Powerful symbol of French pride
Lévesque battled for a company that offered more than electricity
Fifty years ago, at a fishing camp north of Quebec City, the cabinet of then-premier Jean Lesage held a fractious debate over the future of electricity in Quebec.
Spearheaded by the late René Lévesque, the major question on the table was the nationalization of Hydro-quebec. At the time, most of the electricity generated in the province came from powerful private corporations like Montreal Heat and Power and Shawinigan Water and Power.
The lobbying against Lévesque’s dream of a completely state-owned utility was fierce — both within cabinet and outside it. In some quarters, Lévesque was vilified as another Fidel Castro. But Lesage’s appointment of the former Radio-canada TV journalist as natural resources minister made the vote a forgone conclusion.
Hydro-quebec would be nationalized, but it would be more than a state-owned provider of electricity.
For Lévesque and a coterie of ministers, Hydro-quebec would be the catalyst for a new French-speaking state. It would facilitate Lesage’s dream of “maîtres chez nous” — masters in our own house — and shepherd in the days when Quebec engineers could learn and work in French. It would also spearhead the Quiet Revolution.
“It represented a symbol and an extremely important concept of maîtres chez nous,” says Concordia University history professor Harold Chorney. “It was a major achievement. You couldn’t do that today.”
Hydro-quebec would not only build dams and generators, power lines and giant towers, it would build pride in Quebecers, their language and their savoir faire.
“Hydro played a role in creating French-language engineering,” says Daniel Turp, former Parti Québécois MNA and MP for the Bloc Québécois.
“It did something for (the) Quebecer’s identity, proving you could make things happen in French.”
Thanks to Hydro’s demand for engineers, the University of Sherbrooke began to teach engineering in French, using French textbooks. At the same time, Quebec began free education for all and Hydro was the iconic part of a multi-pronged approach to push the province into the 20th century.
“The Quiet Revolution, the ’60s, the Lesage government ending ‘la grand noirceur’ (the great darkness) that opened education to everyone, gave people access to a business education — and that put power in peoples’ hands,” says Clément Gignac, Quebec’s Liberal minister of natural resources and wildlife.
AT THE FISHING CAMP
meeting in 1962, Lesage called for an election on the nationalization question and Lévesque became the front man, explaining to the electorate that private ownership of electricity was “good for the companies but bad for the rest of the province, unnecessarily costly and, on top of that, inefficient.”
He pleaded with voters “to take in their hands, freely and proudly, the first and most important key to a modern economy . . . the nationalization of electricity.”
The Lesage government won a majority. One week later, Jacques Parizeau, who went on to become premier, was secretly dispatched to New York to find the money to buy about 11 private distributors, 45 cooperatives and some 20 municipal power systems. They thought it would be a battle. Instead, he wrote later, “in 20 minutes, we were able to borrow $300 million dollars. Three hundred million. That was a lot of money in 1962.”
One year later, the province had taken over every private electric utility.
Hydro is now reporting revenues of more than $12 billion; its annual dividend
“Hydro represented a symbol and an extremely important concept of maîtres chez nous (masters in our own house). It was a major achievement. You couldn’t do that today.” HAROLD CHORNEY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY HISTORY PROFESSOR
to the Quebec government around $5 billion.
But it has become a magnet for criticism for its massive environmental destruction in the north and its ambitions to sell power to the U.S. Its detractors point to its environmental and social impact on Quebec’s aboriginal people and the province’s rivers and fauna. Then there was the catastrophic ice storm of 1998. Despite its ability to quickly reconstruct almost its entire grid, Hydro was attacked for the poor quality of some of its power lines and for leaving chunks of the province powerless for months.
In 1993, the James Bay Cree published a plea condemning Hydro’s massive construction in the north.
“We’re up against the perception that Hydro-quebec is the engine to (progress) and they’ve used it to whip up the nationalism of Quebecers against the Cree and the Inuit,” wrote Bill Namagoose, a member of the Grand Council of the Cree, complaining that the La Grande portion of the James Bay project flooded more than 10,000 kilometres of waterways, with one dam as large as a 50-storey building.
Namagoose bemoaned the loss of their geographic isolation once Hydro brought in the roads and heavy equipment with which to build the dams and flood the waterways. Thousands of years of tradition had been destroyed, he said.
MCGILL UNIVERSITY
business professor Karl Moore says Hydro-quebec’s ambitions and success helped beget such major Quebec business institutions as the Caisse de dépôt, Power Corp, Cirque du Soleil, Vidéotron, pharmacy chain Jean Coutu and later Bombardier.
“Previously (the) French were not represented in the business world,” says Moore. “Hydro demonstrated not only that they could take part in business but they were world class: you could be successful. Hydro was seminally important.”
Fifty years after its creation, it is perhaps no longer the icon it once was. But, says Moore, “Quebecers are still proud of Hydro. It’s a key institution, it’s world class, a leading company in the world. We are playing in the big leagues.”
“We’re still proud of it (Hydro),” says minister Gignac. “We’re the envy of people around the world. We have the lowest electricity rates in North America and the smallest carbon footprint per capita.”
But now the baton passes to Premier Jean Charest’s Plan Nord, a 25-year “project of the century” that calls for an $85billion initial investment in roads, hous-
ing and schools to draw investors and exploit the minerals and resources in the north.
“The Plan Nord will be for the coming decades what the Manicouagan and James Bay developments were in the ’60s and ’70s,” Charest has said.
Investments in energy development, mining, forestry, transportation and tourism in the 1.2-million-square-kilometre region — twice the size of France — will create 20,000 jobs a year, generating $162 billion in growth and tax revenues of $14 billion, the government predicts.
But the plan has its detractors. The costs are estimates and no one knows which companies, if any, will be drawn there, even if the roads and infrastructure are built. Already debates are raging over the true costs of the infrastructure.
“Plan Nord is part of a straight line from Hydro in the development of the north,” says Moore. “It seems that developing Quebec’s resources is the way forward. But the devil is in the details.”
So, once again, the plan is for the north to feed the south, for the ambitious development projects to bring not only riches but pride, another chapter in the ongoing saga of “maîtres chez nous.”