In the 1970s, the French Canadians bulldozed a few Inuit tribes off huge swathes of sub-Arctic land in order to make way for what was the largest hydroelectric project in the world at the time. This was the James Bay project, located 600 miles north of Montreal. Construction ensued several phases over 20 years, but when it was all said and done, the series of dams created a power capacity of 15 Gigawatts, which is the equivalent of 13 Seabrook nuclear reactors. All of this for a province with the population of 9 million, only slightly larger than Massachusetts. Rate payers in Quebec pay $0.05 USD/kWh while rate payers in New Hampshire pay a staggering $0.25 USD/kWh. Yes, Quebec’s electric bills are one-fifth of ours. Quebec quickly became the Saudi Arabia of electricity in North America.
⚡️Hydroelectricity and Quebec Nationalism
The plot gets thicker. Hydroelectricity and Quebec nationalism are heavily intertwined. A left-wing provincial government was elected in the early 1960s and a man by the name of Réné Lévesque lead the charge to nationalize the power companies across the province. The private electric companies were largely under anglophone management and the left-wing French population saw this as their chance to drive a wedge in English rule. The corporate elite in Quebec up until the 1980s were primarily English speaking. There had always been a French majority in the entire province since colonial times, but the English created many settlements after the French defeat on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 and the French-Québecois (pronounced: “ke-BEK-wa”) correspondingly have had a victim complex ever since. There were whole regions with English majorities in Quebec up until the 1980s, including the Eastern Townships around Magog, near the Vermont and New Hampshire borders with Quebec. The province increasingly instituted policies to encourage the English Canadians to move out.
Lévesque’s campaign was steeped in nationalist rhetoric. Slogans like “Maintenant ou jamais: maîtres chez nous” (“Now or never: masters of our own house”) adorned posters featuring fists clutching bolts of lightning. This channeled communist revolutionary symbolism also employed by the labor movement and Black Lives Matter. The campaign was a success, the public took the bait to nationalize the electric companies, and the Quebec separatist movement was launched into hyperspace. The province consolidated the nationalized electric companies in 1963 under a province-owned corporation named Hydro-Québec (French pronunciation: “EE-dro KE-bek”). Lévesque later became Premier of Quebec in the late 70s. Premier is the Canadian equivalent of an American governor. The name Réne Levesque is now immortalized on many buildings and street signs throughout the Belle Province.
⚡️The James Bay Project and Quebec-anomics
Robert Bourassa is another character in this plot line and he was also a Quebec nationalist. Bourassa was Premier in the 70s when policy makers considered nuclear for a hot second, but he gave the James Bay hydroelectric plan the green light. They even named a dam after the guy.
Hydro-Quebec is a crown corporation, which is a common scheme in Canada and European countries. The entity itself operates quasi-privately, but the government owns the shares to the corporation. Hydro-Quebec is also a cartel and Quebec is no stranger to cartels as—among many other price controls—they have a maple syrup cartel, no joke. The equivalent of the public utility board in Quebec works in cahoots with Hydro-Quebec to have tight price controls to ensure that electric rates domestically within the province are very low but all subsidized by market pricing for everyone else, including New Englanders and fellow Canadians. It’s surprising the rest of Canada allows Quebec to get away with this. Americans likely wouldn’t tolerate it. Yes, Alaska gives dividend payments to its citizens, but it’s three times smaller than the collective benefit Quebec residents receive from selling excess electricity, not even taking into account that electric rates in Quebec are extraordinarily low to begin with.
Electricity is so cheap in Quebec that most people heat their homes with electricity. Also keep in mind that, after taxes, gasoline costs $5 USD/gallon here.
Where things get very sticky: the large profits from Hydro-Quebec get funneled into government coffers so that they can prop up their social programs, which were quite large by Canadian standards, and especially American standards, even before the James Bay project went online. So anyone starting to think that nationalization was a good idea, think again. Hydro-Québec is the cheap food that feeds their monster of a welfare state. So yes, they have really cheap electricity, but they don’t have vibrant free-enterprise to use it on. It’s a difficult jurisdiction to do serious business in. The Québecois have enriched themselves only to further enslave themselves. Even minuscule market liberalization would do wonders for Quebec since they are already sitting on top of an electric goldmine. New Hampshire has the inverse situation. Any right-of-center economist would go nuts pointing out the flaws with Quebec’s economic model.
⚡️ The Quebec–New England Connection
Where this ties back to New Hampshire is the the Quebec–New England Transmission system. After partially waving the white flag on Seabrook, leadership in NH and MA looked to their French-speaking cousins to the north for more energy. At Faneuil Hall in Boston in 1983 with Premier Réné Levesque present, a deal was signed to build a 900-mile high-voltage direct-current transmission line from the NH/MA border near Nashua, in Ayer, to the Quebec sub-Arctic, next to the James Bay project. The system went online in 1990 and provides about two Seabrooks worth of power to the New England grid.
About 15 years ago, leaders wanted to add a second set of cables to Hydro-Quebec dubbed “Northern Pass”. This project would have added 1.1 MW of power or about 1 Seabrook to the grid. This was at the height of the Obama/Gore green-energy craze and environmentalists built a case against this project, even though many would consider hydro-power to be clean energy. The bigger issue ended up being eminent domain. Many affected property owners weren’t thrilled and honestly I don’t blame them. Northern Pass was officially dead.
Other than a few minor natural gas pipeline proposals, there hasn’t been a large-scale attempt to expand New Hampshire’s energy supply since. The quest to solve New Hampshire’s energy question continues.
⚡️ Further listening
This article was loosely inspired by NHPR’s 4-part miniseries called Powerline on the show Outside/In. It provides a detailed history of Hydro-Quebec and the Quebec nationalist movement, not without typical NPR bias, but it’s still well worth a listen.
