Hydro Power and Canadian History By Jeet Heer National Post (August 12, 2004) Hydroelectric power haunts the Canadian imagination. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger once described hydroelectric projects as the very essence of modernity, the perfect symbol of humanity's conquest of nature whereby primordial and awesome waterfalls are harnessed for technological ends In Canada, a country richly blessed with freshwater rapids and falls, the romance of hydroelectricity has been a real cultural force for over a century. "Since hydro was at once a triumph of rational scientific progress and a mysterious elemental force, the myth of hydro appealed to both practical and poetic instincts," the historian H.V. Nelles noted in his classic 1974 book The Politics of Development. It may sound strange to speak of "the myth of hydro" yet throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, politicians and pundits frequently used a tone of hushed awe when discussing plans to capture electricity from Niagra Falls. "It is a spectacle second only to the Falls themselves as a mighty manifestation of the works of God upon earth, to walk through one of the great power houses at Niagra…," the military historian Francis Vinton Greene exulted in a speech to the Empire Club in 1905. The hypnotic power of hydro in Canada has been explored by the anthropologist Lionel Tiger, internationally famous for developing the concept of "male bonding". Writing in Canadian Forum in 1965, Tiger amusingly argued that the Social Credit government of W.A.C. Bennett owed its success to its adroit linkage of B.C. Hydro with images of sexual potency. "One of the crucial symbols of Premier Bennett's Government and a major recent reason for his success in his emphasis on hydroelectric power," Tiger asserted. "The turbines and high tension cables suddenly and magically make of rivers and mountains and rain a source of wealth and a reassurance of significance… In B.C. it is a potency symbol on a grand scale which has been promoted and exploited so that it now possesses an almost mystic importance for many." In Quebec earlier this century, Maurice Duplessis regularly won elections with the promise of rural electrification under the rousing slogan "electeurs, electrices, electricite!" Yet the hydroelectric projects that Duplessis encouraged were under private hands. This would change significantly in the 1960s when the Lesage government pushed to make Quebecers the masters of their own electrical domain. "In a deeply symbolic move, the Lesage government seized the commanding heights of the provincial economy from English capitalists by nationalizing the large, private hydroelectric companies," Nelles notes in his new book, A Little History of Canada. "French Canada thus took charge of the largest, most technologically sophisticated organization in the province and set about running it in French." Not only our hopes, but also our fears are tied up in hydroelectric power. In other countries, conspiracy theories cluster around assassination plots and spy agencies like the CIA, MI-6 or the KGB. In Canada, the paranoid are more likely to fret about who controls the engines of electrical wealth. If you lurk in the kookier corners of the internet, you can find cranks arguing that Maurice Strong, the former head of Ontario Hydro, is a key player in "the New World Order." Other theories involve the United Nations using Cree Indians to sabotage the James Bay Project in Quebec, thereby throwing the whole north-east of the continent into darkness and setting the stage for martial law. The "myth of hydro" illustrates a familiar theme, the paramount importance of geography in Canada. The standard quip is that Canada has too much geography and not enough history. It would be more precise to say that in Canada history and geography live on intimate terms, like a couple so long married that they have fused into a single identity. Long before European contact, natives used the rivers of North America as a natural, continent-spanning highway binding together a sprawling commercial network. From that time until now, the landscape has been not just the back-ground to history but an active partner in human endeavors. Given the importance of geography, it is not surprising that the best historians of Canada have had sensibilities akin to landscape painters. In Francis Parkman's work, Indians and French-Canadians fight in a forest as gothic and scary as the woods imagined by J.R.R. Tolkien. Harold Innis re-invented our history by following the trial of fur-trappers while Donald Creighton mapped out the empire of the St. Lawrence. For all these writers, landscape and memory were one. Two new books show the continuing vitality of this tradition of historian-cartographers: H.V. Nelles's A Little History of Canada (already alluded to above) and Matthew D. Evenden's Fish Versus Power: An Environmental History of the Fraser River. As their titles indicate, Nelles offers a sweeping survey while Evenden's work is a more finely textured case study. Nelles, distilling a lifetime of scholarship into a book short enough to read in an evening, uses the theme of "transformation" to bind together the disparate eras of Canadian history. Always in metamorphosis, Canada has gone from being a land of scattered native communities to a French colony to a British imperial dependency to a precariously united nation-state. The idea of transformation becomes focused and energized when Nelles applies it to his area of specialty, showing how the very landscape of the country has been constantly re-made by human intervention. Here is his account of the impact of the "relentless forest exploitation" of the early 19th century: "After logging, forest fires inevitably raged through the discarded limbs and smaller timber left behind. Natural regeneration took generations; quite different tree species rose in succession on the abandoned timber limits. Stripped of its trees the hydrological character of the land changed; rain and snow ran off more quickly; nearby rivers filled with silt. Bark dislodged from logs during the river-drive sank, lining their bottoms with a poisonous anaerobic layer of muck." The beauty of this passage, practically a small poem, derives from a careful deployment of earthy, monosyllabic nouns: limbs, silt, bark, muck. As much as Parkman or Creighton, Nelles is a master of descriptive prose; fans of comic portraiture will want to look up his wicked description of Diefenbaker. The environment looms equally large in Evenden's work, a study of the conflicting claims made by the salmon fishery and hydroelectric power in British Columbia. Cagily, Evenden approaches the story of hydroelectric power from a fresh angle, looking as it were at a dog that didn't bark. Unlike almost every other major river in Canada, the Fraser River remains undammed, although developers saw it as an alluring target for many years. As the book argues, the preservation of the Fraser owes much not only to regional political factors but also the rising prestige of science. Unlike many other environmental histories, Evenden's book offers a relatively hopeful tale, one where a balance between technological progress and preservation is struck. The salient lesson of his book is that even large-scale technological change remains subject to human control. Massive hydroelectric projects may seem as intimidating as a force of nature, yet it is always in our power to reject or tame them.