” ever experienced in Canada.

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