H. V. Nelles

The State and the Provision of Electricity in Canada and Australia, 1880–1965

Both Canada and Australia are vast, transcontinental nations, with much of their territory empty and inhospitable to settlement. Like Argentina, New Zealand and the United States, they are ‘regions of recent settlement’, similar in natural resources and the roles they play as exporters of primary products.1 Populated almost entirely by Europeans, mainly of British stock, the two former British colonies share political traditions and governmental forms which underlie their federal and parliamentary systems. Thus it is only natural to expect that there should be certain, marked institutional similarities between the two countries.

Private Property in Peril: Ontario Businessmen and the Federal System, 1898–1911

Two opposing groups of business interests — large, internationally-oriented financiers on the one hand and local businessmen and small manufacturers on the other — engaged in economically-based political conflict over the proper nature of the federal system in early twentieth-century Canada. The national financial community proved unable to protect its conception of private property rights by legal and political means at the national level, and the resulting victory of provincial rather than federal control over property rights made possible the creation of a publicly owned hydro-electric system in Ontario.