became an urgent wartime matter. Robert Defries who joined the Antitoxin Lab in 1915 proposed that its operations be expanded to treat Canadian soldiers fighting trench warfare, for "not a fraction of the necessary amount [of tetanus antitoxin] was available". The proposal was quickly approved by the University of Toronto Board of Governors despite the lack of immediate funds, with University President Robert Falconer making an appeal to Prime Minister Robert Borden and the Ottawa administration. Shortly after, whisky magnate and then-Chairman of the Red Cross Society Colonel Albert Gooderham funded an operation to equip the Lab with the capacity to produce a Canadian supply by August 1915. Gooderham had seen a need for anti-toxins against tetanus, which had become an urgent wartime matter for the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He was impressed by the fledgling laboratory's capacity to produce the tetanus antitoxin in controlled conditions and at a lower price than the American sources than the Red Cross had initially contacted. He turned over a 58-acre farm on Dufferin Street north of Toronto for a new production plant on condition that it be named after the Duke of Connaught, then Governor-General of Canada (1911-1916). In February 1916, the Ontario Board of Health began to distribute the Antitoxin Laboratory's products for free across the province. Other provincial governments soon followed suit, starting in Saskatchewan. On October 25, 1917, the expanded lab was inaugurated under its new title, Connaught Antitoxin Laboratories and University Farm. John G. FitzGerald, the Director, was given full authority over the Labs' staff and the Connaught Laboratories Research Fund, which remained autonomous of University finances and supported the development of preventive medicine research. An Honorary Advisory Committee was also established so that Connaught would provide a truly national public health service, appointing representatives of each provincial government health department and the federal government to an annual meeting with FitzGerald. By the end of the war in 1918, the Labs' wounded soldier treatment practices had reduced the rate of tetanus infection to 0.1%, making its anti-tetanus program one of the most successful health campaigns in wartime medicine. That same year, the Spanish flu spread across North America, spread in part through infected soldiers returning from overseas. Connaught swiftly intervened with large quantities of what Robert Defries described as an "experimental" vaccine, freely supplying it to health services and hospitals across the country as well as to several U.S. states