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:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.
In Beverly Hills ... they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.”
—Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)