Rethinking Canada: A Fossil Fuel Nation

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Only recently, with the rise of the Alberta tar sands, has the idea of Canada as a fossil fuel nation received much attention. The enormous environmental effects of bitumen extraction, the controversy of getting it to markets, the importance of it to the Canadian economy and the debates about the merits of ‘domestic’ oil for North Americans have all focused attention on Canada as a major fossil fuel power. Most of the history of energy in Canada has focused on hydroelectric development. Enormous projects on La Grande River in Northwestern Quebec, Niagara Falls in southern Ontario, and the Peace and Columbia Rivers in British Columbia have demonstrated Canada’s energy abundance. But this relatively recent positioning of Canada as an energy powerhouse, and the longer history of Canada as a nation of ‘clean’ energy, obscures the country’s older and more complicated history of fossil fuel extraction, processing, distribution and consumption.
The papers in this panel aim to rethink the country’s energy history and contextualize the recent debates and popular images of energy in Canada by providing a broad examination of Canadian fossil fuel history from the late nineteenth century to the present. Since 1903, fossil fuels have accounted for more than half of all energy consumed in Canada. And since 1947 that proportion has never dropped below 75 per cent. By exploring the rise of manufactured gas and kerosene during the nineteenth century, the efforts to connect coal producers with coal consumers during the interwar years, and the legacy of spills in Canada’s oil pipeline network during the twentieth century, this panel will reveal how fossil fuels shaped modern living standards, national and international politics, economic development and environmental change in Canada.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference - Washington, D.C.

Individual Presentations

• The First Modern Lighting: A Short History of Manufactured Gas and Kerosene in Canada - Ruth Sandwell, University of Toronto

• The Problem of Coal in Canada: Finding Markets for Canadian Coal Between the Wars - Andrew Watson, York University

• A Silent River of Oil: An Environmental History of Pipeline Spills in Canada, 1959-2012 - Sean Kheraj, York University

Chair

• Christopher F. Jones, Arizona State University