WRITING HISTORIES OF CLIMATE CHANGE

In Canada, the majority of electricity produced is hydroelectricity, with just over 60 percent of electricity generation in 2020 coming from hydropower (379.2 terawatt hours out of a total 628.6 terawatt hours). Half of the total national production comes from a single province, Quebec, with the next-closest producer being British Columbia with a 17 percent share. It naturally follows that Quebec's electric utility, Hydro-Québec, is Canada's largest electric utility, and its name comes from the hydroelectricity that provides 95 percent of its energy production.

Hydro-Québec is a nationalized corporation that is based in Montreal and owned by the province of Quebec. Although Hydro-Québec is now something of a mainstay of Québecois identity and a pillar of the province's economy, it was not always so. What is now HydroQuébec was built out of the antithesis of what it symbolizes today: an American-owned private corporation that charged high rates and delivered poor service, especially to rural communities. 

The foundation for Hydro-Québec was established in 1944 with the expropriation of Montreal Light, Heat and Power Consolidated and its subsidiaries, which were unified as Hydro-Québec. Like many other major industries, electricity in Quebec had been dominated by
American interests. In the 1880s, the American-owned Royal Electric Company moved into Montreal with the backing of Canadian political and financial elites. By 1889 the company had secured the public lighting contract for the entire city, establishing a monopoly. In 1901, a merger was engineered between the Montreal Gas Company and the Royal Electric Company, unifying the traditional competitors of gas and electricity as the Montreal Light, Heat and Power Company (MLH&P).

The Great Depression made the exorbitant pricing practices of electric utilities untenable, and the provincial government (under Liberal Party leadership) formed the Lapointe Commission in 1934 to investigate their practices. The commission led to the establishment of new regulatory bodies meant to control the practices of the regional monopolies dominating the regional power market, but MLH&P refused to cooperate. The government eventually decided to pursue the route of nationalization, taking control over MLH&P's four hydroelectric generating stations and gas distribution system.

Despite seeming poised for bold action, the first few years of Hydro-Québec were rather slow, as the 1944 provincial election saw the conservative Union Nationale party under the infamous Maurice Duplessis come to power for the next 15 years. Duplessis was strongly opposed to government intervention in the economy, preferring the "free market" approach, and thus declined to expand the capabilities of the nascent Crown Corporation. Instead, his government formed the Rural Electrification Agency, which left rural communities to their own devices in attempting to attract private electric utilities to provide them with service, a proposition with very little appeal for profit-driven corporations. Duplessis did, however, possess a developmental streak, and used Hydro-Québec to acquire assets and pursue projects that were important to the development of local industries like timber.

The turning point in Hydro-Québec's history was the 1960 election that brought the Liberal Party back into power under the premiership of Jean Lesage. In 1962, during the inauguration of National Electrical Week, Minister of Natural Resources René Levesque gave a speech condemning the large gaps in electricity rates and coverage for different regions, the redundancies plaguing the messy public/private overlapping system, as well as the lack of management position opportunities for francophones. Levesque argued for the true consolidation of electric utilities under Hydro-Québec, a desire that was acted upon the following year when they moved to acquire nearly all remaining private electrical utilities and embarked upon a succession of ambitious hydroelectric complex construction projects. Gradually, Hydro-Québec was able to instate uniform rates across the province and create consistent technical standards, improving the affordability and accessibility of electricity.

Today, Hydro-Québec operates about 61 hydroelectric generating stations with a capacity of 40,000 MW, with an estimated additional 45,000 MW of undeveloped hydroelectric potential. 40 of the 61 stations are of the run-of-river design, which are estimated to be less ecologically disruptive than the traditional reservoir design but are still relatively under-researched. While the nationalization of hydroelectricity, a "renewable" and "non-polluting" energy resource, has provided Québecois with affordable and relatively clean energy for several decades now, it has also served as a key attraction for intensely polluting industries like pulp and paper, steel making, and cement. While discussions of the effectiveness of EVs in curbing carbon emissions requires consideration of where the electricity and different material components are coming from, and how polluting those processes is, discussions on "clean" energy should perhaps integrate not only the ecological disruption that is common to such projects but also the pollution of the industries and activities to which the energy is destined.