approach of World War II, the company formed a subsidiary in September 1939 called Defence Industries Limited. Cartridge plants were opened on Park Avenue in Brownsburg, Quebec with government funding and the technical assistance of the Dominion Cartridge Company. A cannon shell factory (and the entire nearby town itself) was built at Ajax, Ontario (nicknamed "Dilville"). They opened new plants on the site formerly used by British Cordite in Nobel. The Nobel site employed 4,300 people at its peak, and the company as a whole employed 33,000. On 3 May 1944, a CIL sulfuric acid plant in Sudbury, Ontario was certified as unionized by Mine-Mill Local 598. Because so many working-age men were fighting overseas in the armed forces, these plants employed large numbers of women. At the Ajax DIL plant about 7,000 women filled more than 40 million shells. Post war A great post-war building program geared C-I-L to meet peacetime needs for explosives, paints, agricultural and industrial chemicals, plastics, sporting ammunition and man-made textile fabrics. The Nobel plants were once again closed, and this time sold off to Orenda Aerospace for use in jet engine development. In 1913 the predecessor of CXL had established a dynamite plant on James Island, B.C. off the coast of Vancouver Island and near the town of Sidney, B.C. The plant was later reacquired by CIL and produced explosives until its closure in 1972. Re-organization In 1954 C-I-L was divided into two separate companies in accordance with the ruling of a U.S. court which had ordered E. I. du Pont de Nemours (today's DuPont) to end its joint interests with Imperial Chemical Industries Limited (ICI). Until 2010, C-I-L operated as part of Imperial Chemical Industries. In 2010 ICI was bought by AkzoNobel, a Dutch chemical company. Then in 2014, AkzoNobel's North American architectural coatings division was acquired by PPG Industries and has operated as PPG Architectural Coatings Canada since. The CIL brand is sold in major Canadian retailers Home Depot, Canadian Tire, Walmart and Rona/Réno-Dépôt. In 1976 Industries Valcartier Inc. bought out CIL's commercial cartridge production. This granted them the rights to CIL's popular Dominion, Imperial and Canuck commercial ammunition brands. Another of their manufacturing facilities, the Millhaven Fibres plant, was formerly located in Millhaven, west of Kingston, Ontario. The C-I-L lawn and garden chemical brand was owned by Sure-Gro Inc. of Brantford, Ontario, Canada. Their other brands included Nature Mix, Green Earth,