Uncommon Sense or Common Nonsense
Over a century ago, at the dawn of Ontario’s industrial revolution, a collection of so-called ‘petty capitalists’ from the small towns of southern Ontario wondered if the awesome responsibility of managing an electric system invested with profound public interest was rightfully appropriated by an exclusive syndicate of financiers in Toronto. Sound familiar?
Established in 1905, the war between the ‘People’s Power’ (public ownership of the electric utility provided at cost) and the machinations of the Mackenzie Syndicate lasted nearly two decades and felled a series of provincial governments. In the battle against special interest groups, Sir Adam Beck emerged as the political champion for public power, discredited and defeated his unscrupulous foes and served as the Promethean founding chairman. After the Great War, the Hydro Electric Power Commission of Ontario (HEPCO) completed its monopoly as one of the largest, innovative and most successful electric utilities in the world. Hydro is in Ontario’s blood.
Beck died in 1925, but the Beck Paradigm with respect to public ownership of hydro was codified and twisted in the century of complicated history which followed. Beck was convinced that (1) hydro was too important to be left to private interests or market forces alone, (2) bigger is necessarily better, and (3) politics must stay out of hydro, but hydro cannot afford to stay out of politics.
Beck laid the groundwork for the public monopoly utility, and it was under his successors that Hydro really came into its own, but the infatuation with science and engineering could not last. Beck’s accomplishments and indispensability to the political establishment left a framework for a behemoth organization without external regulation which acted upon its own initiative.
Three decades of overbuilding generation capacity and abuse of the public purse in the form of dirty coal and questionable nuclear power plants proved the second tenet of the Beck Paradigm obsolete, and the arrogance of Hydro’s management and their indifference to public opinion exposed the electric empire to dismemberment and privatization. The wisdom of the first and third tenets was lost in the process.
Doug Ford has not been Premier for a week and already there are exhortations to bring back the ‘Common Sense Revolution’ of Mike Harris. The only common sense required is the cessation of shamelessly self-serving historical revisionism, and the uncommon sense that we already have the tools we need to move forward.
It must be remembered that the outrageous payouts to the executives of Hydro One were enabled by Mike Harris, only enacted by Kathleen Wynne, and it was Bob Rae the socialist who put privatization on the table in the first place. All three political parties are guilty for the destruction of Ontario Hydro (the successor to the HEPCO).
It must be remembered that Ontario Hydro was far from perfect, but despite its hubris it at least retained a talented capacity for integrated resource planning, something sorely lacking from the present electricity landscape.
It must be remembered that Margaret Thatcher’s market fundamentalism stunted investment in continuous infrastructure improvements and increased income inequality, and that it was precisely this kind of macho neo-conservatism which resulted in California’s disastrous privatization experiment and the Enron scandal.
It must be remembered that coal is dirty, it has been clinically proven to cause asthma and a slew of other health hazards, and nuclear power is not cheap. The operating costs may be relatively low, but the capital costs of construction, decommissioning and remediation are two orders of magnitude higher than initially projected in the 1960s, not to mention the economic cost, nuclear proliferation risks, and environmental burden of mining and refining uranium fuel.
It must be remembered that climate change is real and caused by human activity and that renewable energy makes business, engineering and environmental sense. It makes perfect sense to rural (and conservative) farmers in Alberta. Why wouldn’t we get our power from the sun, free from the political plots of foreign dictatorships and oil despots, and the alienation of an inflexible and fragile centralized grid?
It must be remembered that the transformation of an entrenched century-old energy paradigm cannot be painlessly executed overnight, and that clean tech means lucrative innovation and manufacturing STEM jobs which retain and attract educated and skilled labor. The dinosaurs decry the few hundred million dollars used to subsidize the development of clean tech, but conveniently ignore the hundreds of billions of dollars thrown at the fossil fuel and mining companies for over a century.
It is at crossroads like these, when all options are seemingly unpalatable, that we should remember we have been here before. Hydro need not necessarily be publicly owned and operated, but it must be driven by strategic integrated planning which serves the public interest, foresight which cannot be effected by pure market forces alone. The public interest now requires decarbonization.
Beck’s stern gaze remains leveled at the provincial legislature from Queen and University as if to say it began at Niagara, it must end at Queen’s Park. The lesson from the saga of Ontario Hydro is that the people have the power to intervene in our own interest and halt this backslide into the past if the appropriate champion can be found.
Otherwise we abdicate responsibility and it is as Karl Marx said about history repeating itself: “the first as tragedy, the second as farce.”
