ABSTRACT

Household electrification came late to rural Canada. In the census year of 1951, when almost all urban homes in Canada had electricity, a third of rural households were still without electric lighting, and three out of four were cooking over a wood-and-coal range. In the 1950s and 1960s, most of the country’s ten provincial governments subsidised and otherwise supported rural electrification for the first time, and by the 1970s almost all rural households had electricity and running water.1 This chapter focuses on the first half of the century, when the growing disparity between the energy choices available to rural and urban people generated urgent discussions about the much-touted benefits of the electrified home and farm. In Canada as elsewhere, electrification took on an almost emblematic or iconic status as a harbinger of modernity. If the growing gap between urban and rural electrification seemed to confirm deep-seated urban beliefs and concerns about rural backwardness and deprivation, it also provided a space where rural people expressed their views about the limitations of, as well as their frustrations with, the electrical grid and indeed modern life generally. In their comments and in their behaviours, it is possible to see a rural identity distinct from the urban culture gaining ascendancy in the first decades of the twentieth century. This chapter uses the history of rural electrification in Canada as a lens to explore some of the profound changes associated with the shift from the organic ‘traditional’ (wind, water and wood) to mineral modern (fossil fuels and electricity) energy regimes for rural Canadians in a country long associated with the some of the highest global rates of energy consumption per capita.2