Allied Power: Mobilizing Hydro-Electricity during Canada’s Second World War by Matthew Evenden (review)

The Second World War was also fought on the home front, with demand for arms transforming industry. Making weapons, in turn, demanded power—a fact illustrated by the quick completion of Tennessee Valley Authority projects and the Grand Coulee Dam to supply electricity with which to make the aluminum that airplanes required. As Matthew Evenden explains, a similar imperative operated in Canada: with dams producing virtually all of the country’s electricity, rivers were quickly mobilized for war. Following the lead of other scholars, including Thomas Hughes in his 1983 Networks of Power, Evenden examines the intertwining of environmental, technological, and social systems that resulted.

When war came in 1939, the Canadian government, convinced that existing institutions and markets could not provide sufficient electricity, asserted its authority over the nation’s rivers. Yet geography and politics, as well as the federal government’s expedient favoring of existing centers of production, eliminated any prospect of a single national power system. Instead, provincial systems retained their distinctive characteristics. For example, while in some provinces, including Quebec, power producers were privately owned, in others, such as Ontario, power was a public matter. Technology and geography reinforced these differences: weak links between widely scattered regional transmission systems rendered provincial power systems largely autarkic.

As a result, the mobilization of rivers produced different outcomes across the country. Production remained concentrated in Quebec and Ontario, the nation’s population and industrial centers. New hydropower projects to supply its aluminum industry reinforced Quebec’s status as the country’s leading electricity producer. In contrast, Ontario was slower to build new projects, and so power demands had to be met, in part, through conservation by civilians and non-essential industries. In Alberta, a power project on Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park raised questions regarding development in a supposedly protected landscape, with landscape design enlisted to resolve this conflict. Meanwhile, in British Columbia the system remained isolated and inflexible: delays in getting new production on stream led to power shortages.

Power production had a variety of impacts on local river environments and aboriginal peoples. These consequences received limited attention, usually only when developers perceived a risk of legal action. They were at any rate only a minor consideration, given both wartime urgency and the primacy of industry over nature prevalent at the time. On the other hand, conservation did receive serious attention. This was, however, a particular wartime definition of the concept, focused not on long-term sustainability, but on the crisis-driven urgency of diverting electricity toward industry. In terms of actually saving electricity, these efforts were not greatly effective. But they had other consequences: modifying the public’s understanding of the value and meanings of electricity and of urban spaces, including streets and the nighttime itself.

Conservation initiatives also brought into focus other social and cultural dimensions of electricity: resentment of big, brightly lit stores, gendered images of selfish consumption versus virtuous domestic self-restraint, and, more generally, diverse approaches to balancing private preferences and wartime necessity. Evenden’s interesting discussion could also have been taken a step further here by considering the politics of defining conservation as a voluntary matter. Were mandatory cutbacks simply not required, or would these have been unacceptable in a political context in which military conscription itself was being fiercely debated?

War changed the scale and scope of hydroelectric development, and the roles of the state and citizens in both producing and consuming power. As Evenden demonstrates, the mobilization of rivers demands analysis at several levels: the rivers themselves, the provinces, the nation, and the continent. His comparisons between disparate regional experiences usefully demonstrate the interplay of local and larger factors. Overall, he presents a reliable and insightful analysis of a technological system as not just a physical, but also a social and cultural artifact.