Mapping Fuel Use in Canada: Exploring the Social History of Canadians’ Great Fuel Transformation

R. W. Sandwell

In the early twenty-first century, as people around the world take in the unwelcome news from scientists about both the limited supply of cheap fossil fuels and the surprisingly virulent impact that large-scale burning of these fuels is having on the global environment, we are being reminded on a daily basis of the deep connections between our everyday lives – particularly the energy systems that provide us with heat, light, power, water, waste disposal, and food – and the larger social and material environments within which we live. At the same time that the limited supply and huge environmental costs of these “new” (in terms of massive human consumption) sources of power become ever clearer in the present, their profound (indeed ‘cyclonic’1) role in Canada’s social, political, economic and environmental history is emerging with more coherence and force. For if, as now seems possible, the twentieth century will appear in the historical record as both the first and the last Age of Abundant Energy, our heightened awareness about the role of fossil fuels past, present, and future is going to have profound implications for the ways in which historians see and analyze what used to be thought about as ‘progress,’ ‘industrialization,’ ‘urbanization,’ and ‘modernity.’

This chapter is part of a larger study that seeks to provide the first nation-wide look at the varied relationships between energy use and the practices of everyday life for rural and urban Canadians in the first half of the twentieth century. Much of that research draws on a broad range of sources – oral histories, personal diaries and memoirs, newspapers, educational materials, census data, and advertising and company records (particularly complaint files of utility companies) – to document the ways in which Canadians understood and responded to the new fuels that they were bringing into their homes and farms. Much of that work is devoted to explaining the wide range of supply- and demand-sided problems that influenced the slow adoption of the new fuels in the home. This chapter, however, has a much more specific purpose. It presents my reflections about learning to use spatial data and spatial thinking to explore the relationship between people, place, and energy in Canadian history. More specifically, it offers some suggestions about how and why HGIS might help us understand how new forms of energy and power transformed daily life in place-specific ways. And finally, it draws on the preliminary stages of my own research into electricity to provide some examples of what an HGIS-informed social history of energy might look like.

HGIS has given spatial thinking a boost in recent years, allowing historians to more easily manipulate and compare map-able visual data that is linked to large data sets, such as census data. HGIS has played an important role in allowing geographical data to move beyond the merely descriptive to take on a clearer explanatory edge than is usually found in historians’ work, outside of environmental history at least. The attention to space and place has been particularly welcome in my social history of fuels and energy project, even though, unlike most history GIS projects, my research looks beyond a small geographic focus on a river valley, a city, a county, or a region to examine the entire country over half a century or more.2 Like other HGIS projects, however, this portion of my research involved a steep learning curve about using the technology, a process made even more difficult because the professionally accepted computer program for creating HGIS maps is definitely not (based on the experience of myself and other historians) user-friendly. To make things worse for this researcher, it is not available for Macintosh computers. Difficult as it was learning to make use of ArcGIS software, I would not have been able to do any HGIS work without guidance and assistance from a collaborative team of students and professionals over a number of months, particularly geography students Jordan Hale (who entered volumes of data into a database) and Sarah Simpkin (who used the data to create the maps that appear in this chapter), and University of Toronto GIS and map librarian Marcel Fortin, who oversaw much of the work. Marcel generously donated his time to this project, and SSHRC provided the funding for my students. And this project would not have been possible without the considerable lengthy and painstaking work carried out by the SSHRC-funded Canadian Century Research Infrastructure Project. This project, via Byron Moldofsky, provided the GIS co-ordinates for 1941 and 1951 Census Divisions that allowed me to map the census-division level data for the entire country.3 Finally, this project shared with other HGIS research an element of risk; historians characteristically do not know the outcome of their research before they embark on it, and research questions most often emerge through or are clarified in the process of the research itself.4 HGIS, therefore, requires an unusual ‘up front’ investment in the time and money attendant on collaborative research, and research dependent on highly sophisticated and expensive technologies. There is no guarantee that it will, in the end, be “worth” the investment.

This chapter will tentatively suggest that for this project the investment has paid off. HGIS has certainly played a role in increasing my historical understanding of the importance of place to the social and the environmental history of fossil fuels and hydroelectricity in Canada. It has done this, on one level, by simply drawing attention to the spatially specific factors involved in energy use across the country. By relating the extraction, processing, transportation or transmission, and the consumption of these fuels to particular places, however, HGIS also sharpens and deepens our understanding of how place, space, and local environments have influenced the profound social transformations of the twentieth century, just as surely as social and cultural changes in fuel use have continued to transform the environment. This research suggests that the mapping and layering of census data over time and through space that HGIS allows can provide an additional, powerful tool of description and analysis for the social historian.

Background: Towards a Social History of Fossil Fuels and Hydroelectricity

Historians have long explored the development of new forms of energy, albeit typically with more of an emphasis on the new technologies and the professional, economic, and technological systems within which they developed than on the fuels themselves.5 Following trends in other countries, Canadian historians are now taking tentative steps towards a more explicit history of energy in Canada.6 Canadian social histories of the impact of changing energy use in the first half of the century remain scarce, however. An important spate of research and writing in the 1980s and ’90s linked women’s changing domestic role to larger changes in Canadian society via the ‘modernized’ household. But aside from Joy Parr’s important work on the post-war period, there has been little published recently that explicitly explores the ways in which the new forms of fuel transformed the relationships within families and between families and the larger Canadian society in the 1900 to 1950 period.7 Evidence is compelling, however, that changing energy consumption in Canadian homes, though occurring long distances from the production of the new fuels and in tiny household-sized consumption units was indeed significant to the ‘big picture’ of energy consumption: whereas industry consumed the lion’s share of energy produced in Canada for many decades, buildings (residential and commercial) are now estimated to be responsible for over a third of all power use and therefore greenhouse gas emissions in Canada.8 And compelling evidence suggests that changes in domestic energy use were directly and indirectly related to broadly based social, economic, cultural, and political change across the country in the twentieth century.

To give just one example of the relationship between energy use in the home and broad social change, Emanuela Cardia has used econometric data from the 1941 census in the United States to suggest a strong correlation between running water in the home and women’s workforce participation; she suggests that women’s work within the home was simply too labour-intensive without running water for women to be able to leave the home to take on paid work.9 My own research into Canadian households suggests a similar correlation between oil heating and women’s work outside the home; it was not until thermostatically controlled (automated) oil furnaces replaced wood (and to a lesser extent coal) that houses could be left empty for more than a few hours in the winter without bringing on the fairly serious consequences attendant on the fire going out. While historians may disagree about the pace, origins, and exact consequences of changing energy use within North American homes, there is little disagreement that changes in fuel use were related to the ‘modernization’ of the family and of Canadian society as a whole throughout the twentieth century.10

As Canadians contemplate what the ‘post-carbon world’ of the future is going to look like, there is good reason for historians to look again, and through the lens of fossil fuel and hydroelectricity use, at areas of social history already explored through the lenses of cultural history, the history of the family, and gender studies, from the rise of mass consumerism and urbanization to women’s emergence in the twentieth century as the non-productive consuming housewife, to the implications of women’s full-scale proletarianization by the late twentieth century. For these twentieth century phenomena are inseparable from both the new kinds of energy used at home as well as at work. My current research, “Heat Light and Work in Canadian Homes 1900–1950: A Social History of Fossil Fuels and Hydro-electricity” seeks to address this lacunae in Canadian history.

Spatializing Fuel and Energy

How can the spatial evidence from the past – evidence that HGIS (and of course the electricity that powers this historical method or practice11 ) now makes available to and workable by historians – shed light on the great transformation in domestic energy use that arguably comprises one of the most significant changes of the twentieth century? Fossil fuels and hydroelectricity,12 after all, are perhaps distinguished most clearly from other forms of household fuel by their near-invisibility, particularly when compared to the materiality of and labours involved in (for example) finding, storing, cutting, and burning wood. Coal more closely resembles wood as a fuel, but the experience of using oil or gas or electricity in the home differs significantly from the household fuels of an earlier time: no one, quite literally, knows exactly where the natural gas that automatically heats our homes and fuels our stoves comes from, and few understand even approximately how it ends up there. Electricity, being pure energy, doesn’t even have a substance or form to it, so how can it be said to have a spatial dimension? On a more practical level, householders, previously completely responsible for bringing fuels into the home and managing their use themselves, are now warned against, and sometimes legally prohibited from, customizing or even repairing modern furnaces and stoves; handling the fuels that these appliances consume can be highly dangerous. Within the contours of daily life today, it is almost as if these fuels come from nowhere specific, no particular place at all.13 If hydroelectricity and some fossil fuels (particularly oil and natural gas) have qualities that render them almost invisible at the level of daily household experience, theorists argue that a defining characteristic of fossil fuels (including coal) is their ability, as uniquely concentrated and extremely valuable sources of power, to be transported long distances. As a result, fossil fuels and hydroelectricity are the first fuels that have allowed us, as a species, to successfully transcend our local environments for the first time.

Allowing people to transcend the local may be the single most important innovation brought about by fossil fuel and hydroelectricity, but it is a spatial anomaly so familiar to twenty-first-century Canadians that its significance is easy to miss. As Christopher F. Jones recently explained, drawing on the work of E. A. Wrigley, there have been two kinds of economies in the world: the remarkable new Mineral Economies (based on fossil fuels, and including hydroelectricity) and the Organic Economies that preceded them.14 They differ in two significant ways. In pre-fossil-fuel Organic Economies, all of the energy in human lives comes from the direct capture of solar energy: people and their animals live and work by eating sun-powered plants and animals, and by using the muscle power these sustain to find and burn the wood (also a direct product of solar energy) that provides the energy needed for cooking and heating. Land and energy are directly linked; energy use is limited by the carrying capacity of the land. In more densely populated areas, this means that choices must be made about whether land should be used to grow fuel in the form of wood or be used for food. Furthermore, in an Organic Economy, the energy sources available (like wood) are bulky and typically expensive to transport, while “the power from wind or falling water could not be transported at all; the energy from a water wheel had to be used at the river bank and wind was only useful in those places where it blew regularly.”15 Because of these two factors – the limited carrying capacity of the land and the expense of transporting bulky fuel sources – Organic Economies tend to be self-sufficient in, and relatively small consumers of, energy.

A Mineral Economy has very different characteristics. Even though fossil fuels were originally the product of solar energy, vast amounts of time and geological forces have transformed that organic matter into a uniquely dense, uniquely efficient, form of mineral energy:

Fossil fuels represent massive stocks of energy available for immediate use rather than the direct capture of solar energy flows. And the high energy density of fossil fuel deposits justifies investing in infrastructure to transport energy long distances, thereby separating sites of energy production and consumption. Energy use is no longer necessarily local or limited.16

The implications of this transcendence for Canadian societies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were myriad and profound. At the level of economic development, fossil fuel sources allowed industries to locate where the availability of the labour force, or materials for production, or transportation routes were the most favourable, rather than where sources of energy could be found. Manufacturing and transportation expanded rapidly as a result, and with them the Canadian economy as a whole. Resource extraction also became vastly more extensive and profitable: with hydroelectricity and fossil fuels available, mines became safer and exponentially more productive due to lighting, fans, motors, and pumps. Pulp and paper mills could be located in remote areas of the Canadian Shield closer to the pulp resource (a.k.a. spruce trees) and production boomed. Gasoline-powered bulldozers could quickly build roads and railroads that allowed fossil-fuel-powered trucks and trains to transport Canada’s resource wealth out of its industrial rural areas to global markets and to bring workers (seasonal, part-time, or full-time) and the food and other goods needed to support them into extraction zones.

Using HGIS to map the growth of the number and extent of the conduits by which fossil fuels and hydroelectricity were generated and moved through Canadian landscapes could potentially deepen our understanding of the geographies of Canada’s economic growth as well as its settlement – and its ‘unsettlement’ or ghost town – history. Finding ways to map increasing fossil fuel and hydroelectric use opens up an important dimension to our understanding of their impact on economic development and the social and cultural changes associated with that. It also opens up the potential of understanding the impact of the production and transportation of fuels on particular environments or locations.

Mapping Sites of Production and Transport

There are other important spatial dimensions to fossil fuel and hydroelectric generation and transmission resulting from their particularly efficient, easily transportable nature. In allowing people to divorce energy sources from other land uses, the new fuels have also allowed the unprecedented exploitation of land for a single purpose – the extraction of a particular mineral, the flooding of land for a hydroelectric dam, or monocropping of a particular valuable vegetable commodity. With the relationship between land, population, and energy fractured by the import of energy sources, people were free to destroy any particular environment, and with it the possibility of sustainable ecologies and communities. Landscapes of destruction that characterize so much of rural Canada, for example, must be counted as part of the ‘fall out’ of fossil fuel use. As Joy Parr has already shown, simply mapping these areas sacrificed to industrial development offers an interesting counter-narrative to Canada’s journey from ‘colony to nation.’17 Far from transcending place, therefore, or erasing the local, fossil fuels and hydroelectricity have allowed the creation of very particular kinds of places, narrowly focussed on particular kinds of activities that are of benefit to people a long way from the sites of production and often profoundly destructive to the local land and peoples.

Although they may be transported to almost anywhere with relative ease, fuels do in fact come from a particular place, and they do travel through particular places. This is particularly clear to the people who live in or near such places. The extraction of fossil fuels, like the generation of hydroelectricity (as well as most types of mining and forestry) is typically accompanied by more or less catastrophic consequences to those environments. A number of historians are studying the political and technological complexities involved in establishing new systems of power in Canada and are emphasizing the devastating impact that these new forms of power have had on the local environments and the human communities (indigenous and immigrant) from which they originate and which they travel through.18 They are examining the pollution attendant on the extraction and processing of coal, oil, and gas as well as the resulting habitat destruction and danger to fish and animals, including human beings. The oil sands of Alberta, oil and gas processing plants, and both coal and uranium mines are already providing rich sources of evidence about the environmental and social impact of fuel production on local places.19 Other historians are examining the massive altering of ecosystems following in the wake of hydroelectric dam construction and the attendant flooding required to get the appropriate year-round flows of water needed to turn the turbines. Others are working to understand the impact of building and maintaining transmission lines on local environments, including, most recently, studies of the impact on local human, animal, bird, and fish populations of Agent Orange and other pesticides used, it turns out, by the hydro companies to control plant growth under the lines.20 Joy Parr’s recent work, noted above, has made significant contributions to our understanding of the social, cultural, and environmental contexts of the systems of modernity in the post-war period, including domestic electrification, nuclear power, the militarization of rural landscapes, and the “lostscapes” created by industrial mega-projects.21 Mapping the time of the extension of the routes by which fossil fuels were created and transported to, from, and through Canadian landscapes, when linked with time series of data about industrial development, environmental devastation, and settlement, will provide an important addition to our understanding of the link between energy production, economic activity, environmental destruction, and sustainable communities in rural Canada.

Mapping Sites of Consumption

Locating the production, extraction, processing, and the transportation of fuels and energy in space and over time – ‘spatializing’ fuels and energy – provides a deeper understanding of the intricate and vital relationships among individuals, communities, and particular places or environments, relationships which change drastically with changing fuel use. What can spatializing electricity consumption add to our understanding of the social history of the early twentieth century?

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the introduction of electricity into homes and public spaces was heralded as a wondrous phenomenon, filled with fantasy, magic, and mystery. From early on, it was predicted to provide labour-saving devices that would be very useful for the homemaker in particular. While historians have been suitably skeptical of early-twentieth-century boosters’ extravagant claims about the ‘dawn of the new day’ that would be ushered in by electricity, they nevertheless widely acknowledge that domestic electrification was an important component of the modernization, most particularly industrialization and urbanization, used to characterize change in Canadian society in the first half of the century.22 Statistics documenting electricity use confirm this national trend.

As Fig. 12.1 illustrates, the number of Canadian households with electrical service grew substantially between 1921 and 1951, more than tripling from over 830,000 to just under three million households.

Fig. 12.2 confirms the general trend of increasing electrification, but highlights as well the considerable differences amongst the provinces in the number of households (“domestic lighting customers”) with lighting. By cross-linking published census data about the number of households in Canada, and Central Electrical Stations’ information about the number of residential customers, we see that the differences amongst provinces were not simply the result of total population. While the proportion of households with electric lighting increased in every province, raising the national average from under 50 percent in 1921 to almost 90 per cent in 1951, Figure 12.3 illustrates that the proportion of households with electricity in each province varied widely: while almost half of Canadian homes had electricity by 1921, fewer than a third of those in Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Saskatchewan had electrical service by that date Even in 1951, when Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia were approaching 100 per cent domestic electrification, fewer than a third of households in Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island, and more than a third in Alberta were still without electricity supplied by central power stations.

There were also significant differences within the provinces between rural and urban households. Figure 12.4 documents very low rates of farm household electrification across the country before the 1940’s, compared to the national average. Rates of farm electrification grew slowly before the Second World War, with only 19% of farm households equipped with electric lighting by 1941, as compared to 65% of all households in the country. Though the rate of farm electrification more than doubled in the next decade, by 1951 still only half of farm households were ‘electrified’. Fig. 12.5 draws on detailed census comparisons of farm, rural non-farm and urban households available in the 1941 census to illustrate differences in electric lighting, electric and gas cooking, and inside running water available to these different groups.

While graphs do a good job of documenting the regional variations, and the differences that existed amongst farm, non-farm and urban households, the level of complexity that it is possible to convey with a graph has probably been reached when documenting change across nine provinces and four dates. With HGIS, however, it is possible to provide much more detail in a comprehensible way. The three pairs of maps, Figures 12.6 to 12.11 use census data, aggregated by electoral district in 1941 and reported in the Census of Housing that year to map key variations amongst households across the country. The fist pair of maps illustrates striking differences relating to household electrification across the country for each of farm and non-farm households. The comparison between farm (12.6) and non-farm (12.7) households provides a clear, highly detailed, overview of the difference that living on a farm made to household electrification.

Figures 12.8 and 12.9, maps showing the percentage of dwellings with running water, similarly document (in considerably more detail than graphs can accommodate) differences both across the country, and between urban and rural, in the prevalence of homes with running water.

As late as 1941, most farms were not located on municipal water systems, and lacked the electricity needed to pump water from the local sources of water on which they relied. While some farms had hand pumps inside the house, most did not; instead, they continued to depend on the age-old practice of carrying water into the house in a bucket. This was typically the work of women and children. Figures 12.10 and 12.11 document the different percentages of farm and non-farm dwellings that had all four of the ‘conveniences’ associated with the ‘fully modern’ house: radio, automobile, telephone, and electric vacuum cleaner. Once again, both the extent of regional variation across the country and the differences between farm and non-farm are striking.

These maps identify in space-specific detail a key element in the history of residential electrification in Canada and one that demands explanation. The explanation lies in the combination of the particular qualities of electricity with the geography of Canadian settlement. Electricity, whether generated by fossil fuels or water, shares fossil fuel’s general, distinctive characteristic of being an energy source efficient enough to warrant transportation over long distances. But electricity has other spatial characteristics that limit where it travels and which have a profound impact on how and why it was (and is) consumed – notwithstanding what seems, at first glance, to be its decidedly insubstantial nature. Perhaps the most unusual of these qualities is that electricity is not only able to be transported cheaply, it must be transported constantly – the electrons must flow – in order for electric energy to exist at all. Because electrical current cannot be stored, it must be consumed as it is generated or be wasted. Creating electricity, particularly when it is generated by means of water power, necessitated the building and maintenance of, and co-ordination amongst, a great many complex machines, wires, and systems. The North American electrical grid, indeed, has been called the world’s biggest machine, and it may be the most important for creating the world in which we now live.23 In spite of all the rhapsodizing of electricity boosters in the first half of the twentieth century about the modernizing benefits of electrification, one of its most unusual qualities was (and is) the unprecedented scale and integration of construction, generation, and distribution of this form of power, particularly when it comes from water. As historian Harold Platt put it, “Unlike any previous method of supplying light or power, generating electricity involved a highly interdependent and integrated system. Every one of its several complex components had to be in perfect balance with all the others to maintain an electrical current.”24 The light bulb or electrical appliance visible to the consumer, therefore, “formed only one part of a symmetrical system that included prime movers, dynamos, regulators, measuring and safety devices, distribution wires, and appliances, all working in instant harmony.”25

In practice, ensuring “instant harmony” meant that, more so than any other product being consumed in the twentieth century, electrical power was profoundly influenced by economies of scale; without a critical mass, production was uneconomical, and transmission was impossible. When, in 1922, the Dominion Bureau of Statistics noted that British Columbia had an unusually large proportion of electrical customers, they did not explain this simply by reference to the province’s abundant supply of relatively cheap hydroelectric power in itself. Instead, they found the explanation in British Columbia’s unusual clustering of population in the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island.26 Although British Columbia was not the most urban province, placing well behind Ontario and Quebec in the first half of the century,27 it did have 41 per cent of its population concentrated in the Lower Mainland and Victoria urban areas. And, significantly, both of these areas were served by the British Columbia Electric Railway Company’s urban transit system, which, along with the cities’ street lighting systems, demanded the production of massive amounts of hydroelectric power.28 The other two provinces with the highest rates of electrification were, however, the most urbanized. Three factors, in sum, made Ontario, Quebec, and B.C. ‘electrify’ earlier and more thoroughly than the other provinces: a large concentration of population, the existence of massive industrial consumers provided by electric street lighting and electric railways within and between cities, and a power company with a monopoly (or virtual monopoly). These were key supply-related factors in the adoption of electricity by domestic customers.29

Before discussing in more detail the difficulties that Canada’s vast spaces presented to electricity companies, it is important to note at the outset that the sale of electricity to residential users was dwarfed by sales to such major industrial consumers – not only electric railways and street lighting, but also factories, mills (particularly pulp and paper), mines and smelters – which consumed most of the electricity produced and accounted for most of the profits on a per-customer basis across Canada.30 In 1933, when national statistics on comparative consumption first became available, the 1.4 million residential customers that year consumed 1.6 million kilowatt hours of electricity, while just under 49,000 industrial customers across the country (3 per cent of the total) were consuming almost ten times the total residential amount, at more than 10 million kilowatt hours.31 In 1941, residential consumption of electricity comprised only 9 per cent of all electricity consumed, but residential customers generated almost a quarter of the revenue for electrical companies. Even by 1951, when most Canadian households had domestic light, residential customers accounted for over 85 per cent of the customers, consumed only 17 per cent of the total kilowatt hours produced in the country, and continued to generate a disproportionately large portion – 34 per cent – of the revenue.32

Even though residential service comprised a minority of customers and total profits, the importance of these small-consumption units, glimpsed in the proportion (or rather the disproportion) of revenues they generated, should not be underestimated. The domestic (i.e., residential or household) market played two very important roles for electrical companies. First, electrical companies did not, by and large, need to make further substantial capital investments to provide electrical lighting for home use: with an electrical company’s massive capital costs mostly covered by industrial customers such as electric railways and street lighting, home service provided an important elastic market where returns could be increased simply by persuading more customers to purchase more electricity. For by 1951, the vast majority of electricity in Canada (over 95 per cent) was being provided by hydroelectricity, which had huge up-front costs in building dams and long-distance transmissions systems, but relatively low running costs compared to fossil-fuel-dependent stations.33 Because home service did not demand that companies expend much more capital than that already invested to supply industry, residential customers provided the profit icing on the economic cake for many early-twentieth-century electrical producers.

The domestic market, furthermore, provided one more important function. As noted above, one of electricity’s most vexing and challenging characteristics is that it cannot be stored. Electrical generating plants and distribution systems had to be created to provide the maximum load that might be needed, even though this maximum might only be reached for a few minutes a day, a week, or even a month. Domestic electrical consumption, with its (at first) tiny but cumulative amounts for cooking, heating, and lighting in the home, was particularly useful in “balancing the load” in off-peak hours, particularly at times when industry did not require massive amounts of energy.34

The most significant way that these two related qualities of electricity – the economies of scale and the need to balance production and consumption – influenced Canadian homes in the first half of the century was, as we have seen above, manifested geographically in the stark distinction between farm and non-farm households, or, more specifically, between those who were close enough to an electrical grid to have central station electrical power and those who were not. The electrical grid only serviced areas where a minimum amount of energy consumption could be guaranteed.35 For although electricity could theoretically be transported to any place to which a wire could be connected, enough electricity had to be consumed at the end of that wire to make the infrastructure cost-effective to the power provider. Thus, at the same time that electricity was a form of power that transcended the local in some respects, its use was predicated on a very specific kind of local population: high density, and comprised of people who were either highly dependent on electrical energy or could be persuaded to be so. Most regions of Canada, and indeed most Canadians, met neither of these criteria before 1950. As Figure 12.12 vividly illustrates, the population density of most of Canada was extremely low; indeed Canada, one of the largest countries in the world, still has one of the lowest population densities.

Spatial organization was a vital component in the spread of electrical power in Canada, or, more accurately, in the limitations of its spread. The complexities of electrical generation relating to the economies of scale made it very difficult to provide service to low-density populations. This was a problem in Canada, where – notwithstanding a national narrative that has identified urban industrialization as the dominant trend in early twentieth century – a majority of the population continued to live in rural areas or in very small towns for the entire first half of the century. Rural Canadians had a strong presence: the number of farms more than doubled between 1871 and 1941, increasing from about 365,000 farms to 733,000.36 The number of farms began to fall after peaking in 1941, though the acreage of improved farmland continued its increase into the 1970s.37 While not increasing at the same rate as the urban population, the rural population continued to grow in Canada to 1971, more than doubling during that time from just over three million to almost seven and a half million. As Figure 12.13 illustrates, it was not until 1976 that the rural population of Canada fell for the first time ever.38 Figure 12.14 evocatively maps the dominance of rural populations across most of the country in 1941.

Although the proportion of people living in rural Canada fell twenty percent in the first half of the century (from 63% in 1901 to 43% in 1951) even as the rural population rose in absolute numbers, census figures tend to overstate the dominance of the urban population; for before 1951, the designation ‘rural’ or ‘urban’ had nothing to do with community size or population density. ‘Urban’ was defined simply as an incorporated municipality, and ‘rural’ was everything else.39 This has led to some statistical anomalies, and to a distortion of historians’ understanding of Canadians’ lived experience in the first half of the twentieth century. While the official statistics designated Canada as more urban than rural from 1921 onwards, It was only in 1941 (when the census confirmed that 46% of the population was rural) that for the first time ever a slight majority of Canadians (51%) lived in communities containing more than a thousand (1,000) people.40 As Fig. 12.15 indicates, it wasn’t until 1961 (when the census confirmed that the rural population had fallen to 39% of Canada’s total population) that, for the first time ever, a slight majority of Canadians (again, 51%) lived in urban communities larger than five thousand (5,000). Even as late as 1971, when 35% of Canadians were designated rural, 59% still lived in communities smaller than thirty thousand, a population that at least one historian has argued should be the line distinguishing urban from small-town and rural.41 As the evidence presented here suggests, Canada was a rural and small town place in the first half of the twentieth century, and the country’s rurality profoundly influenced the way Canadian society responded to the changes associated with modernity.42 This was particularly visible in those elements of modernity closely related to high population densities, and the grids (power, water, sewage) needed to sustain them.

Not only did a smaller percentage of the farm population have access to central electrical service, but, even when they did have it, they used less power. As Fig. 12.16 demonstrates, at the national level, electricity consumption per household was tiny compared to today. But again, as Fig. 12.17 demonstrates, the national trend cloaks huge regional variations. In the case of Manitoba, the variation in consumption was only indirectly related to spatial factors: Manitoba was early in developing its abundant water powers for hydroelectricity, and it dramatically boosted both the number of customers and the volume of their consumption by offering its Winnipeg residents a cheap flat rate for hot water heaters.43 But low usage in Saskatchewan, Alberta, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and much of British Columbia was related to distance from urban or industrial areas. When they had any service at all, rural areas were typically served by a disparate collection of rural utilities that did not provide fulltime or full electrical service. Service was subject to frequent interruptions, and was, furthermore, usually limited to when the major industry was not using the service: the evening hours when rural households would require lighting. In British Columbia alone, there were 111 utilities selling electricity outside of the lower mainland area serviced by BC Electric (which provided 85 per cent of the power in the province), eighty-one of which served fewer than five hundred customers.44

The records from the Electric Lighting Departments across the country received hundreds of complaints about rural service when it did exist. While many simply complained about the incomprehensible billing system and improbably high prices, poor service was the target of many letters. In 1928, for example, the Domestic Lighting Department of the Hamilton Cataract Power, Light and Traction Co. reported: “In the last week or two there have been several complaints of low voltage in and around Grimsby.… The Mountain St. residents say they cannot read between the hours of 7 and 10 pm and when it is time to retire they have all kinds of voltage.” On July 14, 1930, the company received a complaint from an Aldershot resident, complaining that he “cannot get enough power to run our pump properly and sometimes even the radio will bring in local stations only faintly.” Herbert Coates wrote to complain in August 26, 1930, that the voltage was so low that he could not run their refrigerator in Hamilton Beach. Receiving yet another complaint about low voltage, the Operating Engineer wrote to the irate customer to explain:

This district is served by a 40,000 volt line only and for that reason is liable to interruptions for repairs as well as breakdown and the service in consequence is not as reliable in communities served by a duplicate transmission line. I feel sure that the service compares favourably with rural service furnished by the Commission in other districts.45

Complaints from rural residents extended to more than the inconvenience of poor lighting. As Mrs. Robertson complained to BC Electric Co. in 1932 from her home in rural Sooke,

Out of the 164 pheasants hatched out of the incubator, BC Electric killed 124 by chilling and cutting off the current from time to time during the most critical time of their existence.

This means a dead loss to us of $76.20, the cost of the chicks at that age. I had hoped this year to have added quite a lot to a very small income to help with my two little children and the many other overhead expenses in keeping a good home together. But you have ruined all my hopes! I shall never use the brooders again as you will not guarantee electricity at all times. But I think it is very unfair to coerce us to buy electrical appliances before you can guarantee electrical current at all times.46

For their part, electrical companies complained about the reluctance of their rural customers to consume more power – or to pay their bills on time. The Central Electrical Stations of Canada annual report of 1926 noted with dissatisfaction that across the country, “small plants sell almost entirely to lighting customers, requiring service for a comparatively short period of time each day.”47 Usage was, therefore, limited: “In 90 percent of the distribution areas, the use of electricity is limited to lighting only. In fact, the plant equipment in many cases apparently has been installed for lighting only … and the operation cannot be regarded as a modern electric utility service”48

Electricity in rural areas was not only limited in its extent, therefore, but it was available in only the most rudimentary forms, with the result that, although the “cost of electrical service … is relatively high, … the quality of service is relatively poor.”49 People in the largest cities generally had the cheapest rates and consumed the most power, while people in rural areas could pay six or seven times as much for their electric lighting.50 As the Progress Report for Rural Electrification in 1945 summarized: “rural electrification is not a distinct brand of the utility business; it is an outgrowth of the central station industry – the widening of the areas to which certain average costs are applied.”51 As the authors explained, rural electrification would only succeed if it were “conditional upon urban and suburban service.”

It is a simple matter to supply electricity to fifty farms on the borders of a city of 100,000 population; it is a much more difficult matter to supply fifty farms surrounding a town with 2,000 people.… Statistics on service in rural areas will have more meaning, therefore, if accompanied by corresponding statistics on the associated urban services.… Availability, according to modern standards of service, must be general and at the option of the subscriber. The service must be reliable and adequate and it must be offered at rates which will permit the widest possible uses.52

Economies of scale were at the heart of the availability of affordable electrical power, and Canada’s rural population and vast spaces were disadvantaged. By 1951, Canada’s 51% of farms with power line service (over 300,000), compared poorly to about 80 per cent of the farms in the United States.53 While about 30,000 Canadian farms (less than 10 per cent) generated their own electricity by the use of gasoline engines or windmills, this kind of service was intermittent, inconvenient, and occasional and did not represent what electrical service providers considered the fulltime “modern” service.

Conclusion

This chapter has suggested that, in spite of the near invisibility of fossil fuels and hydroelectricity in the contemporary home and in spite of their apparent spatial transcendence of the local, our understanding of Canadian social history can be enhanced by thinking in spatial terms about the production, the transmission/transportation, and the consumption of these new and probably short-lived fuels. A focus on the geographies of where these fuels came from and the places that they travel through and in which they are consumed allows us to tease out key themes, issues, and relationships of power that would otherwise not be apparent. Spatial evidence about fuels can be effectively used to describe the location and the growth of various kinds of fuel; mapping can also be used to illuminate the close causal ties between fossil fuel use and changes in the relationships, not only between people and the land, but amongst people as their relationship with the land changed.

The dominance of Canada’s rural and small-town population into the 1950s makes the mapping of census district data particularly appropriate at the national level. While mapping data for highly concentrated urban populations poses conceptual problems in a national study,54 trends within rural areas with low population density emerge clearly from the existing historical record. Data comparing rural and urban, farm and non-farm, places across the country not only highlight regional differences but allow us to ‘see’ the importance of rural and urban as categories of analysis, along with the more familiar class, race, and gender. Mapping does not replace other sources of evidence about fuel and energy use in Canada, but it does work to illuminate and recontextualize their significance. This kind of research is particularly important in the case of rural Canada, where historians are only just beginning to recognize the unusual rural society that persisted, though in ever-changing relation to urban and industrializing Canada, long after the first large cities began to emerge in the late nineteenth century.

My conclusion, at about the mid-point of my research for this project, is that the economies of scale model so important to modern fuel production, transportation, and consumption is a good one for historians wanting to work with HGIS: the more data we create, the more we can share our data and our questions with other historians, the easier it will be to work more, and more effectively, with historical GIS.

notes

1 Harold Innis, cited by Arn Keeling,“‘Born in an Atomic Test Tube’: Landscapes of Cyclonic Development at Uranium City, Saskatchewan,” The Canadian Geographer 54, no. 2 (2010): 228–52.

2 For the importance of microhistorical work to environmental history in particular, see R. W. Sandwell, “History as Experiment: Microhistory and Environmental History,” in Alan MacEachern and William Turkel, eds., Method and Meaning in Canadian Environmental History (Toronto: Thomas Nelson, 2008), 122–36.

3 http://www.canada.uottawa.ca/ccri/CCRI/index.htm.

4 For an interesting discussion of how historians’ work differs from social scientists in this regard, see John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

5 See, for example, provincial histories of electrical and gas utilities; Christopher Armstrong and H. V. Nelles, Monopoly’s Moment: The Organization and Regulation of Canadian Utilities, 1830–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986); H. V. Nelles, The Politics of Development: Forests, Mines and Hydro-Electric Power in Ontario, 1849–1941 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1974); David Breen, Alberta’s Petroleum Industry and the Conservation Board (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1992).

6 See, for example, Joy Parr, Megaprojects, http://megaprojects.uwo.ca/, accessed 21 March 2011; Joy Parr, Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953–2003 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010); Matthew Evenden, Fish versus Power: An Environmental History of the Fraser River (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jean L. Manore Cross-currents: Hydroelectricity and the Engineering of Northern Ontario (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1999). A number of graduate students are currently working on these issues across the country, and their work will make a welcome addition to this literature.

7 See, for example, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Corrective Collective, Never Done: Three Centuries of Women’s Work in Canada (Toronto: Canadian Women’s Educational Press, 1974); Dianne Dodd, “Women in Advertising: The Role of Canadian Women in the Promotion of Domestic Electrical Technology in the Interwar Period,” in Marianne Ainley, ed. Despite the Odds (Montreal: Véhicule, 1990); Bettina Bradbury, “Women’s Workplaces: The Impact of Technological Change on Working Class Women in the Home and in the Workplace in Nineteenth Century Montreal,” in A. Kobayashi, Women, Work and Place (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 27–44; Joy Parr Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral and the Economic in the Postwar Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).

8 “The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) released a North American report in spring 2008 revealing that buildings (including both commercial and residential) are responsible for 33 per cent of all energy used and 35 per cent of greenhouse (GHG) emissions in Canada.” Canadian Environmental Commission (CEC), “Green Building in North America: Opportunities and Challenges,” CEC: Montreal, 2008. National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, http://www.nrtee-trnee.com/eng/publications/commercial-buildings/section1-commercial-buildings.php , accessed 17 February 2011.

9 Emanuella Cardia, “Household Technology: Was It the Engine of Liberation?” Université de Montréal and CIREQ, current version April 2010, http://www.cireq.umontreal.ca/personnel/cardia.html, accessed 28 March 2011.

10 See, for example, David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1949 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Harold L. Platt, The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Ronald C. Tobey, Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Ronald R. Kline, Consumers in the Countryside: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

11 For an overview of whether HGIS is a method or a practice, see Anne Kelly Knowles, “GIS and History,” in Anne Kelly Knowles, ed. Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2008), 7–8.

12 Electricity can be generated from a variety of energy forms and fuels – coal, oil, gas, diesel fuel (fossil fuels) or water. Because the generation, transmission, and waste disposal relating to hydro-electricity differs significantly from fossil fuel-generated electricity. It is, therefore, useful to make this important distinction when discussing electricity in general.

13 “Nowhere-ness” as a characteristic of modernity has been explored by a number of authors, from James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Touchstone, 1993) to Anthony Giddens’ Social Theory and Modern Sociology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).

14 Christopher F. Jones, “A Landscape of Energy Abundance: Anthracite Coal Canals and the Roots of American Fossil Fuel Dependence, 1820–1860,” Environmental History 15 (July 2010): 449–84.

15 Ibid., 451.

16 Ibid., 453.

17 Joy Parr, Megaprojects, http://megaprojects.uwo.ca/, accessed 2 May 2012.

18 An important study of the impact of another kind of power – hydrogen bombs – on mostly First Nations lands was written by Valerie L. Kuletz, who coined the terms ‘zones of sacrifice’ to describe lands given over completely to destruction. The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West (New York: Routledge, 1998).

19 See, for example, Keeling, “Born in an Atomic Test Tube”; Paul Chastko, Developing Alberta’s Oil Sands: from Karl Clark to Kyoto (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2004); Liza Piper, The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009).

20 Parr, Sensing Changes; Evenden, Fish versus Power; Manore, Cross-currents; John Sandlos, Hunters at the Margin: Native People and Wildlife Conservation in the Northwest Territories (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007).

21 Parr, Sensing Changes; Joy Parr, “‘Lostscapes’: Found Sources in Search of a Fitting Representation,” Journal of the Association for History and Computing 7, no. 2 (August 2004) http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text- [no paginations] idx?c=jahc;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3310410.0007.101 accessed 2 May 2013.

22 See, for example, Veronica Strong-Boag’s The New Day Recalled: Lives of Girls and Women in English Canada, 1919–1939 (Toronto: Copp-Clark, 1988).

23 Julie Cohn, “Expansion for Conservation: The North American Power Grid,” paper presented at the American Society for Environmental History, Phoenix, Arizona, April 2011.

24 Platt, Electric City, 7.

25 Ibid., 17.

26 Canada, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Census of Industry 1922, Central Electric Stations in Canada, 1922 (Ottawa), 8–9.

27 In 1931, both Ontario and Quebec had populations that were 41 per cent rural, while British Columbia’s was 45 per cent rural. All of the other provinces in that year, as in 1941, were predominantly rural. It was only in 1951 that Nova Scotia and Manitoba joined Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia in having predominantly urban populations, while Alberta, Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, and New Brunswick remained rural. Table 4, Census Monograph No. 6, Rural and Urban Composition of the Canadian Population, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, reprinted from vol. XII, Seventh Census of Canada (Ottawa: J. O. Patenaude, 1938), p. 44. In 1941, see Table 21, Eighth Census of Canada 1941, vol. II, Population by Local Subdivisions (Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier, 1944). pp. 232–37. Table 2, Canada. Ninth Census of Canada, 1951, vol. III, pp. 2-1 to 2-4.

28 Canada, Central Electric Stations in Canada, 1922, p. 8.

29 By 1931, electric streetcars (invented by Canadian John Joseph Wright in 1883) were running in cities across Canada, including Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon, Moose Jaw, Winnipeg, Port Arthur and Fort William, Hamilton, Niagara Falls, St. Catharines, Oshawa, Toronto, Ottawa, Kingston, Montreal, Quebec City, Trois Rivière, Halifax, and St. John’s (http://www.ahearn.com/english/contact/history.html, accessed 19 July 2011). For a fuller evaluation of the importance of these factors in the Canadian context, see H. V. Nelles, Politics of Development, and, in the American, see Roland Tobey, Technology as Freedom.

30 See, for example, Table 4, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Census of Industry, 1935, Central Electrical Stations in Canada (Ottawa, 1937), 16–17.

31 M. C. Urquhart, ed. Historical Statistics of Canada (Toronto: Macmillan, 1965), Series P29-33 and P35-38, 450.

32 Urquhart, Historical Statistics, Series P29-33, 34-38, and P39-45, pp. 450–51. In 1951, there were 2.95 million residential customers out of a total of 3.44 million, and they generated about $1.8 million of the total $3.75 million revenue. Industrial customers comprised 3 per cent of the customers, consumed 76 per cent of the electricity, and generated 45 per cent of the revenue.

33 In 1951, only 3.5 per cent of electricity in Canada came from “steam and internal combustion engines,” compared to 73 per cent in the United States, which explains why American electricity cost about 70 per cent more than in Canada, on average at 2.8 cents per kWh, compared to 1.6 in Canada. Government of Canada, Central Electric Stations, 1951 (Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier, 1963), 8–9. Hydro-electricity dominated production in Canada, providing more than 90% of electricity to Canadians until 1961, though, by 2007, that proportion had been reduced to 59%. Statistics Canada Series Q85-91,”Electrical generation by utilities and industrial establishments, by type of prime mover, 1919 to 1976,” http://www5.statcan.gc.ca/access_acces/archive.action?l=eng&loc=Q85_91-eng.csv accessed 2 May 2013. 2007 figures from Statistics Canada, Electric Power Generation, Transmission and Distribution, Catalogue no. 57-202-X, Table 2,
p. 11.

34 On the particular ways in which these two factors were centrally important in the growth of electrification in the United States, Roland Tobey’s work is particularly insightful. Tobey, Technology as Freedom, chap. 1, 9–40. The necessary integration demanded by the massive grid system presented huge problems when it came to estimating the bills for residential customers, as domestic customers took years to understand why they should pay less per kilowatt hour when they consumed more, let alone why the electrical companies should charge a flat fee every month for “readiness to supply service.” As the Department of Trade and Commerce Branch of the Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Transportation and Public Utilities branch, charged with describing and explaining why everyone across the country was paying such different rates for their electricity, put it, “the cost of electricity is one of the most controversial topics in Canada.… It is seldom that satisfactory explanation is given of the many differences in rates as they exist.” Index Numbers of Cost of Rates for Residence Lighting and Tables of Monthly Bills for Domestic Service, Commercial Light and Small Power [1931], published by authority of the Hon. H. H. Stevens, MP, Minister of Trade and Commerce (Ottawa, 1932), 1.

35 Ontario, with its large, early and provincially owned system, and with a large rural population crowded into the south-western triangle of the province, had one of the first and best developed rural electrification programs in the world. The minimum number of rural customers needed to put in rural service varied across the country and was a matter of great concern everywhere. See, for example, Keith Fleming, Power at Cost: Ontario Hydro and Rural Electrification, 1911–58 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992); Frank Dolphin, Country Power: The Electrical Revolution in Rural Alberta (Edmonton, Plain Publishing, ca. 1993) and Nelles, The Politics of Development.

36 Series M12-22 Farm holdings, census data, Canada and by province, 1871 to 1971. . http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-516-x/sectionm/M12_22-eng.csv accessed 2 May 2013.

37 It increased more than 500 per cent between 1871 and 1971, from just over 17 million acres to over 108 million. M34-44 Area of improved land in farm holdings, census data, Canada and by province, 1871 to 1971 (thousands of acres).

38 Statistics Canada, Series A67-69, Rural and Urban Populations of Canada, 1871–1976.

39 See definitions for Series A67-69 at http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-516-x/sectiona/4147436-eng.htm#Population , accessed 20 July 2011.

40 In 1941, there were 5,653,052 living in urban communities larger than 1,000, and 5,853,603 living in rural communities and urban communities smaller than 1,000. Figures calculated from Statistics Canada Series A67-60 and A70-74. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-516-x/sectiona/4147436-eng.htm

41 Rex Lucas, Minetown, Milltown, Railtown: Life in Canadian Communities of Single Industry (University of Toronto Press, 1971). In 1971, there were 8,812,511 people living in Canadian communities larger than 29,999, and 12,755,799 living in rural communities and urban communities smaller than 30,000. Statistics Canada, Series A67-60 and A70-74.

42 For a discussion of the complex nature of Canada’s rural population in the period 1870–1940, and its relation to social and economic change, see R. W. Sandwell, “Missing Canadians: Reclaiming the A-Liberal Past,” in Jean-François Constant and Michel Ducharme, eds. Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 246–73; “Notes towards a History of Rural Canada, 1870–1940,” in John R. Parkins, and Maureen G. Reed, eds. Social Transformation in Rural Canada: New Insights into Community, Cultures, and Collective Action (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013), 21-42; and “Rural Reconstruction: Towards a New Synthesis in Canadian History,” Histoire Sociale/Social History 27, no. 53 (1994): 1–32.

43 Canada, Department of Trade and Commerce, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Public Utilities Branch, Index Numbers of Cost of Rates for Domestic Service and Tables of Monthly Bills for Domestic Service, Commercial Light and Small Power, 1939 (Ottawa, 1940), 12.

44 Report of the Rural Electrification Committee, p. 25.

45 Correspondence regarding Complaints, Hamilton Cataract Power, Light and Traction Co., RG1-1/1-4; file 3.22 Box 3 [labelled 15-3] RG1-1/1-4, correspondence from W. C. Thomson, 28 August 1928, 14 July 1930, Ontario Hydro Archives.

46 British Columbia Electric Railway fonds, Add Mss 4, vol. 241-539, Mrs. Robertson, 5 September 1932, British Columbia Archives.

47 Central Electric Stations of Canada, 1926, p. 12.

48 Province of British Columbia, Progress Report of the Rural Electrification Committee as of January 24, 1944 (Victoria: Charles Banfield, 1944), 81.

49 Progress Report, p. 9.

50 Whereas consumers in Vancouver in 1944 were paying about $2.30 to consume the average 85 kWh per month, consumers in small towns were paying as much as $15.00 per month for the same amount of electricity. The average consumption for B. C. was 85 kWh per month in 1941, and the figures stated here are for 75 kWh per month, which is the closest gradation of consumption for which figures are available. Households in Castlegar were paying $4.05, in Vernon $5.88, in Field $9.00. Progress Report, pp. 40–43. In 1935, The Department of Trade and Commerce, Transportation and Public Utilities Branch, The Index Numbers of Cost of Electricity for Domestic Service and Tables of Monthly Bills for Domestic Service, Commercial Light and Small Power (Ottawa: 1936) provided a rare comparison of average residential consumption. Their charts of relative urban consumption were organized not by province, or region, but by the size of the city. Cities over 100,000 varied in their monthly consumption between 46 kWh (Montreal) and 385 (Winnipeg), with cities of 50–100,000 consuming between 35 and 213. Few cities between 10 and 50,000 consumed more than 150 kWh, whereas most municipalities “up to 10,000 population” consumed well under 75 kWh (4-6).

51 Progress Report, p. 20.

52 Progress Report, pp. 40–43.

53 “There are 623,000 occupied farms in Canada [in] 1951, [and] 336,345 farm customers.… Between 1941 and 1951, the number of gasoline engines used for power purposed on Canadian farms increased 9 per cent from 168,225 to 183,041. At the same time the number of electric motors rose 238 per cent from 58,192 to 196,681.” Government of Canada, Department of Trade and Commerce, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Census of Industry, Central Electric Light Stations in Canada, 1921–1951; Census of Canada, Households, 1921–1951 (Ottawa: 1953), 11. The census figures tell a slightly different story: Table 36, Census of Canada, 1951, vol. 3, Housing and Families, report that 324,065 farm households out of a total of 629,785 had Power Line Source electricity, with a further 29,995 with power from a Home Generated Source.

54 Ian N. Gregory, “‘A Map Is Just a Bad Graph’: Why Spatial Statistics Are Important In Historical GIS,” in Knowles, Placing History, 125.