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POWER AT COST: ONTARIO HYDRO AND RURAL ELECTRIFICATION, 1911-1958.
By Keith R. Fleming Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992. xi + 326 pp. Maps, photographs, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $42.95. ISBN 0-7735-0868-6.
Since its organization in 1906, the influence of the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario (HEPC, or, Ontario Hydro) has reached well beyond its most far-flung power lines. Across Canada and in the United States as well, various political actors alternately sanctified and excoriated Ontario Hydro, either as an expansive distributor of cheap and plentiful electricity or as the harbinger of a creeping socialism. In Ontario itself, as one would expect, HEPC's policies generated ample debate, particularly regarding the agency's commitment to operating on a pay-as-you-go basis in both its rate making and in the growth of its distribution network. "Power at cost" proved successful as a promotional slogan for Ontario Hydro. However, as Keith Fleming suggests in this well-crafted monograph, the slogan proved much more difficult to implement as policy.
Power at Cost is a close study of HEPC's lengthy efforts to build and maintain a rural power system in southern Ontario. Fleming ranges across the first half of the twentieth century, from 1911, when the...