History
Historically, wood fires and human muscles provided the bulk of energy in Canada. When foreigners think of Canada the log cabin and campfire often spring to mind. The arrival of the horse from Europe by way of Mexico substituted animals for humans in the transportation system, initially to the benefit of the native people, but later to their disadvantage. Subsequent developments in energy sources, like coal and petroleum, paralleled and in some cases preceded those in the United States. In 1846, Abraham Gesner built the world's first refinery producing kerosene from coal in Nova Scotia, and in 1853 moved to the United States to build more refineries there.
When the four original provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario joined together to form the Dominion of Canada in 1867, the fathers of Confederation wrote a constitution that (in theory) created a country with a strong central government and relatively weak provincial governments. They did so in reaction to the recent Civil war in the United States, where (in theory at least) the states are very powerful and the federal government is weak. In doing so, they assigned control over and ownership of natural resources to the provinces. In 1870 the British government transferred the territory controlled by the Hudson's Bay Company to the new Canadian government control, a vast area of 4 million square kilometres which included most of the modern provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. At the time, the largest industry in it was the fur trade, which was under federal control, and the Canadian government was unaware of the enormous mineral wealth it held, particularly the massive quantities of fossil fuels toward the western margins and the hydroelectric potential of the rivers flowing into Hudson Bay. As a result of future developments, this gave the governments of the provinces, particularly that of Alberta, far more wealth and power than the founders originally envisioned.
Read more about this topic: Energy In Canada
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)