Public Power: The Fight for Publicly Owned Electricity (review)

In the mid-1960s, around the time when Arizona senator Barry Goldwater was the Republican party candidate for president of the United States, a cartoon appeared in which Goldwater was depicted - in a photograph, dialogue cloud above his head - proposing that the US Postal Service be turned into a private corporation. The humour lay in the absurdity of the idea, which also exposed the lunatic-fringe extremism of Goldwater's conservative views. Today, few would see the joke. By the 1990s, what had been laughable thirty years earlier in both Canada and the US had become mainstream public policy in the form of deregulation and privatization. This book by Howard Hampton, leader of the New Democratic party of Ontario, traces a part of this paradigm shift and critically analyses its results.

The book was written in anticipation of the Ontario provincial election of 2003, in which the NDP made the privatization of Ontario Hydro its leading issue, and it bears some of the marks of an election pamphlet. Claims are made hyperbolically; for example, in the opening paragraph, public power is described as an issue fundamental, among other things, 'to any semblance of social order in our daily lives,' and shortly afterward as the 'most essential' of public services. Hampton denies that his approach to the issue is 'ideological' - distinguishing himself from the Conservative government of then premier Ernie Eves - yet he also claims that the people of Ontario, in establishing a public power system in the early twentieth century, decided that 'public need must trump private greed.' The picture he draws of the origins of the system is highly idealized: they lay in a movement, he says, that 'transcended all social, economic and class differences,' a view not many serious historians today would endorse. In fact, the text relies heavily on older popular histories - notably W.R. Plewman's biography of Adam Beck and Merrill Denison's general history of Hydro - for its account of the origins and development of the public utility.

Still, idealization - or myth - is not necessarily a bad thing. Here, it is put to effective use, as Hampton evokes a pantheon of founding heroes - Francis Spence, E.W.B. Snider, D.B. Detweiler, and, above all, Adam Beck, the London businessman who came to personify 'the Hydro' - who had the courage and imagination to create Ontario's (and one of Canada's) most important public enterprises. He describes the opposition they had to overcome from private power interests in Canada and the US, yet how Hydro also inspired imitation, especially in New York under Franklin Roosevelt's governorship and in the New Deal of Roosevelt's presidency during the 1930s. The echoes of medicare in modern times are impossible to miss.

The partisan purpose of this book takes nothing away from the substance of its argument. Hampton follows the progress of deregulation and privatization from it first trials in Augusto Pinochet's Chile, through Margaret Thatcher's Britain, to Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior's US. In all cases, consumers and taxpayers were stuck with huge unanticipated (if predictable) costs, partly because governments assumed the debts of publicly owned facilities to make them more attractive to private investors, and partly because the price of deregulated electricity went up instead of down. In Ontario, the Conservative governments of Mike Harris and Ernie Eves nevertheless persisted in their determination to privatize Ontario Hydro because, Hampton argues, unlike their early twentieth-century predecessors, they were blinded by their faith in free enterprise.

Along the way, he also argues vigorously against nuclear power ('madness,' he calls it) and in favour of small-scale, diversified production and more efficient consumption, both of which are more environmentally friendly, as well as economically manageable, than the mega-projects of the old central station model of production and the encouragement of profligate consumption that often accompanied it. In doing so, he holds Ontario Hydro itself responsible for the policies and spending that undermined its legitimacy, though it might...