Atlantic Canada has all the energy assets to provide for a bright future. But you have to deal with some short-term pain for long-term gain.

by Jim Meek

It’s spring. The sap is running. So are the satraps and bureaucrats on the main streets of Atlantica in their retro tracksuits. And because it’s spring, and because our spirits soar, I choose to believe that we’re stumbling toward ecstasy.

Yes, I now suspect that Eastern Canada will solve the energy puzzle and, in doing so, conquer the future. This idea depends, I concede, on a couple of wild assumptions. Here’s the first one: Mark Steyn, the climate-change denier who scribes irresistible diatribes for Maclean’s magazine, is wrong and 30,000 scientists are right. It is getting warmer out there, no matter what has happened in the past dozen years or so.

I say this reluctantly, because I know that Steyn and his fellow travellers (including Rex Murphy) would be more fun at a dinner party than the authors of the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Second wild idea: even climate Steyniers have to concede that we’re running out of cheap oil and gas. Jeff Rubin, the former chief economist with CIBC World Markets, explains the mathematics of this argument in his newish book, Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller. Rubin says we’re consuming three times as much oil as we’re discovering. This he calls a “surefire” formula for higher energy prices.

Without a magic “unobtanium” or cheap oil, what’s a poor old region like Eastern Canada to do? Well, it has to have access to energy that is cheap and relatively green now or destined to become both over the long haul.

I have news. We’re already there.

Quebec has been harnessing energy from northern rivers since the 1960s, when a young cabinet minister named René Lévesque announced that the province would privatize its electrical dams. The whole concept of “Power from the North” still seemed like a delusion of grandeur in 1985, when another late Quebec premier, Robert Bourassa, used the phrase as the title of his book on the potential of the province’s great northern rivers.

Quebec now controls one of the largest storehouses of renewable hydroelectric energy in the world, enough to keep the lights on from Manhattan to Shawinigan. As energy projects go, hydro dams have a place in heaven. I’m hardly going to say these have no environmental impact, because some of the projects in northern Quebec have flooded tracts of land larger than Prince Edward Island.

But spilling water over dams to turn turbines is more carbon neutral than breathing. And the real economic beauty of using moving water as a fuel is that the costs don’t go up over time. This makes audacious hydro developments, such as the Churchill Falls project completed in 1967, look brilliant over time, even if they seemed too expensive to build at the outset. Newfoundland’s first premier, Joey Smallwood, couldn’t raise enough money to make the project work, and many Newfoundlanders still believe he made a deal with the devil (Quebec or Ottawa, depending on whom you ask) to get it done.

Today Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams is determined to take a direct equity interest in a proposed new hydro project on the Lower Churchill. Call Williams an enemy of Quebec if you like, but he understands the virtues of the Quebec strategy pursued 48 years ago by Lévesque. So, it seems, do political leaders in the Maritime provinces. This helps explain why New Brunswick danced with Quebec in an attempt to secure long-term access to affordable hydropower. And why Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter continues to champion tidal power.

Dexter loves to repeat the fact that the daily flow of tides through the Bay of Fundy represents more untapped energy than does all the water flowing down all the freshwater rivers of the planet. Is tidal power expensive and challenging to produce, in the short term? You bet it is. But this region will pay a steeper price for failing to exploit its natural advantage by harnessing the energy of water moving through our northern rivers and rushing past us in the ebb and flow of southern coastal tides.

We can build a future on this renewable resource. Understanding the concept is as simple as turning on a tap and watching water fall.

Jim Meek is a freelance writer and consultant with Bristol. He can be reached at jmeek@bristolgroup.ca.