Hydro-Electric Power Commission Research Articles

Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory by Brittany Luby

Reviewed by: Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory by Brittany Luby Daniel Macfarlane Luby, Brittany – Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2020. 256 p. Brittany Luby’s Dammed is a fine-grained, intimate, and highly readable analysis of the impact of hydroelectric development on Anishinaabe communities in the Lake of the Woods–Winnipeg River watershed. Luby unpacks the ways that the costs of governmental infrastructure projects were disproportionately borne by those who lived in Treaty 3 territory—the Dalles 38C Indian Reserve, specifically— while the benefits flowed elsewhere. Power dams such as Norman and Whitedog Falls threatened the traditional lifeways of the Anishinabeg—fish, blueberries, ice roads, manomin (wild rice)—which were formally criminalized or informally circumscribed. But they were not passive victims, and Dammed foregrounds their adaptation and resistance strategies. Luby blends oral history and archival research with firsthand experience, including a process that the author calls “presence-ing” (p. 14). She rejects full objectivity as an “academic construction” borne of a Western worldview. A helpful “Note on Sources” is included at the end of the book. Luby clearly reverses the centre/periphery dyad: from the perspective of government officials in Toronto and Ottawa, the Lake of the Woods watershed was the periphery; in the Anishinaabe worldview, this basin was the centre. Early on, Dammed establishes the processes that led to the creation of Treaty 3 reserves. For a confluence of reasons, and in distinction to other parts of Ontario, the First Nations there were initially able to mostly hold onto and maintain control over their water resources. But this was short-lived. After the growth of hydropower and rise of Ontario Hydro, First Nations water resources in the Lake of the Woods basin were recast by the state as outside of the borders and jurisdiction of the reserves. The author reveals ways that Anishinabeg resisted, including relocation, and “maintained competing definitions of space—particularly their interconnectedness with water” (p. 38). Luby gets into the ways that dams affected ice road mobility in the early twentieth century. Experiential knowledge about the reliability of ice routes was changed by water control infrastructure, while the inability to rely on these roads in the same way had various ripple effects for local subsistence strategies. Chapter 2 [End Page 668] shows how the people who actually inhabited the Lake of the Woods basin were cut out of governmental decision-making about the basin. For example, the only “nations” the International Joint Commission recognized were Canada and the United States. The related discussion of material awareness, seasonality, multi-sensory evidence, and spatial knowledge is illuminating. Dammed then turns to Ontario Hydro (also known as the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario, or HEPCO). The Whitedog Falls Generating Station, opened after the Second World War, flooded out manomin. Luby compares the ways HEPCO negotiated water control and compensation with an industrial mill, which was much different than the way it consulted—or did not consult—the local Indigenous communities. The second half of the book looks at the latter half of the twentieth century. Labour, employment, health, and varying responses to economic and food insecurity are major themes. For the affected Anishinabeg, taking employment at the generating stations or allied industries undermined traditional subsistence activities and the attendant cultural patterns, yoking them instead to the rhythms of wages and market capitalism. But given the lack of employment activities in the area, this type of local employment allowed the possibility of staying on the reserve year-round; HEPCO was reluctant to hire those from the reserves on a permanent basis, however. In a further irony, participation in dam construction further changed river conditions and, in turn, socio-economic conditions on the reserves. Traditional subsistence practices, such as harvesting manomin, had been hurt by dams as far back as the First World War. But the larger post-1945 power dams had more severe impacts, since manomin is very sensitive to water level fluctuations. Chapter 5 delves into changing water quality, waste, and pollution. The blasting of the Dalles Rapids in the 1950s, as part of the Whitedog Falls Generating Station, changed both water...

O controle público da energia elétrica: primórdios no Canadá

Nesse artigo abordaremos a disputa em torno da produção e distribuição de eletricidade entre governos locais do Canadá e acionistas e diretores de empresas privadas, aos fins do século 19. Questionava-se se o serviço seria implantado e explorado por um monopólio privado ou por instâncias de governo. A gestão municipal foi resultado do movimento Populismo Cívico, que defendia que as companhias de serviços deveriam ser totalmente públicas e, da consequente criação da Hydro-Electric Power Commission em Ontário, para distribuição de energia em 1906 e geração e venda em 1914. Os eventos ocorridos no Canadá alarmaram contra a nacionalização das utilities os investidores e diretores em Toronto e no Brasil da holding Brazilian Traction, retirando do país a tomada de decisões e a administração dos lucros.

Watershed decisions: the St. Lawrence Seaway and sub-national water diplomacy

/RésumésThe St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project, authorized by a 1954 Canadian-American agreement after decades of negotiations, was a formative event in the history of North American sub-national governmental relations. This study examines the role of the Province of Ontario and the State of New York, and their respective power utilities, Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario and the Power Authority of the State of New York, in the diplomacy that led to the St. Lawrence megaproject. Sub-national governments directly and indirectly shaped policy not only through formal federalism and diplomatic channels, but also via a number of transborder agencies and engineering boards. Émploying a historical analysis to demonstrate that institutional and ideational factors shaped the Canadian state，s approach to border waters, the St. Lawrence project expanded opportunities for environmental paradiplomacy in subsequent Canadian- American relations.

“It is the finest piece of government work that I know of anywhere”: The Influence of the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario on the Giant Power Survey of Pennsylvania, 1923-1927

Since its foundation in 1906, the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario exerted a major influence on the politics of electricity in the United States. American supporters of publicly-owned utilities saw the Hydro as a model worth emulating south of the border. Reformers who sought lower electric prices for consumers also looked to the Hydro for evidence of the technically-feasible lowest cost of producing and transmitting this source of energy. This paper will examine a specific instance when American Progressives sought to use the Hydro as both a source of information and inspiration for electric policy reforms: the Giant Power Survey of 1923-1927, an attempt by Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinchot to bring about lower electricity costs for consumers and to extend access to rural areas, through a mix of greater regulation and government action. The individuals involved in Giant Power came into close contact with Hydro officials for the vital administrative and technical information with which to argue for their cause; the Ontarians, however, had their own reasons to be wary of getting involved in a controversial proposal.

Raising Standards: Public Works and Industrial Practice in Interwar Ontario

Public works and the bodies which build them or contract for their building are important to the history of standards for a variety of reasons. The sheer size, significance and ubiquity of such works, make standards practice important in and of itself. The rigour used in enforcing those standards on contractors and suppliers, while exerting a force for the improvement of industrial practice, also had the secondary effect of favouring those firms which were familiar with and could meet such standards. Public agencies had not just contractual means to enforce their ideas about standards but often regulatory ones as well. Public works standards helped define the state's relationship with the geographical space in which it acted. These issues will be explored using four case studies from Ontario: public roads and buildings, public health regulation and standards for municipal water works, the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario and finally the City of Toronto.

Technical Standards and the Integration of the U.S. and Canadian Economies

Introduction A March 1943 editorial in the Quarterly Bulletin of the Canadian Engineering Standards Association (CESA) noted the role being played by technical standards in the growing U.S. trade hegemony in Central and South America. (1) Stirred but not shaken by evidence that the days of Britain's informal Latin American empire were over, the editor warned that Canada must respond appropriately. In fact, by this time Canadian business had for decades been involved as a junior partner with the U.S. in the development of North American technical standards. Such standards--roughly, agreements among makers and users of manufactured items on their dimensions and other characteristics--are crucial to the workings of advanced industrial economies. (2) They are a little-noticed part of how, literally at a nuts and bolts level, the two nations' economies were integrated. As such, they should be seen along with such traditionally cited factors as levels of U.S. equity investment in secondary manufacturing, shared consumer tastes, and the north-south grain of the continental geography in explaining why, when, and how such integration occurred. (3) There is a particular irony in the position of the CESA. Founded in response to a British initiative, the Association had a formal commitment to bringing British technical standards to Canada while remaining at arms length from the U.K.'s standard-setting protocol. But from its earliest work, the CESA acted as a major conduit for the flow of U.S. standards into Canada, standards that came to dominate Canadian manufacturing. The Association did receive a small subvention from the federal Department of Trade and Commerce and has had ties to both the National Research Council of Canada and the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario. Even so, it was a private body. Given this, the story offered here is less one of public policy and capitalist strategies than it is one of quotidian technical decisions by engineers in both the public and private sectors. Indeed the harmonizing of U.S. and Cana dian technical standards proceeded irrespective of the vicissitudes of tariff and investment policies. What are standards? (4) An illuminating example: if utility companies, the makers of lighting fixtures, and the manufacturers of light bulbs could not agree about bulb sizes, screw threads, plug prongs, and the definitions of fundamental electrical units we would all be, quite literally, very much in the dark. At the very least we would be greatly inconvenienced. Pushing a bit further: think of the mild inconvenience of worrying about different currents for razors and hair dryers whilst traveling abroad and increase this by orders of magnitude. In fact, though, agreements are reached on a vast range of products, components, and services; these agreements are called consensus standards. Consensus is usually reached through committees of engineering professional bodies or of organizations devoted to the promulgation of standards. Adopted voluntarily, these standards make industrial production in its present form possible. Among the chief economic benefits of standards are reduction of inventory costs and the lo wering of transaction costs. In spite of mechanisms to prevent such abuse, standards can be manipulated to gain competitive advantage for particular firms. This, however, is extraordinary and is seen by most who participate in their formulation as defeating the very purpose of standards. Although voluntary, standards gain the force of law when written into contracts or government regulations. As standards underlie a variety of safety codes (electrical, building, fire, earthquake) a persuasive claim can be made for standards serving the public interest. Early Standards, Early Influences Even before Confederation, Canadians had begun to see the economic wisdom of conforming to U.S. norms. Although keeping Imperial weights and measures, the colonial government of Canada, to the intense annoyance of the British Treasury, in 1858 switched to a decimal currency. …

Power at Cost: Ontario Hydro and Rural Electrification, 1911–1958 by Keith R. Fleming

436 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE OGPU (the secret police) began investigations while frightened bu­ reaucrats at Soiuzstroi called meetings and promised to act on Witkin’s ideas. With the passage of weeks, however, this apparent action lapsed and Witkin’s ideas were again shelved. Witkin’s battles brought him into contact with officials from a large number of organizations, including the Commissariat of Heavy Industry, the Council of Labor and Defense, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (RKI), and several industrial trusts. Witkin may well be the only Westerner ever to have been engaged by the RKI and the OGPU as an industrial expert. In his spare time Witkin took it upon himself to calculate the total construction completed during the First Five-Year Plan. He con­ cluded that in no year did construction exceed that of prerevolution­ ary Russia in 1913/14, and he found that total construction for the entire Five-Year Plan was less than that in America for an average single year between 1923 and 1932. Witkin’s analysis of Soviet construction was the first of its kind, and it established the truth behind the propaganda of official inflated figures. In the end Witkin was defeated by the bureaucracy he fought so tirelessly. He left the Soviet Union in 1934 embittered by his experi­ ences and by the failure of his courtship of the Russian actress Emma Tseraskaia. No publisher would touch the memoirs he wrote after his return to the United States, and his manuscript was destroyed after his premature death in 1940. It is fortunate that a single photocopy found its way into the Hoover Institution Archives, where historian Michael Gelb discovered it fifty years later. In publishing the memoirs of Zara Witkin, Gelb has greatly enriched the literature concerning life, politics, and industry in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Robert McCutcheon Mr. McCutcheon is a specialist in spacecraft dynamics at Computer Sciences Corporation. He is also a historian of Soviet science with several publications devoted to Soviet astronomy in the 1930s. Power at Cost: Ontario Hydro and Rural Electrification, 1911 —1958. By Keith R. Fleming. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992. Pp· xiv + 326; illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $39.95. Keith R. Fleming’s Power at Cost: Ontario Hydro and Rural Electrifi­ cation is a welcome addition to the literature on the history of North America’s first major public power entity, the Hydro Electric Power Commission of Ontario (HEPC, commonly known today as Ontario Hydro). Much has already been written by Canadian authors about the popular ground swell among municipal and business leaders in the older, more settled southern areas of the province that urged TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 437 provincial government leaders to pass public power legislation in 1906. A few American writers, particularly those who have probed the battle between public and private power interests raging in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s, have described, although often briefly, the origins and ideology of the HEPC. Only limited research has been done, however, on the HEPC’s policy-making process and activities following the death of Adam Beck, imperious chairman of the commission from its founding to his death in 1925. Power at Cost helps fill the gap in existing literature on how the publicly owned HEPC actually worked. Drawing on numerous pri­ mary sources located at Ontario Hydro and other Ontario public archives, Fleming describes, in twelve well-written chapters, the motives and methods employed by the HEPC to make significant inroads into Ontario domestic, commercial, industrial, and rural power markets during a fifty-year period. The author’s primary purpose is to show how public policies were made and implemented by the HEPC and the provincial government, between 1911 and 1958, to bring electricity to rural southern Ontario. By 1958, rural electri­ fication in a region extending from Lake Huron to the Saint Lawrence River was virtually completed. Such an accomplishment was significant, claims Fleming, because of the HEPC’s early commitment to rural electrification and the steady pace at which it occurred. Particularly between 1911 and 1945, “Ontario had no peer in Canada in the rural field and had little to learn from...

The Uniform Rate and Rural Electrification Issues in Ontario Politics, 1919–1923

SINCE ITS INCEPTION IN •906, the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario (•EPC) has always been close to political and economic controversy provincial, federal, and, on occasion, even international. • Achieving by the •9aos a virtual monopoly over the distribution and generation of hydro-electricity in Canada's most heavily industrialized and populated province, the HEPC has jealously guarded a pre-eminence known by few public institutions in any modern jurisdiction. Indeed, its seldom contested authority to determine the price of hydro-electricity has enabled the Commission to influence almost every aspect of Ontario life. The most comprehensive explanation of why Ontario turned to public ownership for the generation and transmission of electrical energy is that provided by H.V. Nelles in The Politics of Development (Toronto •974). Emanating from a self-interested group of businessmen and manufacturers operating in the cities and towns of southwestern Ontario, the public power movement has been identified by Nelles as having comprised the 'moderately well-to-do, socially prominent bourgeoisie who invariably manned the town councils and the local boards of trade. '• To them, public ownership of the means of hydro-electric distribution would not only prevent discrimination in favour of large users and large centres, but would actually deceniralize the province's manufacturing sector. In particular, they were determined that Toronto should not reap all the benefits of the 'white coal' harvest. This was a legitimate fear since the three privately owned

Private Electrical Utilities and Municipal Ownership in Ontario,1891-1900

En juin 1897, les compagnies d'électricité de l'Ontario lancèrent leur première offensive organisée contre l'étatisation. Leur but était de faire modifier la Loi sur les municipalités de l'Ontario de manière à protéger les droits acquis des compagnies et éventuellement de ralentir le mouvement de réforme qui commençait à prendre de l'ampleur dans toute la province. Deux ans après, elles réussirent à faire adopter les «Conmee Clauses», aux termes desquelles les municipalités devaient acheter les compagnies locales d'électricité et de gaz avant d'aménager de nouvelles installations. L'industrie eut du mal à faire front commun dans cette campagne. Ses représentants exprimèrent une conception du rôle de l'État qui était à la fois souple quant aux limites de la réglementation publique et rigide quant à la responsabilité qu'elle attribuait au gouvernement de protéger les intérêts fondamentaux des entreprises privées. À court terme, les adversaires du projet de loi ne purent empêcher son adoption; à long terme, cette querelle ne fut qu'un épisode du conflit relatif à la municipalisation de l'électricité, qui aboutit à la création de la Commission de l'énergie hydro-électrique de l'Ontario.

A PRELIMINARY ESTIMATE OF THE ICE-SEASON ENERGY BALANCE FOR THE NIAGARA RIVER

Summary The Meteorological Service of Canada and the Ontario Hydro-Electric Power Commission are conducting an International Hydrologic Decade study of ice formation and dissipation on the upper Niagara River. As a contribution to this project, an estimate of the energy balance of the river has been made, based on long term climatological data and on hydrological observations obtained during the 1967 ice season. This paper discusses the magnitudes of various terms in the energy balance equation and suggests applications of the energy budget approach to problems of ice forecasting.

An International comparison of voltage-transformer calibrations to 350 kv

IN JUNE 1960, the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario inquired whether the United States National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Washington could measure for them the ratio and phase-angle errors of a 350-kv voltage transformer then being built to their order. This request was also made at about the same time of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) in Ottawa. Neither laboratory had, at that time, made calibration measurements on instrument transformers at this voltage level, but both had given the problem considerable thought; and it appeared that the request by Ontario Hydro afforded a unique opportunity not only to examine some of the problems involved in voltage-ratio measurements at 350 kv, but also to compare measurement results between the two national laboratories.

The NPD Nuclear Power Station Electrical System and the Statistical Approach to Its Design

This paper describes the electrical system designed for the Nuclear Power Demonstration (NPD) Generating Station and the statistical approach used to make decisions as the design progressed. NPD is a 22-mw (megawatt) nulcear power station designed by Canadian General Electric Company in co-operation with Atomic Energy of Canada, Ltd., and The Hydro Electric Power Commission of Ontario (HEPC). The reactor is heavy-water-moderated and heavy-water-cooled and uses natural uranium as the fuel. The plant is located on the Ottawa River about 1 mile downstream from the Ontario Hydro's Des Joachims generating station. An electrical system was designed for NPD which is quite similar to that which would be found in a conventional generating station of the same rating. However, because of the critical nature of some of the processes during all phases of operation including shutdown, a great deal of emphasis was placed on reliability. Throughout the design, circuit configuration and equipment selection stressed reliability as well as cost.

Floating-point arithmetic in COBOL

article Free AccessFloating-point arithmetic in COBOL Author: O. Kesner Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario, Toronto, Ont., Canada Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario, Toronto, Ont., CanadaView Profile Authors Info & Claims Communications of the ACMVolume 5Issue 5May 1962 pp 269–271https://doi.org/10.1145/367710.367739Published:01 May 1962Publication History 1citation354DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations1Total Downloads354Last 12 Months19Last 6 weeks4 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Advanced data system in the power industry

THE HYDRO-ELECTRIC Power Commission of Ontario has recently developed and constructed an automatic data processor for a new generating station at Niagara Falls. Since the design employs new techniques which may have application in fields outside the power industry, a detailed description of the key features is offered in this paper.

Investigation of Ice Pressure on Dams. First Report on Measurement of Coefficient of Linear Expansion of Artifical and Natural Ice. J. G. Willmot Hydro-electric Power Commission of Ontario. Research Division Report No. 56–392, 1956, 41 pages, illus.

Investigation of Ice Pressure on Dams. First Report on Measurement of Coefficient of Linear Expansion of Artifical and Natural Ice. J. G. Willmot Hydro-electric Power Commission of Ontario. Research Division Report No. 56–392, 1956, 41 pages, illus.

Investigation of Ice Pressure on Dams. First Report on Measurement of Coefficient of Linear Expansion of Artifical and Natural Ice. J. G. Willmot Hydro-electric Power Commission of Ontario. Research Division Report No. 56–392, 1956, 41 pages, illus.

Investigation of Ice Pressure on Dams. First Report on Measurement of Coefficient of Linear Expansion of Artifical and Natural Ice. J. G. Willmot Hydro-electric Power Commission of Ontario. Research Division Report No. 56–392, 1956, 41 pages, illus. - Volume 3 Issue 22

Electrical Features of the Sir Adam Beck - Niagara Generating Station No. 2; The Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario [includes discussion

Electrical Features of the Sir Adam Beck - Niagara Generating Station No. 2; The Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario [includes discussion

Report on Investigation into the Failure of Two 100-MW. Turbo-generators

It has often been said of engineering that ‘Progress is made by solving the problems resulting from the making of progress’. This paper describes the investigations made following the failure of two generators each of 100 MW. capacity installed in the Richard L. Hearn Generating Station at Toronto of The Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario. The author details some general considerations affecting the design of alternator rotors, the selection of materials used, past troubles which had to be avoided, reasons for certain features incorporated in the original design and modified as the result of the failures, and safeguards introduced into current practice to avoid the possibility of a repetition of the failures.

115-kv pipe-type compression cable installation

THE CONSTRUCTION of a fuel-electric generating station at Toronto, Canada, by The Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario, made it necessary to incorporate additional power into the existing 115-kv transmission system. Due to congested conditions in portions of this area, erection of steel tower transmission lines was not practical.

Tests and Operating Experiences at the Ottawa River Plants of the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario [includes discussion

Tests and Operating Experiences at the Ottawa River Plants of the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario [includes discussion