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Experts at Work: The Canadian State, North American Environmentalism, and Renewable Energy in an Era of Limits, 1968-1983 by Henry Trim A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (History) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) October 2014 © Henry Trim, 2014ii Abstract This study examines the emergence of sustainable development and renewable energy in Canada during the 1970s and the interplay between environmental politics, state structures, and intellectual discourse which made this emergence possible. The dissertation focuses on two events, the construction of the New Alchemists' Ark on Prince Edward Island with the help of the provincial and federal governments, and the Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources' $600 million (in 1978 dollars) subsidy program for renewable energy. These events provide a lens into North American environmental politics, the policymaking of Pierre Elliott Trudeau's government, and the intellectual influence of Cold War science on the early foundations of sustainability in the 1970s. I make four interconnected arguments about the nature of environmental politics, expert authority, the Trudeau government, and sustainability in this dissertation. First, the Trudeau government embraced the Cold War rationality of the 1960s and attempted to reorganize Canadian governance around objective analysis in an effort to transform policymaking into an exercise in calculation rather than political compromise. This privileging of technical and scientific knowledge that enhanced the authority of experts leads to my second argument. The state's ability to shape discourse through ideology and policy feedbacks encouraged specific forms of environmental politics and, as a result, privileged an influential minority of environmentalists in the 1970s. Third, rather than rejecting or attacking this highly technocratic approach to policy, some environmentalists embraced it. These groups employed the technical knowledge preferred by the Trudeau government – modeling and forecasting – to conceptualize and advocate sustainable development. Fourth, government advisors worked directly with these technocratic environmentalists to champion renewables, thereby making Canadian sustainable development a co-production of government analysts and environmental advocates. Furthermore, the successes of renewable energy and sustainability in the 1970s rested upon the work of Cold War scientists, a formalist approach to rationality, and a belief in the efficacy of planning, as much as environmental concern. iii Preface This dissertation has made substantial use of images and illustrations. When these illustrations have not come from government documents, I have contacted the copyright holders and gained their permission to reproduce the images I have used. The Friends of the Earth granted permission to reproduce images from Amory Lovins and John H. Price's book, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, published by San Francisco: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1975. Nancy Jack Todd, the editor of the Journal of the New Alchemists, has very kindly given permission to reproduce illustrations and photographs from issues of the Journal of the New Alchemists. Denis Meadows, a co-author of The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972), provided permission to reproduce images of the World3 Model's forecasts published in The Limits to Growth. Finally, Stewart Brand has provided permission to reproduce photographs published in his article "The New Class," CoEvolution Quarterly 3 (Spring 1977): 8-39. I would like to thank each of these individuals or organizations for their permission to reproduce their work and for their important contributions to my dissertation. iv Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................. ii Preface ................................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents .................................................................................................................. iv List of Figures ....................................................................................................................... v Abbreviations ......................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ vii Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Trusting in Numbers: The Trudeau Government, Expert Knowledge, and Canadian Energy Policy ....................................................................................................... 30 Chapter 2: An Alternative on Prince Edward Island: Environmentalism, Sustainable Development, and the Campbell Government ..................................................................... 69 Chapter 3: Sustaining Canada: The Science Council of Canada and State Sponsored Environmentalism in the 1970s ............................................................................................ 113 Chapter 4: A Quest for Permanence: John Todd and the New Alchemy Institute ............ 153 Chapter 5: Sustainable Futures: Amory Lovins, Future Studies, and Environmentalism ................................................................................................................. 188 Chapter 6: Models, Networks, and Optimism: Renewable Energy in the Late 1970s ....... 226 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 265 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 272 v List of Figures Figure 1: The Opening of the PEI Ark, September 21, 1976 ................................................ 2 Figure 2: World3 Model Standard Run ................................................................................. 5 Figure 3: A Forecast of Canada's Oil Reserves and Demands ............................................ 49 Figure 4: The EMR Feedback Model .................................................................................... 51 Figure 5: Models of Canadian Energy Reserves ................................................................... 54 Figure 6: Energy Analysis Model .......................................................................................... 65 Figure 7: An Illustration from the Agreement Covering the Development Plan ................. 79 Figure 8: The PEI Ark............................................................................................................ 98 Figure 9: A Schematic of the World3 Computer Model........................................................ 127 Figure 10: The Cover of the Conserver Society Notes .......................................................... 139 Figure 11: A Map of the New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod in the late 1970s ................ 159 Figure 12: Dr. John Todd in 1974 ......................................................................................... 162 Figure 13: The Cover of an Issue of the Journal of the New Alchemists ............................ 171 Figure 14: Ark Bioshelter Energy Flow Diagram ................................................................. 177 Figure 15: Amory Lovins and Herman Kahn at Governor Jerry Brown's Office ............... 189 Figure 16: Calculation of Investment Costs for Nuclear Energy ......................................... 199 Figure 17: Domestic Demand and Availability Forecasts for Oil ........................................ 234 Figure 18: The Operation Sequence of the WATSUN Model .............................................. 240 Figure 19: WATSUN Calculation of Cost Competiveness .................................................... 243 Figure 20: The Meadowvale Solar Home in the Winter of 1977 .......................................... 246 vi Abbreviations Organizations: Economic Council of Canada ECC Prince Edward Island Economic Improvement Corporation EIC Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources EMR Institute of Man and Resources IMR New Alchemy Institute NAI National Energy Board NEB Office of Energy Conservation OEC Research and Development Corporation RAND Science Council of Canada SCC Archives: Iowa State University Special Collections ISUSC Jimmy Carter Library and Museum JCL Library and Archives Canada LAC Prince Edward Island Public Archives and Records Office PEIPARO University of Prince Edward Island Special Collections UPEISC vii Acknowledgments This dissertation owes a huge debt to those who helped assemble the numerous and diverse sources this project relied upon. Archivists, librarians, and government officials in Ottawa, Charlottetown, Ames, and Atlanta were instrumental in this respect. A few went above and beyond the call of professional duty. Leo Cheverie of the University of Prince Edward Island Library and the staff of the Prince Edward Island Public Archives and Records Office deserve special thanks for their hospitality and unfailing assistance. The Honorable Alistair Gillespie, who opened his files at the Library and Archives Canada to me, contributed immeasurably to this dissertation and has my heartfelt thanks. For its helpful provision of copies of the Journal of the New Alchemists, the Green Center of Hatchville, MA, deserves mention as well. Finally, Alan MacEachern, who shared his notes on the Institute of Man and Resources and provided the PEI Archives with his enlightening series of interviews, has my deep gratitude. I have also benefited greatly from the University of British Columbia's generous support. The University Graduate Fellowship, the Phil Lind Fellowship in U.S. Studies, a Graduate Entrance Scholarship, and other funding made my studies possible. Beyond this assistance, the Canadian History Graduate Research Travel Scholarship helped my research trips to the Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa considerably. For this support, as well as teaching opportunities, both the Department of History and UBC as a whole have my thanks. As John Donne famously wrote, no man is an island; a graduate student is even less self-sufficient. This dissertation would not have been possible without the assistance, encouragement, and generosity of a great number of people. First, and foremost on this lengthy list is my dissertation supervisor, Jessica Wang. Your guidance and patience has been instrumental in every stage of this dissertation's years of circumambulations, from its beginning as an entirely different project, through its research, and its many, many, many drafts. By giving your time and sharing your experience, you made the writing process an education and a heck of a lot of fun. It means more than I can say. Many others have also been unselfish with their feedback and encouragement, and I am indebted to them all. The members of my committee at UBC, Jessica, Bob Brain, Tina Loo, and Tamara Myers each aided my research and my growth as a scholar viii immeasurably. The editor extraordinaire, Michel Ducharme, also requires a special thanks for his unstinting assistance and advice about writing. Beyond my committee, Bob McDonald, Eagle Glassheim, Alexei Kojevnikov, Margaret Schabas, Bradley Miller, Carla Nappi, Leslie Paris, Eric Nelles, and Danny Vickers all freely provided direction and support. Thank you all for your help and your contributions to my scholarship and teaching, and, above all making my time at UBC both exciting and challenging. Outside of UBC, I owe a debt of gratitude to Colin Coates, Alan MacEachern, Stephen Bocking, W. Patrick McCray, David Kaiser, Michael Egan, Elizabeth Neswald, Katharine Anderson, Melanie Frappier, Dan MacFarlane, Ryan O'Connor, Jon Clapperton, the NiCHE New Scholars Committee, and the many other colleagues who have shared my interests and commented on my work over the years. My brilliant fellow graduate students in the History Department also contributed immensely to my work and greatly improved my experience at UBC. The list of those who have brightened my time as a PhD student is very long, but Brandon Davis, Patrick Slaney, Denzil Ford, Phil van Huizen, Ken Corbett, John Dingle, Eva Prkachin, Laura Madokoro, Tom Peotto, Chris Larsen, Eric Johnson, Erica German, Sarah Basham, and Stephen Hay deserve special mention. Finally, I must thank my wife, partner, and part-time editor, Christina. This work would not have been possible without your thoughtful assistance and never ending support. You truly deserve the title of "Frau Doktor" from this time forward. To the rest of my family and friends, who have put up with my continual and unsolicited expositions on the Trudeau Government, Cold War science, and the problems with environmentalism, your forbearance has been much appreciated. 1 Introduction Those who are concerned about the future of mankind are haunted by three questions: will there be enough food, will we have enough energy, and can we produce both without destroying the environment; without making the earth a place that is not good to live upon? The Ark – which I have the great pleasure of declaring officially open this morning – the Ark is answering "Yes!" to those three questions. And that is why I consider it a very exciting moment.1 Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau spoke these hopeful words to an excited crowd and curious TV crew on September 21, 1976 at Spry Point, Prince Edward Island (PEI). Trudeau's inspiring address marked the opening of a large futuristic structure, dominated by solar panels, greenhouses, and aquaponics tanks. The PEI Ark, dubbed a "spaceship to the future" by local journalists and heavily funded by the Trudeau government, was the first building of its kind in Canada, and with its solar heaters, wind turbines, and composting toilet it would not be out of place beside contemporary green architecture.2 Designed to replicate a NASA space capsule, the Ark used the latest in ecological science, and its builders promised it would be almost completely sustainable as it recycled its inhabitants' waste while providing them with food and energy in a closed loop of ecological feedback.3 The presence of the Canadian Prime Minister, hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funding, futuristic technology, and promises of long-term sustainability might lead one to expect the involvement of NASA scientists or, at the very least, a leading research university. However, the New Alchemists, a group of scientists dedicated to helping hippies go "back to the land," planned and built the Ark.4 Led by the charismatic biologist John Todd, the New Alchemists convinced federal and provincial governments 1 Pierre Elliott Trudeau, "From Urgencies to Essentials," in Soft Tech, eds. J. Baldwin and Stewart Brand (San Francisco: Point, 1978), 166-167. 2 Walter Stewart, "The Ark: Prince Edward Island's Spaceship to the Future," The Atlantic Advocate 67, 1 (September 1976): 42-44; John Todd, "Tomorrow is Our Permanent Address," Journal of the New Alchemists 4 (1977): 85-106. 3 John Todd, An Ark for Prince Edward Island: A Family Sized Food, Energy, and Housing Complex, Including Integrated Solar, Windmill, Greenhouse, Fish Culture, and Living Components (Woods Hole MA: New Alchemy Institute, 1975), New Alchemy Vertical File, UPEISC. 4 "New Alchemy Institute, Articles of Incorporation, San Diego, California, 1970," Box 1, Folder 11, New Alchemy Institute Records (NAI Records), ISUSC. 2 to fund their work and make their futuristic structure the centerpiece of a new approach to development designed to ensure long-term environmental sustainability and economic growth in the face of the 1970s oil shocks. Concern about "the future of mankind" motivated more than just pioneering experiments with green architecture. Two years later, Alistair Gillespie, the minister of the Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources (EMR), announced a $600 million (in 1978 dollars) subsidy program intended to create a Canadian solar heating industry.5 The EMR's plan seems even more astonishing given the relative novelty of solar heating in Canada, where experimentation with the technology only began in 1971, and it remained little known into the mid 1970s.6 Disregarding solar technology's unconventionality, Gillespie and the federal government promised the new solar heating industry would 5 When adjusted for inflation the amount equals $1.9 billion today. This calculation was made using the Bank of Canada's inflation calculator. Bank of Canada, Inflation Calculator, accessed February 16, 2014, http://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/related/inflation-calculator/. 6 E.W. Hoffman, "Four Years Operation of a Solar House" (paper presented at The Potential of Solar Energy for Canada organized by the Solar Energy Society of Canada in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada and the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Ottawa, Canada, June 2-3, 1975). See also Henry Trim, "Brief Periods of Sunshine: A History of the Canadian Government's Attempt to Build a Solar Heating Industry, 1974-1983," Scientia Canadensis 34, 2 (2011): 29-49. Figure 1: The Opening of the PEI Ark, September 21, 1976. From left to right: Premier Alexander Campbell, John Todd, Nancy Jack Todd, and Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Nancy Jack Todd, "Opening of the Arks," Journal of the New Alchemists 4 (1977) 3 provide tens of thousands of jobs for Canadians and supply roughly five percent of the country's energy needs by the 1990s, a scant twelve years in the future.7 The federal government did not simply pick this ambitious program out of the air. Environmental groups and government advisors, often using sophisticated computer analyses, worked together to convince EMR that renewable energy would dominate the future. Amory Lovins, a member of Friends of the Earth, used futurology to rethink mainstream energy policy and champion a shift to renewable energy. He had a substantial influence on this groundbreaking plan for sustainable development by helping to build a consensus around both renewable energy and the utility of alternative approaches to development.8 The surprising transformation of renewables from a set of little known technologies to the recipient of more than half-a-billion dollars in funding also had roots in the conserver society. The Science Council of Canada, a crown corporation staffed by scientists and engineers that championed scientifically informed policymaking and the development of "national technologies," popularized this approach to development.9 Fear of environmental limits and economic collapse connected the politicians, hippies, bureaucrats, scientists, and environmentalists who constructed and implemented these audacious programs of sustainable development. In the 1970s a shared form of rationality, approach to governance, and set of technical practices mediated these actors' concerns about the future. Their shared ideology grew out of the pressures of the early Cold War, which created a very specific understanding of rationality as it sought to contain the irrationalities of human reason and mute political disagreement.10 Under the aegis of the Cold War, natural and social scientists redefined rationality as a machine-like ability to employ algorithms to maximize benefit while minimizing risk and used this idealization of human behavior to guide both military strategy and civilian policymaking.11Above all, this understanding of reason and its emphasis on abstract and 7 Ronald Anderson, "Solar Energy," Globe and Mail, July 6, 1978. 8 For an introduction to Amory Lovins' work see Lovins, "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken," Foreign Affairs 55, 1 (October 1976): 65-96. 9 J. Ann Lévi-Lloyd, "Canada's Search for a Science Policy and the Role of the Science Council of Canada in Articulating Science Policy Issues from 1966 to 1980" (PhD diss., Université de Montréal, 1988). 10 Andrew Pickering, "Cyborg History and the WWII Regime," Perspectives on Science 3, 1 (1995):1-48; Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 11 Paul Erickson, Judy Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturn, and Michael Gordin, How Reason Almost Lost its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (Chicago: University of 4 formalist processes encouraged attempts to transform decision making into exercises in calculation. Seeming to promise a means to end political conflict and to improve governance, this conception of rationality, with its emphasis on technical knowledge, spread from the RAND Corporation and the Pentagon to general North American political discourse. In Canada, this hyper-rationality defined politics under the Trudeau government. Working to depoliticize policy and improve governance, the Trudeau government centralized power and privileged technical knowledge in an attempt to transform policymaking into reasoned debate governed by "knowledge power."12 For those committed to this ideology the practice of quantitative modeling, most notably scenario building, provided the means of analyzing the present and gaining the insight into the future necessary for long-term planning.13 The Club of Rome and its famous Limits to Growth report, which helped define political discourse in the 1970s, provides perhaps the best example of this abstract rationalism in action. Designed by renowned computer programmer and former defense scientist Jay Forrester, the World3 model that Limits to Growth used in its forecasts was a breathtaking exercise in abstraction.14 Breaking the world down into five "levels" (population, resources, industry, food, and pollution), the computer program calculated systems of feedback to construct the first global model and forecast the dire consequences of exponential growth more than a hundred years in the future.15 Models and their abstract and formalist approach dominated two of the central debates of the Chicago Press, 2013); Jennifer Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); David Jardini, "Out of the Blue Yonder: The Transfer of Systems Thinking from the Pentagon to the Great Society, 1961-1965," in Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering During WWII and After, eds. Agatha Hughes and Thomas Hughes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 12 Peter Aucoin, "Organizational Change in the Machinery of Canadian Government: From Rational Management to Brokerage Politics," Canadian Journal of Political Science 19, 1 (March 1986): 3-27; Richard French, How Ottawa Decides: Planning and Industrial Policy Making 1968-1984 (Toronto: J. Lorimer and Co., 1984). 13 Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Roger Levien, "RAND, IIASA, and the Conduct of Systems Analysis," in Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering During WWII and After, eds. Agatha Hughes and Thomas Hughes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 14 Fernando Elichirigoity, Planet Management: Limits to Growth, Computer Simulation, and the Emergence of Global Spaces (Evanston, IL.: Northwestern University Press, 1999). 15 Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth: A Report to the Club of Rome on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972), 89. 5 1970s as they helped push the environment into mainstream political discussion and framed the energy crisis that came to define the decade. Analysts interpreted the 1973 OPEC embargo and price shocks as the new normal and constructed forecasts, first of scarcity and then the end of oil. As these models defined the future and created concern, they also provided those able to use them with a means to outline an alternative – sustainable development – and use a politically privileged methodology to construct compelling arguments for this alternative. Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars involved, the highly public government support for sustainable development, and the guiding hand of hyper-rationalist forecasting and governance, this episode has remain unexamined. My analysis of the combination of political power, rationalist ideology, technical knowledge, and environmental advocacy contributes significantly to environmental history, Canadian political history, and the history of science. It demonstrates the active participation of the state in the first programs of sustainable development, highlights the significant influence of the state on environmental politics, and offers a state-centered approach to studying the Figure 2: The World3 Model Standard Run. Note the rapid collapse it projects in the late twentieth century. Donella H. Meadows, et al., The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972) 6 actions of important, but often overlooked, environmentalists. Similarly, countercultural scientists' and technocratic environmentalists' embrace of rationalist ideology and technical knowledge developed by military scientists during the Cold War challenges the common perception that 1960s environmentalists abhorred modern technology and suggests that technical practices, such as futurology, defined environmentalists' successful advocacy of renewable energy and the formulation of sustainability in the 1970s. This analysis of hyper-rationalism rooted in Cold War research also contributes to Canadian political history, by expanding the existing scholarly discussion of the Trudeau government's attempt to use scientific knowledge and expert authority to rationalize policymaking and depoliticize politics and the ways in which these efforts framed Canadian politics during the decade. As this scientism privileged certain political actors, namely those able to manipulate technical knowledge, it reshaped political discourse and shifted the foundations of political power. Paying attention to the influence of this specific interpretation of rationality and the application of technical knowledge, which had a central role in pioneering programs of sustainable development, also extends analysis of expert authority and quantification by illustrating the politicization of knowledge and its employment as a tool in political debate. Just as importantly, the fundamental significance of modeling to the construction of alternative energy policies challenges the common dismissal of forecasting as an inaccurate tool of obfuscation by demonstrating the role of modeling and future studies in developing new policies and challenging the status quo in the 1970s. Environmentalism, the State, and Technical Knowledge This dissertation's study of the employment of highly technical analysis, the shared commitment to Cold War rationality, and the activity of the Canadian government at both the federal and provincial levels, which enabled the extensive renewable energy program and the construction of the PEI Ark, redefines historical analysis of environmentalism in two significant ways. First, it suggests that the Canadian state played a significant role in environmentalism's intellectual development and actively participated in Canadian environmental politics during the 1970s. Second, it underlines the importance of technical knowledge to modern environmentalism, including 7 technologies such as energy analysis and futurology that are not commonly associated with environmental activism. This dissertation understands environmentalism as any effort to protect the natural environment though technological, philosophical, or political action. I embrace this broad view of environmentalism to highlight the emergence of environmental activity from policies and approaches not popularly associated with environmentalism and not always designed exclusively to preserve the environment. This approach more effectively incorporates influential, but atypical, environmental actors, such as the New Alchemists and the Science Council of Canada, which helped shape Canadian environmentalism in the 1970s, but have received little analysis. Although the New Alchemists and many of the other groups this dissertation examines fall outside the norms of environmentalism in the period, their influence on environmental politics and the role the played in the emergence of sustainable development in Canada means they must be taken seriously as environmentalist actors and participants in Canadian environmental debates. Just as importantly, their use of technical knowledge to justify their activities and generate support for their projects further expands scholarly analysis of the philosophical and political foundations of environmentalism. Environmental historians have long debated the place of science in modern environmentalism. Seeing the environmental movement as a successor to the peace movement and the New Left, environmental historian Frank Zelko has drawn on Theodore Roszak's classic, The Making of a Counter Culture, to argue that in the 1970s environmentalists viewed technology with suspicion and associated science with the military industrial complex and the construction of nuclear weapons.16 Although not all historians go as far as Zelko, his work is part of a broader approach to studying environmentalism that connects it to criticism of modern technology and the application of New Left inspired tactics of protest.17 More recently, however, environmental 16 Frank Zelko, "Making Greenpeace: The Development of Direct Action Environmentalism in British Columbia," BC Studies, Special Double Issue "On the Environment," 142/143 (Summer/Autumn 2004), 214. 17 Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993); Stephen Dale, McLuhan's Children: The Greenpeace Message and the Media (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1996); Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Adam Rome, "'Give Earth a Chance': The Environmental Movement and the Sixties," Journal of American History 90, 2 (September, 2003): 525-8 historians and historians of science have challenged this analysis through a broader reassessment of the counterculture's politics and its relationship with technology in the 1960s and 1970s.18 Environmental historian Andrew Kirk, for example, has outlined an alternative assessment of what he calls "countercultural environmentalism" that highlights its pragmatic approach to technology and even suggests leaders of countercultural environmentalism drew on long standing themes of technological progress to argue that innovation and the extensive application of green technology were central to any attempt to protect the environment and provide Americans with fulfilling lives.19 Outside of this debate over the values the many different groups or philosophical approaches to environmentalism have assigned to technology, scholars have also examined the influence of scientific research and scientist activists on environmentalism in the 1960s and beyond.20 Historian Michael Egan, for example, convincingly shows that biologist Barry Commoner, along with other activist scientists, substantially expanded environmentalism by educating the American public about the dangers of nuclear fallout and communicating the importance of the precautionary principle within modern industrial societies.21 As a result of these efforts as well as the popularization of ecology as a "subversive subject" in the late 1960s, the science based activism of ecologists, biologists, and chemists has largely framed environmental historians' analysis of science.22 While fundamental to the history of modern environmentalism, this focus obscures the importance of other forms of scientific and technical knowledge to environmental thought and action, particularly the practices of futurology and 555; Philip van Huizen, "Flooding the Border: Development, Politics, and Environmental Controversy in the Canadian-U.S. Skagit Valley" (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2013). 18 David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011); Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007); Peder Anker, From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2010). 19 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 11. For an excellent discussion of the theme of technological progress, see David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 20 Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Stephen Bocking, Ecologists and Environmental Politics: A History of Contemporary Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 21 Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 49. 22 Paul Sears, "Ecology: A Subversive Subject," BioScience 14, 7 (July 1964): 11-13. 9 quantitative modeling. As Jacob Hamblin has suggested, the focus on ecology and activism has led environmental historians to overlook the connections between environmentalism and Cold War military science, particularly the computer modeling involved in the development of global environmental analysis.23 Expanding upon Hamblin's work, I show how the practices of futurology and quantitative modeling significantly affected environmentalism by demonstrating how environmentalists employed models to understand the world and how this technical approach framed their analysis, lent it authority, and allowed them to communicate their concerns to policymakers who relied on these forms of investigation. My analysis also suggests that this influential minority of environmentalists employed other forms of Cold War science to experiment with methods of architecture and sustainable agriculture suited to the limited world of "spaceship earth."24 Todd and the New Alchemists designed the PEI Ark by using "cabin ecology" research developed through NASA's experiments with space capsules during the 1960s.25 In a similar vein Amory Lovins, as I mentioned above, deftly employed the technical practices of energy analysis to critique energy experts' calculations. He also built futurological scenarios to illustrate what he believed were the horrible consequences of embracing nuclear power as well as the substantial advantages that he thought would accrue from renewable energy. Without the future studies pioneered by military scientists at the RAND Corporation, a central institution of Cold War military science, Lovins could not have carried out his analysis. These examples of the combination of complex technology and rationalistic ideology inherent in these efforts to live in a sustainable way were characteristic of a technocratic undercurrent present in some strands of environmentalism during the 1970s. Besides broadening environmental historians' study of technical knowledge and underlining the significance of previously overlooked methods of inquiry, my research rethinks the foundations of sustainability by connecting it to Cold War science and 23 Jacob Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 24 Peder Anker, "Buckminster Fuller as Captain of Spaceship Earth," Minerva 45, 4 (December 2007): 417-434. 25 Peder Anker, "The Ecological Colonization of Space," Environmental History 10, 2 (April 2005): 239-268. 10 modernization. I argue that the idea of sustainability developed out of a combination of environmental concern and computer assisted analysis of the future and received significant ideological support from attempts to manage human society with machine-like efficiency and rationally direct its development.26 The central importance of Cold War military research initially undertaken in the service of the vast geopolitical struggle also suggests that the state had a more active and influential role in modern environmentalism than scholars have previously recognized because of the emphasis scholars, such as Andrew Kirk, have place on environmentalism's libertarian sensibilities.27 The necessity of rethinking the importance of the state to modern environmentalism is an odd task. Environmental historians have skillfully examined the influence of the state upon the natural world and the complex ways in which state power has framed human interactions with the environment.28 Tina Loo and Meg Stanley, for instance, have brilliantly analyzed how local environmental knowledge, state planning, and communities of globally transient experts shaped dam building in Canada.29 This extensive and insightful analysis of the state, however, has yet to figure prominently in environmental historians' study of postwar environmentalism.30 Instead of drawing on analysis of the state, scholars of environmentalism adopt an approach that political sociologist Theda Skocpol has described as "society centered."31 26 Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 27 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 18. 28 Tina Loo, "People in the Way: Modernity, Environment, and Society on the Arrow Lakes," BC Studies 142/143 (Summer 2004): 161-196; Daniel MacFarlane, To the Heart of the Continent: The Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014); Dean Bavington, Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010); Martin Melosi, Effluent America: Cities, Industry, Energy, and the Environment (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001); Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999); Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 29 Tina Loo and Meg Stanley, "An Environmental History of Progress: Damming the Peace and Columbia Rivers," The Canadian Historical Review 92, 3 (September 2011): 399-427. 30 The state figures much more prominently in histories of earlier forms of environmental protection and management, such as the conservation movement of the Progressives. See Brian Balogh, "Scientific Forestry and the Roots of the Modern American State: Gifford Pinchot's Path to Progressive Reform," Environmental History 7, 2 (April 2002):198-225. 31 See Skocpol, "Bringing the State Back in: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research," in Bringing the State Back In, eds. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Peter Evans and Daniel Carpenter, among others, have expanded upon Skocpol's 11 As a result, the literature on environmentalism has largely dismissed the state as an independent actor and instead conceptualized it as an expression of society or as a prize fought over and controlled by competing social forces – often business interests and environmental movements.32 The society centered approach has led scholars to understand environmentalism as a social movement and to focus their analysis on how it caused social and cultural change that reshaped expectations and forced policy modification.33 Society centered analysis has helped historians investigate the myriad ways that environmentalism has transformed western views of the environment and the means with which concerned citizens have mobilized to effect change. This focus on social change at the expense of state agency, however, has sometimes led to a narrow understanding of both the environmental actors and the structures that shaped environmental politics. In the Canadian context, historians have often cited Prime Minster Pierre Trudeau's avid canoeing as part of Canadians' changing "life styles" and the transformation of their approach to the environment, but scholars have largely ignored the Trudeau government's profound effect on Canadian politics during the period that saw the blossoming of Canadian environmental advocacy.34 In fact, the only political scholar who has attempted an extensive examination of the impact the Canadian state had on environmentalism, Kathryn Harrison, assumed changes in public opinion dictated the state's interests.35 While she offers an excellent analysis of the constraints the structure of work by arguing that political outcomes should be understood as co-productions of political and social factors. See Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862-1928 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). 32 Paul Milazzo, who examines the significance of the state to American environmental action in the 1960s, is one of the few scholars who focuses on the state as an active participant environmentalism. See Milazzo, Unlikely Environmentalists: Congress and Clean Water, 1945-1972 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006). 33 In Beauty, Health and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Samuel Hays provides a good example of this approach. The work of Robert Gottlieb similarly focuses directly on the movement culture of environmentalism. See Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring. 34 Neil Forkey, Canadians and the Natural Environment to the Twenty-First Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 102-103. Jennifer Read similarly approaches environmentalism as a social movement connected to student protest. See Read, "'Let us heed the voice of youth': Laundry Detergents, Phosphates and the Emergence of the Environmental Movement in Ontario," Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 7, 1 (1996), 227-250. 35 Kathryn Harrison, Passing the Buck: Federalism and Canadian Environmental Policy (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1996). 12 confederation placed on federal action, Harrison's narrow definition of environmental activity – passing legislation directly related to pollution or preservation – and her focus on public opinion as the primary motivation for governmental action artificially confined the state's agency. For example, her account overlooks the influence of the state on political discourse as well as the significance of energy and development policy to environmentalism. By taking the state seriously as an actor, this dissertation illustrates the important, and occasionally central, role the government sometimes played in Canadian environmentalism in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Focusing on the Canadian state as an organization with agency and a substantial influence on political culture, I analyze how state actors at the federal and provincial levels participated in environmental debates, contributed to environmental groups' intellectual development, and framed Canadian environmental politics. In particular, I argue that pioneering programs of sustainable development emerged from the government's efforts to plan development and its ideological commitment to employing technical knowledge to reshape Canadian society and politics. The PEI Ark, for instance, emerged because the provincial Premier was able to mobilize state power in support of a program of sustainable development that he believed would benefit his province both economically and environmentally. Rationalist Ideology, Technical Knowledge, and the Trudeau Government The Trudeau government dominated Canadian politics from the end of the late 1960s until the early 1980s. It presided over the culmination of the Canadian social welfare state, profoundly reshaped the structure of the Canadian state, and outlined a conception of Canadian federalism that resulted in open conflict with the provinces over energy policy and the repatriation of the Canadian constitution.36 As a result, the Trudeau legacy still shapes contemporary Canadian politics. Indeed, the fascinating and polarizing figure of Trudeau himself has a dominant place in the historical analysis of Canadian 36 Donald Savoie, Governing from the Center: The Concentration of Power in Canadian Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Peter Aucoin, "Organizational Change in the Machinery of Canadian Government: From Rational Management to Brokerage Politics," Canadian Journal of Political Science 19, 1 (March 1986): 3-27; Richard French, How Ottawa Decides: Planning and Industrial Policy Making 1968-1984 (Toronto: J. Lorimer and Co., 1984). 13 politics in the period.37 Biographies and studies explore this towering and complex figure and analyze the incongruencies of his romantic and rebellious public image and his personal commitment to rational action, among other aspects of his personality and politics.38 Historians have been less interested in the ideology of his government and how it affected Canadian politics in the 1970s.39 The work of Canadian political scientists, however, suggests that by setting the terms of political debate through its privileging those able to manipulate technical knowledge, the ideology and organization of the government profoundly affected policy, particularly energy policy and economic development.40 Furthermore, the French Canadian literature emphasizes the growing importance of technocratic management in Canadian politics of the period.41 To build on this analysis and move away from personality-dominated accounts of the Trudeau government, I draw extensively on the work of Theda Skocpol. Voicing a need for an alternative methodology to analytical outlooks focused on social or cultural forces, Skocpol has outlined a state centered approach and highlighted how it enables a more complete analysis of states as actors in their own right and how their institutional structures shape politics.42 Her analysis forms the foundation of my approach to politics throughout my dissertation, particularly her emphasis on the ability of the state to mould political discourse. To paraphrase Skocpol, the state matters because its organizational configuration and its actions shape political culture, which in turn privileges specific 37 John English, Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Toronto: A.A. Knopf Canada, 2009); John English, Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Toronto: A.A. Knopf Canada, 2007); Andrew Cohen and J.L. Granatstein, Trudeau's Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1999); Kenneth McDonald, His Pride, Our Fall: Recovering from the Trudeau Revolution (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1995); Kevin Christiano, Pierre Elliot Trudeau: Reason Before Passion (Toronto: ECW Press, 1994); Stephen Clarkson, Trudeau and Our Times (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990). 38 Kevin Christiano, Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Reason Before Passion (Toronto: ECW Press, 1994); Kristy Holmes, "Negotiating Citizenship: Joyce Wieland's Reason over Passion," in The Sixties: Passion, Politics, and Style, ed. Dimitry Anastakis (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2008). 39 During the 1970s political journalists discussed Trudeau and his government's impact on political culture extensively. See George Radwanski, Trudeau (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1978) and Richard Gwyn, The Northern Magnus: Pierre Trudeau and Canadians, 1958-1980 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1980). 40 G. Bruce Doern and Glen Toner, The Politics of Energy: The Development and Implementation of the NEP (Toronto: Methuen, 1985); Donald Savoie, Visiting Grandchildren: Economic Development in the Maritimes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). 41 Jean-Jacques Simard, La Longue Marche des Technocrates (Montreal: Les Editions Cooperatives Albert Saint-Martin, 1979). 42 Theda Skocpol, "Bringing the State Back In: Retrospect and Prospect," Scandinavian Political Studies 31, 3 (2008): 110. 14 ideas and groups over others, thus making it possible to raise certain political issues or policy approaches, but not others.43 In short, the state is the primary determinant of political culture, and it frames both how policies are discussed and which are likely to succeed. By drawing on Skocpol, I am able to demonstrate the importance of Cold War science – particularly its attempts to discover and institute rational policymaking processes – to Canadian political discourse under the Trudeau government. The ideological preeminence of objective knowledge and scientific analysis enhanced the political power of expert advisors and made technical knowledge a valuable tool within Canadian political discourse during the 1970s. My emphasis on the connections between the rationalism of the Trudeau government and Cold War science expands on existing accounts by highlighting the application of formalist theories of decision-making designed to systematize and improve decision making, and by showing how the Trudeau government attempted to transform Canadian governance by depoliticizing the policy process to ensure that decisions relied upon the objective analysis of facts rather than bureaucratic inertia or political favoritism. Central to my analysis is the failure of the government's efforts to depoliticize Canadian politics, a common outcome of such efforts to make politics efficient and systematic.44 This point, however, is only the beginning of my examination. A discourse that privileged technical knowledge continued to dominate governmental judgment and shape politics. Guided by historian of science Theodore Porter's study of quantification and expert authority and Skopcol's focus on the state's influence, I argue that rather than depoliticizing politics, this discourse enhanced the power of groups equipped to manipulate technical knowledge and claims to objectivity.45 In short, the Trudeau government did not make politics a process of objective judgment founded in fact, but 43 Skocpol "Bringing the State Back in," 21. In Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, Skocpol expands her analysis of how the state influences the capacity and goals of social groups through its privileging of specific approaches and policy feedbacks, which affects future decisions. See Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 44 Thomas Stapleford, The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 1880-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 227; French, How Ottawa Decides, 79. 45 Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). 15 rather it made forms of investigation that constructed evidence and promised objectivity – namely futurology and quantitative modeling – powerful tools within Canadian politics. The importance of this technical knowledge and the diverse set of advisors which used it leads me to an expansive understanding of the state. I approach the state as the enduring structures of governance which are able to maintain the legitimacy of their martial, legislative, and administration power. However, these structures are both porous and dynamic. In the 1960s and 1970s the authority of different structures, such as government departments, changed, and the intellectual foundations upon which the state based it decisions were altered. These reforms often blurred the boundaries of the state as advisory bodies which were theoretically meant to operate at arm's length, such as the Science Council of Canada, were closely involved in policy, experts moved in and out of departments, and their advice was incorporated into the policy process. In fact, the Trudeau government's efforts to incorporate scientific knowledge into policy gave experts and advisors substantial authority and, even though they were not always incorporated into the structures of the state, it is difficult to understand political debates or policy decisions in the 1970s without taking their actions into account. By drawing on this inclusive view of the state, I show how its preferences influenced the presentation of environmental ideas, but also enabled those who could mobilize the preferred technical knowledge to take part in political debate and in some instances shape policy. This approach to the state allows me to analyze the influence of state discourse and to extend analysis of Canadian politics in the period. Most importantly, I am able to show how state discourse was constructed and how it gave agency to technically skilled experts willing to work closely with the government. The structure and ideology privileged technically skilled environmental groups, which allowed their studies of Canada's energy future to reshape federal policy and frame commitments to renewable energy. For instance, Amory Lovins drew on this Cold War rationality to analyze energy policy, and his approach and conclusions were widely adopted by both environmentalists and advisors within the Canadian government. In short, the state bounded discussion, but if the desired forms of knowledge were used by networks of bureaucrats and environmentalists they could substantially reshape policy. A state centered approach also allows me to analyze how the government of PEI 16 manipulated federal development policy by appealing to then current theories of modernization in order to direct federal investment into development projects desired by the provincial government.46 In short, the federal government's "objective" policymaking enhanced the power of provincial governments that were able to mobilize the correct expertise and vocabulary. This analysis challenges scholarship which approaches the federal government's efforts to encourage economic development and "modernize" Atlantic Canada as an almost purely federal endeavor by suggesting it underestimates the participation of the provinces and their ability to redirect, if not entirely control, development projects.47 During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the government of PEI proved particularly adept at this method of manipulation when it mobilized the Trudeau government's commitment to regional development and its ideology of rational management by enlisting economists and other development experts to construct policies that attracted tens of millions of dollars in funding.48 The countercultural scientists of the New Alchemists also participated in and benefited from this manipulation of the federal government's modernization efforts by helping to outline policies of local sustainable development, and they earned extensive government funding as a result. My analysis of the state's influence on various environmental groups also highlights the vulnerabilities created by reliance on technical expertise and the manipulation of state discourse. While the Trudeau government remained in power and committed to rationalizing the policy process, it privileged technocratic environmentalists and scientific advisors, thereby giving them substantial political power. The influence of these groups, however, rested on the state. If the government decided to shift its policy goals or change the intellectual and structural foundations around which it made decisions, advisors could quickly find themselves isolated and no longer regarded as useful. Advocates of renewable energy found themselves in this position in the early 46 Richard Phidd and G. Bruce Doern, The Politics and Management of Canadian Economic Policy (Toronto: Macmillan, 1978), 324. For a discussion of development policy on PEI specifically, see Donald Nemetz, "Managing Development," in The Garden Transformed: Prince Edward Island, 1945-1980, eds. Smitheram, Milne, and Dasgupta (Charlottetown: Ragweed Press, 1982). 47 Savoie, Visiting Grandchildren; Miriam Wright, A Fishery for Modern Times: The State and The Industrialization of the Newfoundland Fishery, 1934-1968 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2000). 48 Edward Macdonald, If You're Stronghearted: Prince Edward Island in the Twentieth Century (Charlottetown: PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation, 2000); Wayne MacKinnon, Between Two Cultures: The Alex Campbell Years (Stratford, PEI: Tea Hill Press, 2005). 17 1980s, when the government refocused its energy policy on oil development and clashed with the provinces over the federal government's authority over resource exploitation. Similarly, on PEI, where the provincial government undertook Canada's first program of sustainable development, the programs relied substantially on the political power of Premier Campbell and his closest advisors. When Campbell left office in 1979, these pioneering efforts began to dissolve, and in the 1980s the newly elected government, led by Campbell's political opponents, defunded the primary institution created to oversee experimentation with renewables.49 The environmentalists' efforts to work with the state and the state's own actions were integral to Canadian environmentalism in the 1970s, but the problems the expert environmentalists faced in the 1980s underlines the reality that the power of technical knowledge remains contingent upon the state and, while instrumental, it cannot overcome the power of a hostile government. Expert Authority, Modeling, and Sustainability Although fragile, expert authority and technical knowledge played a fundamental role in Canadian politics during the 1970s. By focusing on the employment of technical knowledge and expert authority in political debates, this dissertation challenges scholarship that argues technical expertise inevitably enhances state power and limits dissent.50 On a more specific level, it also suggests that analysis which focuses on the inaccuracy of futurology and modeling in the 1970s overlooks the fundamental importance of these Cold War techniques to the formulation of sustainable development. In Canada, for instance, solar technologies were not constructed through a development process defined by solar technology itself. Rather, the computerized technologies of energy analysis and economic simulation and the experts who employed them shaped federal efforts to create a solar industry.51 To understand the unusual history of renewable energy and sustainable architecture in the 1970s, it is necessary to take the influence of 49 Alan MacEachern, An Environmental Fable: The Institute of Man and Resources (Charlottetown: Island Studies Press, 2003). 50 See James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Paul Josephson, Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2002); Dean Bavington, Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010). 51 Trim, "Brief Periods of Sunshine." 18 simulation seriously, especially because it operated as the means through which scientists and some environmentalists asserted the bright future of these technologies and outlined detailed programs for their development.52 Focusing on technologically mediated narratives of progress to guide my examination of the New Alchemists and their Ark, I argue that its success rested upon the group's ability to construct networks connecting the counterculture and elite funding organizations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, and leverage their scientific knowledge into extensive financial support. More broadly, my analysis of Canadian efforts to construct a solar industry and experiment with sustainable architecture underlines the importance of projects to predict and manage the future and shows how these techniques defined alternative approaches to development.53 Scholarly analysis of forecasting, however, has tended to move quickly past its capacity to shape policy or encourage experimentation and focus instead on its inaccuracy and its ability to provide a veneer of objectivity to self-serving decisions.54 The very real inaccuracies of energy forecasts, which first predicted Canada had a surplus of natural gas, then a deficit, then a surplus again all in the same decade, has led scholars to note their influence, but dismiss them without examining the longer history and the deeper intellectual and political reasons why simulation had such power in the 1970s.55 To these scholars, technical expertise functions as a tool of domination and almost invariably subverts the democratic process and narrows political debate. To paraphrase John Robinson, a scholar of public policy, energy forecasting functioned not as a means of gathering information and making informed policy, but as a method of hiding political 52 W. Patrick McCray, The Visioneers: How an Elite Group of Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Edward Cornish, "Future Shock and the Magic of the Future," The Futurist 41, 6 (November/December 2007): 43-49; Nik Brown, Brian Rappert, and Andrew Webster ed., Contested Futures: A Sociology of Perspective Technoscience (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000); Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas, and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, eds., Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004). 53 For a discussion of the sometimes problematic explosion in interest that can surround a new technology, see Matthew Eisler, Overpotential: Fuel Cells, Futurism, and the Making of a Power Panacea (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012). 54 John Robinson, "Pendulum Policy: Natural Gas Forecasts and Canadian Energy Policy, 1969-1981," Canadian Journal of Political Science 16, 2 (June 1983): 299-319; Vaclav Smil, Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 55 Robinson, "Pendulum Policy," 310. For a broader discussion of the impact of forecasting see Matthew Connelly, "Future Shock: The End of the World as They Knew It," in The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective, eds. Niall Ferguson et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 19 decisions behind the mantle of objectivity while extending the power of the state.56 While broadly accurate, this view of forecasting, and expert authority more generally, which closely reflects anthropologist and political scientist James Scott's analysis of expert authority, provides a one-sided view of expertise.57 Notably, it undervalues the agency of experts and assumes the state is a monolithic entity without internal conflicts. This analysis might accurately describe an authoritarian state without civil society or countervailing centers of knowledge production, but it does not describe politics in postwar Canada. Scholars of expertise within the history of science provide a more nuanced approach useful to investigating the complex politics of technical knowledge and expert authority in the 1970s. These scholars' central argument, which guides my work, is that expertise and the production of technical knowledge do not stop political debate.58 Even the production of a single metric, such as the cost of living, can enable decades of fervent political debate.59 Rather than transforming policy into a formal process of calculation, experts' construction of quantitative metrics expands and complicates political debate by producing points of disagreement and introducing new actors. As political theorist Yaron Ezrahi suggests, the state's employment of scientific or technical knowledge both enhances and limits state power, as it allows the state to draw on the authority of expertise to legitimate its actions, but also forces the state to adhere to the practices of the expert community or risk losing the ability to claim expert status.60 In short, the state's employment of expertise and technical knowledge neither silences debate nor depoliticizes politics, but rather it expands political conflicts by enhancing the authority of those able to establish themselves as experts and employ privileged technical knowledge. 56 John Robinson and Clifford Hooker, "Future Imperfect: Energy Policy and Modeling in Canadian Institutional Mandates and Constitutional Conflict," in The Politics of Energy Forecasting: A Comparative Study of Energy Forecasting in Western Europe and North America, eds. Thomas Baumgartner and Atle Midttun (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 57 Scott, Seeing Like a State. 58 See Porter, Trust in Numbers; Stapleford, The Cost of Living in America; Michael Bernstein, A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 59 Stapleford, The Cost of Living in America. 60 Yaron Ezrahi, The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 20 The use of futurology and simulation models by environmentalists, such as Amory Lovins, to enter the energy debates of the 1970s and introduce arguments for renewable energy illustrates how forecasting broadened political debate and the complex politics of expertise. Rather than simply allowing the state to ignore criticism, futurology and economic forecasting enabled environmentalists and advocates of renewables to criticize government policy and construct quantitatively founded arguments capable of appealing to both elite policymakers and Canadian and American citizens. As I indicated above, the Science Council of Canada (SCC) outlined the conserver society, an approach to sustainable development it called on the Trudeau government to adopt, by using simulation.61 The SCC relied heavily on both its scientific authority and the futurological approach of environmentalists and organizations – particularly Lovins and the Club of Rome – to construct its program of sustainable development. Drawing on forecasts of future scarcity and simulations of renewable technologies' development, it argued sustainable development would benefit Canadians more than the Trudeau government's efforts to encourage growth through resource exploitation. This use of simulation buttressed the SCC's authority within the political culture set by the Trudeau government and positioned the Science Council as an expert on Canada's future. With its authority established, it employed formalist approaches of "systems analysis" privileged by the state to examine the future and, on the basis of its analysis, argue rationally for a shift to sustainable development.62 Among its reasons for the shift was the opportunity to create a degree of "technological sovereignty" against American domination and position Canadian industry to benefit from the coming end of oil.63 This reasoning drew heavily on national debates over Canada's neo-colonial relationship with the United States and self-consciously attempted to enhance Canadian scientific research and employ Canadian 61 Science Council of Canada, Report 19, Natural Resource Policy Issues in Canada (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1973), 39. 62 SCC, Natural Resource Policy, 12. 63 G. Bruce Doern, Science and Politics in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1972); G. Brent Clowater, "Canadian Science Policy and the Retreat from Transformative Politics: The Final Years of the Science Council of Canada, 1985-1992," Scientia Canadensis 35, 1-2 (2012): 107-134; Edward Jones-Imhotep, "Communicating the North: Scientific Practice and Canadian Postwar Identity," Osiris 24,1 (2009): 144-164. 21 scientists and engineers.64 These nationalist goals would play a key role in Canadian alternative development in the 1970s. Canadian programs of alternative development in the 1970s do not fit easily into the accepted chronology of sustainable development, which focuses on the 1987 Brundtland Commission and its famous report Our Common Future.65 This circumstance raises the following question: Is it reasonable to refer to Canadian alternative development programs in the 1970s as sustainable development? The concept of "sustainable development" is difficult to precisely define and, as Deb Debal and other scholars of development have argued, elements of the concept are both long standing and politically contentious, which makes any definition problematic.66 Nonetheless, the Brundtland Commission can be said to have set the tone of the United Nations' understanding of sustainability and sustainable development, and the UN's approach continues to dominate contemporary discussions of the concept. The Commission defined "sustainable development" as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."67 Sustainability, in this definition, rested on a compromise between growth and multigenerational access to the necessities for a reasonably healthy and comfortable life. It saw the careful management of resources and the mindful development of technology as central to the successful adaptation of human society to the limits of the natural world. This understanding of sustainability drew heavily upon earlier analyses of the world and its environmental and social problems, most notably Barbara Ward's and René Dubos' Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet, which they wrote for the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment.68 Concerns about the world and its future as well as discussions of how to ensure long-term survival, however, were not confined to the UN or environmental groups. As early as 1968, the Science Council of 64 Stephen Azzi, Walter Gordon and the Rise of Canadian Nationalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999). 65 World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 66 Debal Deb, Beyond Developmentality: Constructing Inclusive Freedom and Sustainability (London: Earthscan, 2009); Ulrich Grober, Sustainability: A Cultural History, trans. Ray Cunningham (Totones, UK: Green Books, 2012), 67 WCED, Our Common Future, 41. 68 Barbara Ward and René Dubos, One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972). 22 Canada began to voice concern about resource depletion and suggested the need for programs designed to conserve or replenish resources.69 In the early 1970s, the Science Council fleshed out its concerns about the future and called for "long-range policies for integrated management of resource and the environment," and it based this call on the "perception [that] the world is a finite host to humanity, and from our recognition of increasing global interdependence."70 The Council also began to use the term "sustainable" to refer to management practices designed to ensure sustained yields over the long term or technological and policy innovations that could help Canadians to adapt to the limits of the natural world.71 The SCC was not the only group using the term sustainable in this way before 1987. Amory Lovins, in his widely read book Soft Energy Paths, used the term in a similar fashion as he argued for the development of renewable energy and the institution of long-term plans to balance environmental protection and economic development.72 In my view, this use of the term "sustainability," combined with the similarity between the goals of alternative development in the 1970s and later goals of sustainable development, justifies the use of the term to describe activities during the period, even though they were not characterized as "sustainable development" at the time. While the existence of sustainability more than a decade before its codification is interesting, the political foundations of Canadian programs are far more intriguing. These projects were closely connected to nationalist efforts to develop Canadian technology and industry. The nationalism of Canadian sustainable development suggests that scholarly focus on international environmental meetings and debates over the right to growth in the global south, which dominate discussions of sustainable development, overlooks extensive experimentation with concepts of sustainable development in North America.73 69 Science Council of Canada, Report No. 4, Towards a National Science Policy for Canada (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1968), 14. 70 Science Council of Canada, Report 19, Natural Resource Policy Issues in Canada (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1973), 32. 71 Science Council of Canada, Report 27, Canada as a Conserver Society (Ottawa: Minister of Supply Services, 1977), 19, 36, 50. 72 Amory Lovins, Soft Energy Paths: Towards a Durable Peace (London: Harper-Colophon Books, 1977), 11. 73 John McCormick, Reclaiming Paradise: The Global Environmental Movement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Steven Bernstein, The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), Wade Rowland, The Plot to Save the World (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin and 23 As ideas about sustainability became an appealing means of addressing potential environmental and economic problems within Canada, they intersected with rationalist ideology, nationalist desires to expand Canadian industry, and government efforts to apply modernization theory to Atlantic Canada and ensure the country's energy self-sufficiency.74 By examining these motivations for sustainable development, I argue that nationalist attempts to position the country to benefit from future oil shortages, as much as concerns about the global south or environmental collapse, generated interest in sustainable development. By focusing on this important combination of nationalist politics, Cold War rationalism, and futurology, scholars deepen their understanding of the history of sustainable development. To extend historians' analysis of the role that expertise played in the political success of sustainable development, I focus on how the Trudeau government's hyper rationalism intersected with modeling and technological optimism to push solar energy from the visions of government advisors and environmentalists into concrete policy in the late 1970s. By drawing on a computer model of solar technology's development – WATSUN – the Office of Energy Conservation (OEC), a small office of marginal importance, introduced solar technology into Canadian energy policy and, with the help of environmentalists and advisory groups, such as the SCC, convinced the Trudeau government to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars towards solar heating and other renewables. WATSUN enabled this group within the EMR to turn a little known technology into an abstract, but definable entity that experts could analyze and knowledgably insert into the energy department's development plans. In short, WATSUN's seeming ability to model an emerging technology and define its future enabled the politically marginal OEC to reshape energy policy. Even as they highlight the power of expertise within Canadian political discourse in the 1970s, WATSUN and the OEC also underline expertise's limits. The authority of the OEC quickly crumbled in the 1980s when its predictions of solar technology's Co. Ltd, 1973). 74 Janine Brodie, The Political Economy of Canadian Regionalism (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990); Miriam Wright, A Fishery for Modern Times: The State and the Industrialization of the Newfoundland Fishery, 1934-1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Donald Savoie, Visiting Grandchildren: Economic Development in the Maritimes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). For a discussion of the long history of "development" and its connection to modernization, see Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (New York: Zed Books, 1997). 24 success failed to materialize, the threat of scarcity waned, and priorities within the EMR shifted. While mistakes and a changing global situation caused problems for energy experts who advocated solar, the brittle character of their political power emphasizes the politically contingent nature of expertise. The power of technical knowledge and facts to change policy relies upon the government's recognition and privileging of that knowledge over other viewpoints. In politics, the attitude of the state matters as much as the validity of the facts themselves. Dissertation Outline This dissertation makes four interconnected arguments. First, I argue that the Trudeau government applied its interpretation of the rational application of knowledge to governance in an attempt to depoliticize Canadian politics and make policy decisions more objective. To reshape the country's politics, the Trudeau government drew upon a variety of sources, including broader Cold War efforts to systematize decision making through the application of abstract knowledge. This "knowledge power" framed energy policy in the 1970s, as the Trudeau government used economic and energy forecasts in an attempt to justify government intervention into oil and gas development, and multinationals employed the same techniques to defend their position in Canada's oil industry. In short, the Trudeau government politicized forms of technical knowledge that promised to assist efforts to make rational and fact based decisions. The state's privileging of supposedly objective judgment significantly affected environmental politics by enhancing the influence of those who possessed the technical training to provide seemingly objective knowledge. This privileging of expertise leads me to my second main argument: the Canadian state played a central role in environmental politics during the 1970s. The state was significant in two fundamental ways. First, it actively participated in environmental politics as provincial and federal governments pursued policies of economic and energy development. Second, the ability of the state to shape the culture of politics through ideology and policy feedbacks privileged specific approaches and groups within Canadian environmental politics. In Canada, the government of PEI directly contributed to environmental politics on the island by modifying its development policy to pursue Canada's first program of sustainable development. Just as importantly, the provincial government's actions were constrained 25 by the dominant federal discourse on both development and effective policymaking. To receive the federal support necessary to undertake their experiments with environmentally sustainable development, the PEI government manipulated the highly rational and technical approach encouraged by the Trudeau government. The constrained actions of the provincial government represent just one example of how the Canadian state shaped environmental politics. The SCC, part of the broadly defined Canadian State, also contributed directly to environmental politics by formulating an approach to sustainability, which it went on to popularize among environmentalists and government departments. Both the Science Council and the government of PEI assisted environmental groups by supporting their efforts to receive federal funding and by soliciting and publicizing environmentalists' analyses of Canada's future, an activity that brought their policy advice to the attention of the Trudeau government as well as many Canadians. This assistance, however, selected environmental groups with specific abilities, namely the training and skill to manipulate abstract knowledge. The privileging of environmental groups with technical training leads to this dissertation's third major argument: an influential minority of environmentalists employed technical knowledge, especially future studies and simulation, to both conceptualize policy alternatives and construct persuasive narratives about the prospects of renewable energy and sustainable living. These environmentalists' use of technical knowledge suggests that while parts of this diverse movement expressed suspicion about science and technology and only made an exception for the "subversive" science of ecology, other groups drew heavily on Cold War research and its formalist and abstract approach to understanding the world.75 These methodologies, with their heavy reliance on mathematics and quantitative analysis, provided these environmentalists with an influential intellectual and political tool, a tool that allowed some of them to participate in debates over energy and development policy in the 1970s. By deploying this technical knowledge, environmentalists altered Canadian policy not through public protest (although they did that as well), but by acting as advisors – technocrats – capable of providing insightful analysis and constructing effective policies and new technologies 75 Paul Sears first characterized ecology as a subversive subject by arguing that it raised questions about the wisdom of continuous industrial growth. See Sears, "Ecology: A Subversive Subject," BioScience 14, 7 (July, 1964): 11-13. 26 designed to provide economic growth while protecting the environment. This technocratic strand of environmentalism also played a fundamental role in the conceptualization of sustainable development. In 1970s Canada, alternative development emerged as a method of providing Canadians with jobs and insulating the country from rising oil prices and not primarily as a means of protecting the environment or assisting the global south. Sustainability's most effective advocates went beyond international environmental concern in their arguments, to employ economic forecasts and simulations of sustainable technologies' commercial potential. Presenting renewables, such as solar heating, as technologies of the future, they successfully enlisted government assistance to help Canadians conquer new and potentially profitable industries before others beat them to the market. The political influence of abstract and technical knowledge behind these arguments for sustainability allows me to make my fourth argument. Rather than narrowing political debate or depoliticizing politics, future studies and modeling, as forms of technical knowledge, allowed environmentalists and government advisors to identify and define scarcity as a problem and devise creative responses. While hubris and error characterized much of their analysis, it also fashioned a space for discussions of the country's future and its potential problems, as well as providing the impetus for policy experimentation. The use of models in this inventive way underlines a point central to the history of science and this dissertation, namely that expert analysis and quantification are political actions and frequently the starting points of long debates. While politically powerful in the right circumstances, expertise and evidence do not depoliticize politics, but rather they set the terms of the dispute and privilege those with access to the requisite forms of knowledge. This dissertation develops these arguments through six chapters placed in rough chronological order from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. The first chapter examines the Canadian state under the Trudeau government and asserts that the Trudeau government's application of mechanical objectivity and regime of rationalization reshaped Canadian political discourse. Using the Trudeau government's energy policy as a lens, I illuminate the structures and policy feedbacks – technically trained advisors and simulation – that shaped Canadian politics, particularly discussions of energy, in the 1970s. This chapter 27 concludes by contending that the Trudeau government failed in its efforts to control energy policy as well as in its attempt to depoliticize policymaking. Instead it created a political discourse that helped government bureaucrats, and later, scientists, politicians, and environmentalists, to criticize federal policy and propose alternatives. Chapter two builds on the first chapter by examining how the PEI government drew on and manipulated the Trudeau government's political discourse in its experiments with sustainable development. I argue that the Campbell government's approach to development in its massive Comprehensive Development Plan grew out of a commitment to economic modernization and rational planning. Redirecting rather than abandoning this project of modernization and transformation, the Campbell government shifted from centralized industrial development to a focus on environmental sustainability and small-scale renewable energy technology. Expanding upon this point, I show how alternative development emerged out of a desire to manage changing global circumstances while maintaining economic growth. Working with the Campbell government and explicitly supporting its rationalistic approach, environmental groups effectively functioned as technocratic advisors for the state, a fact that underlines the diversity of the environmental movement. Furthermore, I contend that this participation as technical advisors directly challenges the antipathy that some historians have argued existed between appropriate technology groups and the state. Continuing the theme of state influence on environmental politics, the third chapter examines the development of the conserver society and the impact of the SCC on environmentalism. Connecting the SCC to the Trudeau government's desire for rational management, I argue the SCC sought both to help the state mobilize science in a nationalist effort to assist economic growth and to develop Canadian research programs that could employ scientists and engineers. It pursued these actions with a quantitative approach to analyzing Canada and simulating its economic and environmental future. This methodology enabled the SCC's development of the conserver society concept and indelibly linked sustainability in Canada with Cold War science and the efforts to institute regimes of rational planning it inspired in the 1960s and 1970s. As I examine this early approach to sustainable development, I show that both environmentalists and government ministries adopted the conserver society as a means of outlining a viable 28 long-term approach to development and as an influential method of popularizing their policy goals in the 1970s. In particular, the SCC's conserver society played a significant role in the Trudeau government's decision to fund solar energy at the end of the decade. Chapter four shifts focus from the state to environmental actors and reveals how John Todd and the New Alchemists deftly used scientific knowledge to construct a network of support, including the Canadian government, which enabled their experimentation with sustainable technologies. I begin by analyzing the construction of the New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod. The Institute, part commune and part research institution, provided these countercultural environmentalists with a springboard from which Todd could enlist the financial support required to pioneer green architecture. After analyzing the New Alchemy Institute's knitting together of a network of support using Todd's rhetoric and scientific credentials, the chapter turns to the PEI Ark. Building on chapter two, I argue the Campbell government and Todd clashed on the purpose of the PEI Ark as the former saw it as the centerpiece of its sustainable development program and the latter as an opportunity to experiment with the "biotechnic" systems he and his colleagues had developed to moderate human impacts on the environment. These conflicting desires ultimately led to an unhappy rupture between the province and the countercultural environmentalists of New Alchemy. Todd and the New Alchemists would leave PEI to continue the development of the systems they had pioneered in the Ark and play a small, but significant, part in the development of what Michael Bess has called the "light-green society."76 This dissertation's fifth chapter examines Amory Lovins' approach to environmentalism and his influence in Canada. It begins by focusing directly on the close connections between Lovins and his conception of sustainability, on the one hand, and the Cold War development of futurology, on the other. By comparing Lovins and futurologist Herman Kahn, I contend that futurology and energy analysis formed the foundation of Lovins' work, and I suggest that environmental historians need to broaden their assessment of technical knowledge to understand the significance of these important, but little examined, ways of knowing employed by environmentalists. Lovins' 76 Michael Bess, The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 29 "soft energy path" and the way in which he used models to construct an accessible and compelling narrative about America's energy future further underlines the importance of this technical style of environmentalism. Returning to my broader argument that technical knowledge and the Canadian state played a central role in 1970s environmental politics, I show how Lovins and his methods impacted Canadian environmentalists and government advisors by provided them with a vocabulary and analytic approach which they used to understand the potential of renewable energy. Chapter six's examination of the Trudeau government's substantial commitments to solar energy continues my analysis of expert authority and futurological models. This chapter brings my investigation of modeling and state power together to explore the employment of modeling in the context of the Trudeau government. Focusing on the Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources, it examines how the OEC used the WATSUN model to study and then project solar technology's development in Canada and convince the EMR to fund solar technology. Underlining the importance of the Trudeau government's scientism and the influence of networks of expertise, this chapter also emphasizes the limits and fragility of appeals to knowledge within political debate by examining the collapse in support for solar technology in the early 1980s. My conclusion continues this discussion of the political limits of expertise by examining the reaction of Andrew Wells, the central actor in PEI's experiments with sustainability, to the challenges renewable energy faced in the late 1970s. For Wells, the mobilization of expertise and the manipulation of the Trudeau government's scientism provided a means to introduce sustainable development into policy debates and generate support for solar and other renewables. This influence, however, was fundamentally limited. While technical knowledge could reshape policy, thanks largely to its privileged place in political discourse, it could not smoothly transform Canadian society or provide irrefutable solutions to environmental problems. These profoundly political questions would require extensive debate drawing upon both evidence and ideology. The dispute continues to this day. 30 Chapter 1: Trusting in Numbers: The Trudeau Government, Expert Knowledge, and Canadian Energy Policy Pierre Elliott Trudeau's government marked the apogee of the activist liberal state in Canada. Formed in 1968, it promised to use the state's power to reorganize the government and provide Canadians with a "just society," a powerful, but ill-defined vision of a united, egalitarian, and liberal country.77 The Trudeau government saw efficient and rational governance as the key to creating a better society for Canadians. As it guided the country through the economic turmoil and the energy shocks of the 1970s and into the more conservative 1980s, the Trudeau government reshaped Canadian governance around an ideal of rational decision-making and refashioned political discourse around the application of expertise. This reframing of Canadian politics indelibly marked Canadian energy policy and created a space for the discussion of energy conservation and the country's first experiments with sustainable development. The history of the Trudeau government and its impact on the period remains strangely fractured. Biographers and historians have dissected the man, noting his commitment to federal power, his charisma, and the contradictory nature of his romantic appeal to Canadian youth and his personal devotion to rationality.78 Other historians have broadened their focus to examine how his government responded to a changing Canadian society. Focusing on the influence of social actors, they argue that the Trudeau government reflected, but did not shape new ideas of sexuality and individual identity, or an emerging national consciousness founded on multiculturalism.79 Political scientists have noted how the Trudeau government actively reorganized the Canadian state and 77 Pierre Elliott Trudeau, cited in The Essential Trudeau, ed. Ron Graham (Toronto: McCleland and Stewart, 1998), 20. 78 John English, Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Toronto: A.A. Knopf Canada, 2009); Andrew Cohen and J.L. Granatstein, Trudeau's Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1998); Kristy Holmes, "Negotiating Citizenship: Joyce Wieland's Reason over Passion," in The Sixties: Passion, Politics, and Style, ed. Dimitry Anastakis (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008). 79 José Igartua, The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1945-1971 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006); Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby-Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). 31 concentrated power in the office of the Prime Minister and the cabinet.80 Political analysts have also highlighted the Trudeau government's ethic of "rational management" and its efforts to make policymaking more "objective" and less political.81 Oddly, historians have largely ignored these structural analyses. Instead, they have remained focused on either Trudeau the individual or how his government responded to social and cultural changes in the 1970s. Environmental historians, for example, link Trudeau's enjoyment of wilderness adventures to an emerging Canadian environmental consciousness, but offer little analysis of how the structure and ideology of his government affected environmental policy.82 This chapter places the Trudeau government in the context of the growth of the social welfare state and its efforts to apply mechanical objectivity to the policy process, and it argues that the centralized structure and the scientistic ideology of the Trudeau government shaped Canadian politics in the 1970s by framing policy discourse and privileging specific types of knowledge. It focuses on the Canadian state's attempts to make "objective" policy based on expert analysis and carefully developed forecasts designed to enable long-term planning in place of bureaucratic custom or political expediency. This approach enables my analysis of the Trudeau government's reshaping of Canadian political discourse and its profound effects on energy policy and Canadian environmental politics. My examination of Canadian state draws heavily on the work of Theda Skocpol. In particular, I analyse what she has described as the effects of state structures. As Skocpol argues: …states matter not simply because of the goal oriented activities of state officials. They matter because their organizational configurations, along with their overall patterns of activity, affect political culture, encourage some kinds of group formation and collective political actions (but not others), and make 80 Donald Savoie, Governing from the Centre: The Concentration of Power in Canadian Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Richard French, How Ottawa Decides: Planning and Industrial Policy Making, 1968-1984 (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1984). 81 Peter Aucoin, "Organizational Change in the Machinery of Canadian Government: From Rational Management to Brokerage Politics," Canadian Journal of Political Science 19, 1 (March 1986): 3-27. 82 In his history of Canadians' relationship with the environment, Neil Forkey focuses on environmental groups and only briefly discusses the influence of the state, and even then, he highlights Trudeau's individual actions. See Forkey, Canadians and the Natural Environment to the Twenty-First Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 103. 32 possible the raising of certain political issues (but not others).83 Furthermore, Skocpol argues that the ideology of the state frames both political discourse and governments' internal practices.84 Thus, the structures of the state, primarily its centralization and its embrace of "rational management" deeply influenced Canadian policy by privileging expert knowledge. To investigate how the Trudeau government's rationalistic approach shaped Canadian political discourse in the 1970s, this chapter focuses on a central issue of the decade: energy policy.85 Using energy policy as a lens into policymaking, I argue that the Trudeau government attempted to employ its program of rational management to exert federal control over oil and gas development.86 This approach, however, proved unable to legitimate the government's intervention into energy policy. Drawing on Theodore Porter's fundamental insight that "limiting the play of politics" through mechanical objectivity is the outcome not of "the megalomania of experts" but rather of bureaucratic conflict and public mistrust, I show how knowledge of energy resources and supply and demand forecasts became tools of contestation, both within the federal government and between government and industry.87 In fact, forecasts and economic simulation became tools of the politically weak rather than a means of expanding state power. However, since forecasts and economic simulation remained fundamental to energy policy, the Trudeau government could not easily abandon the application of these forms of expert knowledge. The limited ability of the state to achieve its ideal of "objective" decision-making or control the application of expertise created opportunities for both manipulation and cooperation.88 Adopting these 83 Theda Skocpol, "Bringing the State Back in: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research," in Bringing the State Back In, ed., Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 21. 84 Theda Skocpol, "Bringing the State Back In: Retrospect and Prospect," Scandinavian Political Studies 31, 3 (2008): 111. 85 G. Bruce Doern and Glen Toner, The Politics of Energy: The Development and Implementation of the NEP (Toronto: Methuen, 1985); John Fossum, Oil, the State, and Federalism: The Rise and Demise of Petro-Canada as a Statist Impulse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); James Laxer, Oil and Gas: Ottawa, the Provinces and the Petroleum Industry (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1983); Paul Chastko, Developing Alberta's Oil Sands: From Karl Clark to Kyoto (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2004). 86 Fossum, Oil, the State, and Federalism, 5-6. 87 Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 189. 88 Porter, Trust in Numbers, 86. 33 new technical and rhetorical tools, government advisors, industry analysts, and environmentalists marshaled scientific and technical data to criticize government policy and propose alternatives, including energy conservation and renewables. In short, the actions and structure of the state imprinted a specific pattern on Canadian politics that enhanced the influence of those with certain types of expertise and created a space for debate, particularly over technical subjects, such as Canada's energy future. This chapter's examination of how the structures of the Canadian state expanded the influence of expert knowledge and made it central to conflicts over policy provides an excellent opportunity to engage with recent discussions of state power among environmental historians. James Scott's analysis of state power dominates environmental historians' discussion of the state's impact on the environment and the role of expertise in the extension of state power.89 To paraphrase Scott, experts employed by the state cooperate to construct an edifice of synoptic knowledge that, while flawed, dominates the national territory and both legitimizes and directs state power.90 In the Canadian context, environmental historians have drawn on Scott to emphasize the importance of state power and expert knowledge and have argued that a "high modernist" approach characterized the period stretching from the 1940s through the 1960s. Using the concept of high modernism, defined by Scott as "rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition," scholars have explored how the co-production of expert knowledge by scientists, engineers, and planners has made Canada "legible" and amenable to state intervention.91 Engaging with this discussion of state power, my analysis provides environmental historians with an alternative approach to the state and its employment of expertise that 89 James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Paul Josephson provides a good example of how environmental historians have uncritically employed Scott's concept of the state. See Josephson, Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002). 90 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 4-6. 91Scott, Seeing Like a State, 88; Matthew Farish and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, "High Modernism in the Arctic: Planning Frobisher Bay and Inuvik," Journal of Historical Geography 35, 3 (July 2009): 517-544; Daniel Macfarlane, To the Heart of the Continent: The Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014). Although he does not draw extensively on Scott, environmental geographer Dean Bavington makes a similar argument about the state's use of expert knowledge to enhance its ability to control people and exploit the environment. Bavington, Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010). 34 more effectively analyzes the Canadian state in the 1960s and 1970s. In this period, the seamless cooperation between expert and government assumed by Scott's "high modernism" did not exist. Although state experts adhered to a common faith in the benefits of modernity and the utility of technical knowledge, they often used their expertise to construct critiques of government policy and propose alternatives. Rather than enhancing the power of the state by controlling knowledge and limiting political debate, the Trudeau government's effort to rationalize governance enabled disagreement by enhancing the power of those who were politically weak, but able to use technical knowledge. That group included government advisors critical of Canadian energy policy and anxious to propose sustainable alternatives. This chapter's analysis of the Canadian state, politics, and energy policy proceeds in three sections. The first introduces the postwar Canadian state and connects the Trudeau government's approach to policymaking with the broader history of attempts to apply mechanical objectivity and regimens of rationalization to the state. I contend that these developments presented the possibility of rationalizing the postwar state and shaped the Trudeau government's view of expert knowledge. Shifting focus to the Trudeau government's energy policy, I analyze the development, implementation, and conflicts that occurred over energy policy in the early 1970s. This section illuminates the structures and policy feedbacks that shaped Canadian energy development in the 1970s as it shows how the Trudeau government's critics used simulations of Canadian energy needs and possible supply development to contest policy. The final section of the chapter illustrates how the structures of Trudeau government and its less than successful attempts to control energy policy – and more broadly, depoliticize policymaking – enabled government advisors and later scientists, politicians, and environmentalists, to criticize federal policy and propose alternatives. The Structures and Politics of the Trudeau Government Two changes stand out in the Canadian postwar period: the massive expansion of the Canadian state and the attempted rationalization of governance with the goal of making "objective" policy. Together these changes dictated how the state made policy and how it understood and justified its interventions in Canadian society, from social welfare to energy policy. The government's approach to policy resulted in specific areas 35 of flux within the state where groups could gain purchase and attempt to influence decisions. In both these areas, programs in the United States motivated and shaped similar developments north of the 49th parallel. During the postwar period, the United States continued its construction of the welfare state and attempted to manage rationally the growing size and complexity of the state while making policy an "objective" practice of problem solving. As historian Michael Bernstein notes, this belief in the ability of expertise to mitigate political interest has a history stretching back to the progressive era if not earlier.92 During the 1950s and 1960s, it became a central element of the postwar consensus. Proponents understood policymaking as a technical practise of problem solving and, according to historian Nils Gilman, "celebrated... the power of science, the importance of control, and the possibility of achieving progress through the application of human will and instrumental reason" as a method of overcoming inefficiencies and schisms of politics.93 This idealization of progress through the application of reason reached its apogee in the 1960s.94 In this era, analytical management techniques, most famously the RAND Corporation's methods of systems analysis, spread from the Pentagon to other parts of the American state. This methodology understood decision making as a matter of calculation that could be solved with the application of the correct algorithm. Stripping down decision making to a formal process of yes/no propositions or abstracting complex human motivations to arrive at Homo economicus' min/max calculations, RAND theorists attempted to construct heuristics capable of cutting through human irrationality and making decisions based on objective analysis.95 John F. Kennedy's Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara and his "whiz kids" present the most famous example of this approach 92 Michael Bernstein, A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 12-13. See also Yaron Ezrahi, The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 218. 93 Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 7-8. 94 Paul Pierson, "Rise and Reconfiguration of Activist Government," in The Transformation of American Politics: Activist Government and the Rise of Conservatism, eds. Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 20-21. 95 Paul Erickson, Judy Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturn, and Michael Gordin, How Reason Almost Lost its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (Chicago: University of Chicago University Press, 2013), 62, 134. 36 applied uncritically to the goal of rational, efficient, and apolitical policymaking when the group famously attempted to convert military procurement into a process of calculation rather than compromise and pork barrel politics.96 This application of knowledge and technique seemed to promise the ability to manage the huge and ever growing complexity of the Cold War state and direct its vast powers. These techniques, with their underlying belief in the potential of rational management, became part of the policy process in America. Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society programs, for example, were organized and managed according to systems theory.97 The approach, however, proved ill suited as its hierarchical organization devolved into conflicts over turf, and cost benefit analysis proved unable to analyze the anti-poverty program or allocate funds effectively.98 The politics of the Cold War, which sought to suppress political dissent and avoid open discussion of political ideology, also placed a premium on depoliticizing policymaking as the Cold War state distanced itself from earlier politics of the progressive left and open ideological debate of the New Deal era.99 The methods of Cold War military planners, particularly their use of mathematical models and computer simulations, reshaped the practices of American science along with the state. Andrew Pickering and other historians of science have argued the Cold War saw the transformation of American science into what Pickering has termed the "cyborg sciences."100 This newly dominant approach to science inaugurated intimate cooperation between the defense industry and academic sciences and saw the spread of computers, which massively increased data processing and blurred or even erased the boundary between social and mechanical systems. The discipline of economics, for instance, avidly embraced these new tools and became dominated by mathematical models and computer 96Jacob Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 152. 97 David Jardini, "Out of the Blue Yonder: The Transfer of Systems Thinking from the Pentagon to the Great Society, 1961-1965," in Systems, Experts, and Computers, ed., Agatha Hughes and Thomas Hughes (New York: MIT Press, 2000). 98 Jardini, "Out of the Blue Yonder," 338. 99 Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 215-216. 100 Andrew Pickering, "Cyborg History and the World War II Regime," Perspective on Science 3, 1 (1995): 1-48. See also Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1997). 37 simulations that collapsed the differences between society and models.101 As economics grew in importance during the postwar period, it brought this abstract form of analysis into the very heart of policymaking and political debate.102 The ideal of "objective" planning and rational management proved compelling in American municipal politics as well. In the mid 1960s, civic planners embraced the tools of "Cold Warriors" from RAND and the rest of the defense establishment.103 Employing computer systems and theories of cybernetics developed to fight the Cold War, urban planners created models of American metropolises to understand the dynamics of cities and plan their development. As Jennifer Light notes, these large-scale computer models proved unable to fully capture the complexities of urban development, yet remained influential throughout the 1960s and 1970s.104 Faith in the ability of these new techniques and technologies to enable extensive research and rational planning on a massive scale reached their zenith in the early 1970s with the emergence of futurology and world modeling.105 One defence scientist turned civic planner, Jay Forrester, took these applications of computer modeling to a global scale and even extended them hundreds of years into the future. He produced one of the first and best-known global simulations and exercises in "future studies," the World3 model at the center of the (in)famous Limits to Growth report.106 The model brought the use of computer simulation full circle. The Club of Rome, a technocratic environmental group, used the very techniques of knowledge production and claims of mechanical objectivity that had formerly justified and encouraged rapid growth, to mount a trenchant attack on rapid material progress and inaugurate the ongoing debate over natural limits.107 101 Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 102 Duncan McDowall, The Sum of the Satisfactions: Canada in the Age of National Accounting (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007); Thomas Stapleford, The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 1880-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 103 Jennifer Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 58. 104 Light, From Warfare to Welfare, 61-62. 105 Matthew Connelly, "Future Shock: The End of the World as They Knew It," in The Shock of the Global: the 1970s in Perspective, eds. Niall Ferguson et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010), 338. 106 Fernando Elichirigoity, Planet Management: Limits to Growth, Computer Simulation, and the Emergence of Global Spaces (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999). 107 Robert Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 142. For a wider discussion of the limits debate see Paul Sabin, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and our Gamble over Earth's Future (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 38 In Canada, buffeted by ideas south of border, the development of the social welfare state and efforts to make policy "objectively" followed a similar path.108 During the postwar period, the Canadian state expanded rapidly as it implemented the Canadian Pension Program and Unemployment Insurance in the 1940s, which together established the foundations of the Canadian welfare state.109 The government of Lester B. Pearson, goaded by the New Democratic Party, and conscious of the growing social welfare state in the United States, added the finishing touches to Medicare and other programs.110 The Pearson government also expanded support for education, funded economic development, and signed trade agreements to preserve the Canadian automotive industry.111 According to David French, the implementation of these far-reaching programs made planning the government's raison d'être, and both the practice of planning and the government's organizational abilities expanded rapidly in the late 1960s and early 1970s.112 The Pearson government recruited economists and statisticians, in particular, to assist its growing efforts to manage and direct the expanding state and ensure continued economic growth.113 The founding of the Economic Council of Canada (ECC) in 1963 highlights the growing cooperation between economic experts and government policy makers in the 1960s. Tasked with providing the government with expert advice about the economy's medium- to long-term prospects, the ECC sought to help the government ensure that steady economic growth continued for the foreseeable future. As a leading 108 In Canada, however, the postwar consensus did not collapse in the late 1960s, and it continued to define Canadian governance throughout the 1970s. 109 L. Richard Lund, "Income Maintenance, Insurance Principles, and the "Liberal 1960s": Canada's Unemployment Insurance Program, 1961-1971," in Social Fabric or Patchwork Quilt: The Development of Social Policy in Canada, ed. Raymond Blake and Jeffery Keshen (Peterborough: ON: Broadview Press, 2006), 221; Dennis Guest, The Emergence of Social Security in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), see particularly chapter 10. 110Robert Bothwell, Ian Drummond, and John English, Canada Since 1945: Power, Politics, and Provincialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 288-290. 111 Donald Savoie, Visiting Grandchildren: Economic Development in the Maritimes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 82-84; Dimitry Anastakis, "Multilateralism, Nationalism, and Bilateral Free Trade: Competing Visions of Canadian Economic and Trade Policy, 1945-70," in Creating Postwar Canada: Community, Diversity, and Dissent, 1945-75, ed. Magda Fahrni and Robert Rutherdale (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), 153. 112 Richard French, How Ottawa Decides: Planning and Industrial Policy Making 1968-1984 (Toronto: J. Lorimer and Co., 1984), 18. 113 Theodore Porter argues this focus on administration is a fundamental element of economic theory underlying twentieth century economics. Porter, "Locating the Domain of Calculation," Journal of Cultural Economy 1, 1 (March 2008): 39-50. 39 Canadian statistician put it in 1967, "contemporary Canadian society has set far more exacting standards for the performance of the economy than in the recent past."114 In the interest of meeting these "exacting standards," the ECC, in coordination with the National Energy Board (NEB) and the Bank of Canada, began to develop a computer database of Canadian economic information.115 Recognizing the potential utility of this data, econometricians at the ECC constructed the Canadian Disaggregated Interdepartmental Econometric Model (or CANDIDE Model). Begun in the mid 1960s and completed in 1972, CANDIDE purported to be capable of simulating the entire Canadian economy, including the accurate prediction of the economy's response to government expenditure.116 Government planners would use it to forecast the development of the Canadian economy in the 1970s. The late 1960s and early 1970s were heady days for economics in Canada. Citizens and government expressed faith in the predictive ability of econometricians and their computer oracles while growth continued to raise Canadians' standard of living.117 As Theodore Porter notes, this vision of well-ordered progress has long been a goal of statisticians and advocates of quantification.118 As the Pearson government provided Canadians with social welfare and worked with the ECC to manage economic growth, it also sought to replicate Americans' ability to turn scientific research into economic benefit and, more importantly for this chapter, to inform and improve government policy. In the mid 1960s, the Pearson government sought ways to strengthen Canadian scientific research and apply it more effectively, both as an aid to policy making and as a national resource for economic growth. While tripling federal funding for scientific research during the 1960s, the Pearson government also set up new advisory bodies, most notably the Science Council of Canada (SCC), to assist in the development of a coherent science policy and to advise the government on scientific matters.119 The SCC, a semi-independent advisory body composed of Canada's 114 McDowall, The Sum of the Satisfactions, 138. 115 McDowall, The Sum of the Satisfactions, 141. 116 Mike McCracken, An Overview of the CANDIDE Model 1.0 (Ottawa: Economic Council of Canada, 1973), 5. 117 McDowall, The Sum of the Satisfactions, 145. 118 Theodore Porter, "Statistical Utopianism in an Age of Aristocratic Efficiency," Osiris 17 (2002): 210-227. 119 G. Brent Clowater, "Canadian Science Policy and the Retreat from Transformative Politics: The Final Years of the Science Council of Canada," Scientia Canadensis 35, 1-2 (2012): 115. 40 leading academic scientists and engineers and charged with offering objective advice on scientific issues, quickly became a significant voice in Canadian politics. Its members interpreted their mandate broadly, and the Council began publishing reports on everything from industrial research to the natural environment.120 Anxious to ensure the hundreds of millions the government invested annually in government research were being well spent, the Pearson government also commissioned a series of substantive reports on Canadian science.121 The most influential of these commissions, the Senate Special Committee on Science Policy (the Lamontagne Commission) set up in 1967, presented the government with a series of substantive recommendations that helped cement the influence of what Peter Aucoin has called "rational management" when the Trudeau government came to power.122 Acting on the Lamontagne Commission's advice, the federal government established the Ministry of State for Science and Technology (MOSST) in 1971. MOSST sought to systematize Canadian science policy and ensure that the government employed scientific knowledge effectively in policymaking. In theory at least, MOSST would replace the ad-hoc science policy of the 1960s with a coherent system of decision-making by providing cabinet ministers and the Prime Minister with any scientific information relevant to policy.123 As Peter Aucoin and Richard French note, this advisory structure was built on the belief that "knowledge is power" and assumed "that research, information and analysis will carry the day ...against the traditional sources of political and bureaucratic power."124 This structure remained fundamental to policymaking in the Trudeau government. When Pierre Elliott Trudeau became Prime Minister in 1968, a position he would hold for sixteen years, he inherited a large, powerful state, committed to an active role in 120 Science Council of Canada, Report No.15, Innovation in a Cold Climate: The Dilemma of Canadian Manufacturing (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1971); Science Council of Canada, Report 19, Natural Resource Policy Issues in Canada (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1973). 121 These reports were the Glassco Commission Report, the Mackenzie Report, and the Lamontagne Report. See G. Bruce Doern, Science and Politics in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1972). 122 Clowater, "Canadian Science Policy and the Retreat from Transformative Politics," 114; Aucoin, Organizational Change in the Machinery of Canadian Government," 6. 123 Aucoin, Organizational Change in the Machinery of Canadian Government," 12. 124 Peter Aucoin and Richard French, Knowledge, Power, and Public Policy (Ottawa: Science Council of Canada, 1974), 12. 41 Canadian society and similarly devoted to rationalizing governance and employing expert knowledge to manage Canada's future. Trudeau, who was also personally committed to these goals, would expand upon them during his years in office. Writing about the Canadian state just before he became Prime Minister, Trudeau expressed hope that "emotionalism" could be removed from decision making and looked forward to a time when Canadian governance functioned more like "advanced technology and scientific investigation, as applied to the fields of law, economics, social psychology, international affairs, and other areas of human relations."125 Fitting perfectly within the postwar consensus, Trudeau's ethic of "rational management" sought to make policy through the pragmatic exchange of ideas rather than through any adherence to a specific political ideology.126 According to political scientist Donald Savoie, Trudeau and his allies used the power of the Prime Minister's office to transform the cabinet into a focus group where he and his ministers could formulate policy through (at least in theory) a rational and informed debate.127 This centralization of power placed inordinate political authority in the hands of the Prime Minister and cabinet and huge burdens on ministers as it deluged them with information. Trudeau himself famously read nearly a thousand pages of briefing documents every week.128 The Trudeau government's efforts to mobilize information had their inclusive and democratic side as well. The famed Liberal Party Conference held at Harrison Hot Springs in 1969 attempted to transform the Party into "society's radar" by using the then fashionable discipline of cybernetics.129 Speaking at the conference, Trudeau told party members that "with the refinement of our techniques for forecasting and planning we are coming to realize that the image we hold of our future is itself an important element of that future."130 He then invited party members to "go to where the people are" and generate discussion about Canada's future to provide feedback about government policy 125 Pierre E. Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians (Toronto: Macmillan, 1968), 203. 126 Aucoin, "Organizational Change in the Machinery of Canadian Government," 7. 127 Savoie, Governing From the Center, 74. According to Savoie, centralizing power in the Prime Minister's Office became the accepted norm in subsequent Canadian governments. 128 George Radwanski, Trudeau (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1978), 2, 169-171. 129 French, How Ottawa Decides, 20. 130 "Notes for Remarks by the Prime Minster at the Harrison Liberal Conference," (Harrison Hot Springs, B.C., November 21, 1969). Cited in French, How Ottawa Decides, 20 42 and to allow the government to address Canadians' concerns.131 This effort proved unworkable in practise and quickly fell apart, but it exemplified the breadth of the Trudeau government's attempts to reorganize Canadian governance. As Donald Savoie and Peter Aucoin note, Trudeau's centralizing approach placed a check on both the authority of individual ministers and the influence of bureaucratic "mandarins" because it subjected all policy decisions to rigorous review within cabinet from a variety of viewpoints.132 By limiting bureaucratic and ministerial autonomy in this way, the Trudeau government forced departments to supply both cabinet and their ministers with the strongest possible arguments for specific policies if they wished to prevail in cabinet discussions. This competitive use of research created a powerful incentive for government departments to hire staff or consultants with backgrounds in economics, policy analysis, and long range planning.133 Although this structure was designed to depoliticize politics and instead make policy based on a careful analysis of the facts, in actuality it only shifted the grounds of political debate as technical knowledge became central to policy, and thus political conflict.134 The extensive planning exercise in the aftermath of a substantial Liberal victory in the 1974 election provides an excellent example of these new structures in action. Designed to set priorities for the incoming government, it instead became a massive and largely sterile exercise in state planning.135 The effort began by formally gathering information from the Liberal party caucus, the central agencies, and leading minsters to establish priorities. The planning process then required each department to carry out a review of its policies and to report how prospective programs contributed to a list of established priorities.136 This "heroic attempt to plan," as Richard French describes it, required departments to assess how their policies contributed to such goals as "a more just, tolerant Canadian society" or made a "more rational use of resources and [was] 131 "Liberals Seek Alternative to Rule-by-Protest," Globe and Mail, November 24, 1969. 132 Savoie, Governing From the Center, 254-255; Aucoin, "Organizational Change in the Machinery of Canadian Government," 8. 133 French, How Ottawa Decides, 26. 134 Aucoin, "Organizational Change in the Machinery of Canadian Government," 11; French, How Ottawa Decides, 24-25. 135 French, How Ottawa Decides, 75. 136 French, How Ottawa Decides, 78. 43 sensitive to the natural and human environment."137 Unsurprisingly, given such broad priorities, this attempt at planning devolved into disorganization and failed to produce a coordinated set of programs. During the mid 1970s, as the federal government struggled to produce systematic policies, it gave departments a strong incentive to tailor their suggestions to fit the government's stated goals. As the final section of the chapter will demonstrate, savvy bureaucrats seeking to redirect government priorities could take advantage of the systematic effort to plan by presenting seemingly "objective" arguments for new policy directions.138 The Office of Energy Conservation, in particular, would prove adept at using the technical discourse privileged by the Trudeau government to advocate new policies of energy conservation at odds with the government's commitments to rapid economic growth. Together with the creation of MOSST, the SCC, and the ECC, these changes gave the Trudeau government a specific structure and created a powerful set of incentives and policy feedbacks that reconfigured Canadian politics by privileging those who could use technical knowledge. The widely recognized failure of the Trudeau government's reforms to depoliticize policymaking and the substantial problems, most notably bureaucratic confusion, political scientists have documented within the Trudeau government would seem to minimize the importance of these reforms.139 These failures, however, do not diminish the historical significance of the Trudeau government's commitment to "rational management." This combination of philosophy and organization framed how the government made decisions in the 1970s, and seriously affected Canadian politics of the period. In short, the Trudeau government's commitment to rational management, through both its structure and ideology, framed its efforts to exert authority over energy policy, as well as provided opportunities for its critics both inside and outside of government to propose alternatives. Rational Discourse: the Energy Sector and the Trudeau Government The Trudeau government and its "rational management" substantially changed the policymaking apparatus and political significance of the Department of Energy, Mines, 137 French, How Ottawa Decides, 79. 138 "The Government's Priorities, Re: Energy," Vol. 4, File Energy Policy References, 1975, Toombs Fonds, LAC. 139 French, How Ottawa Decides, 149. 44 and Resources (EMR). This restructuring also underwrote the government's efforts to assert federal control over the energy sector, which made the EMR central to the political employment of expertise in the 1970s.140 The first step in the federal government's entrance into energy policy transformed the EMR, formerly known by the derisive moniker "rocks Canada," from a minor department primarily concerned with granting mining licences into a fully-fledged energy department capable of constructing a coherent energy policy for Canada. This reorganization illustrates how the structure and ideology of the Canadian state affected policy and created unintended opportunities for political conflict as it politicized energy forecasting. The Trudeau government's struggles to use technical knowledge, especially econometric simulations of medium- and long-term development, also underline the conflicts inherent in programs of standardization and the weaknesses that lie at their foundation.141 Finally, examination of the Trudeau government's entrance into energy policy through the lens of its structure and approach highlights the influence of the Trudeau government's broader goals and their impact on Canadian energy policy and politics. In the 1960s, the National Oil Policy (NOP) governed Canada's loosely defined energy policy and the federal government's minimal authority. The NOP placed control of the industry in the hands of business and largely consisted of a laissez-faire approach focused on expanding the exploitation of oil and gas, which reflected the federal and provincial governments' lack of both the political will and the knowledge necessary to shape the development of Canadian fossil fuels.142 The main purpose of the NOP was to guarantee a market for expensive Canadian oil and gas. To this end, the policy financed pipelines from Alberta, which produced the vast majority of Canada's oil, to consumers in Ontario and the United States. A two-price system was also set up in Canada, with Canadians west of Ottawa relying on more expensive Canadian oil and Canadians east of 140 John Robinson and Clifford Hooker, "Future Imperfect: Energy Policy and Modeling in Canada Institutional Mandates and Constitutional Conflict," in The Politics of Energy Forecasting: A Comparative Study of Energy Forecasting in Western Europe and North America, ed. Thomas Baumgartner and Atle Midttun (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 220. 141 Porter, Trust in Numbers, 33. 142 Fossum, Oil, the State, and Federalism, 26. This laissez-faire approach stands in sharp contrast to the development of nuclear energy, which revolved around government financed projects primarily undertaken by crown corporations. See Robert Bothwell, Nucleus: The History of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988). 45 Ottawa importing cheaper oil from the world market.143 This system integrated Canadian oil into the continental market and benefited the oil industry, which gradually expanded production.144 The National Energy Board (NEB), set up in 1959, administered this policy of continentalization. A quasi-independent regulatory agency, the NEB reported directly to cabinet, which seemed to insure government oversight and control of the energy sector.145 In reality, the NEB's main clients and advisors, the major multinationals that dominated the Canadian oil industry, quickly co-opted the board.146 Lulled by the "symbolic reassurance" of the NEB's independence and supposed expertise, the federal government largely ignored energy throughout the 1960s. The result, according to Canadian critics of the NEB, was a resource giveaway that made Imperial Oil, Gulf Oil, Shell, and Texaco the biggest players in the Canadian oil industry.147 The laissez-faire approach began to change soon after the formation of the Trudeau government. Trudeau's election corresponded with rising concerns about both Canada's economic position in the world and its relationship with the United States.148 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Canada's economic relationship with the United States came under a great deal of suspicion from Canadian nationalists. Influential authors such as Kari Levitt and George Grant even argued that foreign investment had transformed Canada into an American colony.149 This criticism of Canada's neo-colonial status was by no means a marginal viewpoint. In 1967, Walter Gordon, Pearson's former Minister of Finance, organized a task force to review American investment in Canada.150 Predictably, given his long-standing economic nationalism, when the report arrived in 1968, it called 143 G. Bruce Doern and Glen Toner, The Politics of Energy: The Development and Implementation of the NEP (Toronto: Methuen, 1985), 80-81. 144 Doern and Toner, The Politics of Energy, 82. 145 Doern and Toner, The Politics of Energy, 83. 146 I. McDougall, "The Canadian National Energy Board: Economic 'Jurisprudence' in the National Interest of Symbolic Reassurance," Alberta Law Review 22 (1973): 327-382. 147 Fossum, Oil, the State, and Federalism, 26-27. 148 Joel Bell, "Canadian Industrial Policy in a Changing World," in Towards a Just Society: The Trudeau Years, eds. Thomas Axworthy and Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Markham, ON: Viking, 1990), 80. 149 Kari Levitt, Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada (Toronto: Macmillan, 1970); George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Toronto: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1965). 150 Anastakis, "Multilateralism, Nationalism, and Bilateral Free Trade," 144-145. For an excellent examination of Walter Gordon and his influence on Canadian nationalism, see Stephen Azzi, Walter Gordon and the Rise of Canadian Nationalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999). 46 for much tighter controls on foreign investment and the creation of the Canadian Development Corporation to help Canadian industry.151 While the Trudeau government by no means abandoned international trade or rejected foreign investment, it prioritized economic equality and expansion of Canadian ownership as part of its "just society."152 Efforts to increase Canadian ownership would remain a focus of government policy for much of the 1970s as nationalists and the SCC championed the development of Canadian science and industry. To provide itself with a counterbalance to industry and a complement to the NEB's supervisory role, the Trudeau government constructed an alternative center of expertise through which it could formulate energy policy. A newly invigorated EMR, staffed with new and talented advisors and an aggressively nationalist minister, Donald Macdonald, became the center for policymaking and the agent through which the Trudeau government would attempt to assert federal authority over the energy sector. Heading the list of new recruits were Wilbert Hopper, Jack Austin, and Joel Bell. All highly educated with backgrounds in the oil and gas industries, these men and the many others who joined EMR in the early 1970s, became the department's energy experts and greatly enhanced its ability to formulate policy.153 Bell, for instance, was the lead author of the EMR's first comprehensive policy analysis of Canadian energy, An Energy Policy for Canada: Phase 1.154 The new Minister, Donald Macdonald, joined them in 1972. An aggressive, Cambridge educated MP, Macdonald remained a fixture on the Priorities and Planning Committee of Cabinet, Trudeau's inner circle of powerful ministers, throughout the early 1970s.155 He also shared Trudeau's deep federalism and had even more nationalist economic views.156 This infusion of skill, knowledge, and political power transformed the EMR into a powerful department moulded to satisfy the Trudeau 151 Azzi, Walter Gordon and the Rise of Canadian Nationalism, 175. Bothwell, Drummond, and English, Canada Since 1945, 308. 152 Cabinet Meeting on Priorities and Planning, April 6, 1974, Vol. 5, File 5, Trudeau Fonds, LAC. See also Marc Lalonde, "Riding the Storm: Energy Policy 1968-1984," in Towards a Just Society: The Trudeau Years, eds. Thomas Axworthy and Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Markham, ON: Viking, 1990), 50; Bell, "Canadian Industrial Policy in a Changing World," 81. 153 Fossum, Oil, the State, and Federalism, 36-38. 154 Minister of Energy, Mines, and Resources, An Energy Policy for Canada: Phase 1, Volumes 1-2 (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1973). 155 Radwanski, Trudeau, 11; English, Just Watch Me, 193. 156 English, Just Watch Me, 223. 47 government's emphasis on management through scientific knowledge and rational planning. As it transformed itself into a policy making body, the EMR made every effort to gain access to information and scientific expertise and thus bring itself into line with the Trudeau government's "rational management" and enable it to contribute actively to policymaking within the structures of the Canadian state. One group with which it built a close relationship was the SCC, a leading scientific authority and a strong supporter of national technological development.157 Key advisors on oil and gas policy and experts in energy analysis, such as R.B. Toombs and R.P. Charbonnier, moved between the department and the advisory body, thereby transferring expertise and allowing the SCC to assist the EMR in studying Canada's energy options and help formulate policy.158 The relationship grew so close, in fact, that in 1971 Charbonnier, who now worked for the EMR, asked the SCC's committee on energy to begin a study designed to complement the EMR's forthcoming assessment of Canadian energy policy by examining the "long term scientific and philosophical aspects" of energy in Canada.159 Because of its study and their other extensive work with energy and resources, the SCC exercised an indirect, but significant, influence on Canadian energy policy through the information it provided, and it became an important advocate for renewable energy.160 The newly expanded department and its technically sophisticated staff produced an exhaustive study of Canadian energy: An Energy Policy for Canada: Phase 1. This extensive and highly technical report examined every aspect of Canada's energy sector from hydroelectricity to gas and from exploration to pipeline construction. A "strategic report" rather than a pure statement of policy, the study perfectly represented the Trudeau government's "rational management" in action as it collected and synthesized huge quantities of information in an effort to provide cabinet with an "objective" foundation 157 Clowater, "Canadian Science Policy," 120; J. Ann Lloyd, "Canada's Search for a Science Policy and the, Role of the Science Council in Articulating Science Policy Issues from 1966 to 1980"(PhD Diss., Université de Montreal, 1988), 169. 158 Lloyd, "Canada's Search for a Science Policy," 172. 159 Lloyd, "Canada's Search for a Science Policy," 172-174. 160 See Science Council of Canada, Report No. 23: Canada's Energy Opportunities (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1975). The SCC's advocacy of renewable energy and the conserver society will be examined in depth in chapter three. 48 for policymaking.161 As the EMR put it in the report's introduction: The challenge can be stated simply – to have energy policies ensuring the best management of our resources for the general welfare of Canadians. …Energy policies must be developed on the foundation of thorough analyses of various options and impact of those options on the industry itself, and most importantly on all aspects of Canadian economic and social policies.162 The EMR also assured Canadians that "the studies on which the document is based are being improved as the basic data are refined" and they represented "the best analyses available," thus giving An Energy Policy for Canada pre-eminence as the basis for policy.163 When published in May 1973, the report effectively stated the government's view of the "facts" about Canada's energy sector and its future. Reflecting the Trudeau government's views, An Energy Policy for Canada explicitly stated that the policies of NOP required re-examination, particularly policies relating to royalties, land-rights, and federal provincial responsibilities.164 The study also assumed that, as the ultimate representative of Canada, the federal government had the right as well as the ability to oversee energy policy. This assertion of federal supremacy and the government's desire to examine royalties, land-rights, and constitutional responsibilities made the government's view of energy highly contentious in Canada's regionally dominated politics.165 This conflict arose because the confederation awards ownership of mineral resources to the provinces. The federal government, however, administers trade, which makes cooperation necessary between different levels of government.166 In this context of divided responsibility, the EMR's An Energy Policy for Canada provides a stunning example of how the Trudeau government asserted both the federal government's right to 161 Memo to Cabinet, "An Energy Policy For Canada – Phase I – Analysis," Vol. 3, File Energy Policy 1973, Toombs Fonds, LAC. 162 EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 1: 2. 163 EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 1: 2. 164EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 1: 9; "Notes for Responses by the Prime Minister to Comments by Provincial Premiers on Federal Energy Policy Statement," Vol. 2, File 6, Trudeau Fonds, LAC. 165 Regional and constitutional conflict is the focus of Doern's and Toner's Politics of Energy, the leading analysis of this aspect of Canadian energy policy in the 1970s. 166 Doern and Toner, Politics of Energy, 65-66. 49 change the foundations of energy policy and the EMR's ability to manage Canada's energy development. The contentious nature of both assertions made the report's justification of its desired policy changes and its demonstration of the government's ability to oversee energy policy an important element of Canadian energy history in the 1970s. In its efforts to assert federal authority over the energy sector, the Trudeau government employed the same hyper-rationalistic ideology that it applied to other areas of Canadian governance. Specifically, the EMR employed systems theory and econometric analysis to demonstrate how energy intersected with and affected nearly every aspect of Canadians' lives. Asserting "energy policy is everybody's concern," the EMR argued that the development of Canadian energy resources could no longer be left solely under provincial and industry control since its national impact superseded any Figure 3: A Forecast of Canada's Oil Reserves and Demands. The EMR used simulations to analyze Canada's energy future and communicate its findings to Canadians. Energy, Mines, and Resources. An Energy Policy for Canada – Phase 1, 1973 50 regional or private interests.167 Quantification, simulation, and econometric analysis became the lens through which the EMR approached energy in An Energy Policy for Canada and the department's primary methodology for examining energy and overseeing its development. The government adopted simulation to examine the energy sector and formulate its first approach to energy policy for both ideological and political reasons. In part, the EMR's analysis continued the work of the NEB, which had continually gathered information from oil and gas companies in an attempt to develop an overall picture of Canadian reserves and possible future development.168 The EMR, however, expanded upon the NEB's efforts to examine all energy policy with the goal of ensuring that Canadians had the resources required to live in the society they desired. As John Robinson and Clifford Hooker argue, modeling had a central place in the EMR's approach since it offered the only method of analyzing long-term supply and demand and incorporating economic consequences.169 Vaclav Smil, a leading historian of energy, concurs with this analysis. Although highly critical of modeling and forecasting, he notes that in the 1970s such analytical tools had a central place in energy policy and despite criticisms and failures remained influential throughout the decade.170 As Smil suggests, the authority of modeling and forecasting rests upon both the desire to render the world legible and manageable and the hubris that such an achievement is possible.171 These assumptions were foundational to the Trudeau government's "rational management" and encouraged by the government's structure in the 1970s. Since simulation seemed to offer the "objective" information the Trudeau government required and also had the potential to support the government's claims for the necessity of federal intervention, the EMR embraced it. Employing this abstract approach in an effort to make the Canadian energy sector legible and amenable to management, An Energy Policy for Canada conceptualized the energy sector as a complex system of inputs and outputs interconnected with nearly every 167 EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 1: 1. 168 Robinson and Hooker, "Energy Policy and Modeling in Canada," 213. 169 Robinson and Hooker, "Energy Policy and Modeling in Canada," 221. 170 Vaclav Smil, Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 122-123. 171 Smil, Energy at the Crossroads, 178. 51 aspect of the larger whole of Canadian society.172 To emphasize these connections, the report even included a feedback model that the EMR had made of the energy sector. This model, borrowing from cybernetics, graphically displayed the complex multivariate feedback loops that the EMR believed characterized the Canadian energy sector and its relationship with Canadian society.173 Emphasizing the extensive feedback between such distinct entities as capital, Canada-U.S. relations, the environment, and Canadian quality of life, this diagram encapsulated the federal government's argument for policy intervention. To strengthen its analysis, the EMR also incorporated simulations by the ECC's CANDIDE Model, which it employed to understand the connections between energy 172 EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 1: 7-24. 173 EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 1: 5. Figure 4: The EMR Feedback Model. This model of Canadian energy system appeared as part of an extensive list describing the complex feedback between energy and Canadian society and emphasizing the need for carefully designed policy. Energy, Mines, and Resources. An Energy Policy for Canada – Phase 1, 1973 52 policy and economic growth.174 According to An Energy Policy for Canada, this model's simulations demonstrated that energy played a fundamental role in the function of Canada's economy, and that if something interrupted continued energy development Canada's economy would suffer.175 In the report's view, leaving Canadian energy policy in the hands of foreign business interests courted disaster. Thankfully, the report suggested, the well-informed federal government with its "knowledge of the facts" could "[formulate] the best energy policies" and ensure energy was available to support "Canadian aspirations."176 In short, quantifying Canada's energy needs and resources enabled the federal government to justify the expansion of federal authority upon its assertion of "objective" knowledge and expertise. The report's systems analysis also incorporated the environmental impacts of energy development, which introduced environmental costs as a factor in Canadian policy making for the first time. Although not carefully calculated or a primary factor in the report's analysis, its inclusion and the report's open discussion of the necessity of balancing quality of life and economic growth reflected the growing influence of environmentalism and its connection to changing lifestyle expectations of Canadians.177 This recognition of the environment, however, was not without its political calculus. The spotlight on the environmental impacts of energy development strengthened the federal government's argument for intervention, since the federal government theoretically possessed the greatest ability to regulate the environmental impact of energy development.178 Beyond presenting the federal government's argument for its involvement in the energy sector, the report acted as a demonstration of the EMR's policymaking ability and the government's mastery of the complexity of the Canadian energy sector. At the foundation of the EMR's and the federal government's claim to administer 174 For a discussion of the CANDIDE model, see M.C. McCracken and the Economic Council of Canada, CANDIDE Project Paper: An Overview of CANDIDE Model 1.0 (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1973). 175 EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 2: 186. 176 EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 1: 4. 177 EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 2: 129-131. Samuel Hays in particular emphasises the importance of quality of life concerns. See Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 178 John Roberts, "Meeting the Environmental Challenge," in Towards a Just Society: The Trudeau Years, eds. Thomas Axworthy and Pierre Trudeau (New York: Viking, 1990), 262-281. 53 Canada's oil and gas development lay a series of projections outlining the future of Canadian energy needs and supplies up to 1990 and, in some long-term simulations, up to the year 2050. The purpose of these forecasts was to outline Canada's energy future and demonstrate that the EMR could manage the development of nuclear, hydro, uranium, and most importantly oil and gas to meet Canadians' present and future needs.179 To make these projections the EMR relied primarily on econometric and linear programming models. In fact, such models were so important to An Energy Policy for Canada that the second volume pointedly stated that with a more advanced forthcoming computer simulation, the department would achieve even greater "sensitivity [of] analysis" and thus more accurate forecasts.180 With such tools, energy policy would be reduced to an exercise in planning. Employing econometric and linear programming models and using data provided by the Canadian Geological Survey, the Canadian Energy Board, and industry, the EMR constructed multiple scenarios of oil and gas reserves available at different price points.181 To calculate the future resources available in Canada, the EMR's models integrated geophysical data collected by geological surveys with a logarithmic formula the department had devised based on past oil finds to project Canada's total oil and gas reserves, including Canadian frontier lands and coastal areas yet to be explored.182 Starting from this mathematically defined level of resources, the EMR then employed its models to analyze the most cost effective method of bringing oil and gas to market.183 Then the EMR used the CANDIDE Model to simulate the economic impacts of energy development on Canada and its future prospects.184 Unsurprisingly, the report concluded that the Canadian arctic, where it projected much of Canada's future oil and gas development, might be beyond the powers of private industry to exploit due to the degree of risk and high costs.185 Federal support would be required to assure Canada's energy 179 EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 1: 64-80. 180 EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 2:90. 181 EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 2:74. 182 EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 2:74-75. 183 Linear programming models would remain a mainstay of the EMR's policymaking throughout the 1970s. They were believed to "assure public confidence" in policy decisions and insure the "orderly development of Canada energy systems," according to William Brown. Brown, "Energy Allocation: A Canadian Experience," Vol. 3, File Energy Policy References, 1974, R.B. Toombs Fonds, LAC. 184 EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 1: 206-207. 185 EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 2:184-185. 54 future. The report's highly technical vocabulary and emphasis on long-term forecasting set the standard for how the EMR would approach policymaking and the character of future energy discussions within the Canadian government. The Trudeau government's next major report, An Energy Strategy for Canada: Policies of Self Reliance, published in 1976, employed a similar methodology.186 It focused on total energy supply and demand and again emphasized the integral nature of energy to Canadian life. According to the 1976 report, energy's importance, coupled with complexities of its development in the aftermath of the 1973 oil shock, made coordinating "energy-policy planning and other 186 Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources, An Energy Strategy for Canada: Policies of Self Reliance (Ottawa: Energy, Mines, and Resources, 1976). Figure 5: Models of Canadian Energy Reserves. These two graphs illustrate the probability calculations the EMR used to assess the potential resources to be found in "frontier areas." Note these graphs represented exploration as a simple log function, suggesting exploration development could be easily analysed and planned. Energy, Mines, and Resources, An Energy Policy for Canada – Phase 1, 1973 55 social and economic goals" more important than in the past.187 In other words, the Trudeau government's technocratic policymaking and its goal of objective management framed its energy policy throughout the 1970s. Its emphasis on mechanical objectivity, or at least its appearance, would provide environmentalists and advocates of renewable energy opportunities to manipulate federal policy in the late 1970s. Beyond its statement of the Trudeau government's approach to energy policy, An Energy Policy for Canada provided the last statements of limitless growth in Canada before the energy crisis and the efforts of environmentalists changed the terms of discussion. The report projected a quadrupling of Canada's energy use in the year 2000 as the population increased and economic growth and energy use continued to accelerate.188 To supply this massive increase in energy use, the EMR believed Canadians would require between three and six times as much oil, twice as much hydroelectricity, and a staggering five hundred times as much nuclear energy.189 As absurd as a five hundred-fold increase in nuclear energy production seems, nuclear agencies around the world proposed similar increases.190 This rapid growth in energy use was widely accepted and a central part of "growth liberalism" in the postwar period.191 Among nuclear advocates and policymakers, it was an item of faith that nuclear energy would provide the world with unlimited energy and endless prosperity. In fact, without this astronomical increase in nuclear energy, along with optimistic projections of Canada's potential oil and gas reserves, there would be no way of meeting Canada's projected energy demands. Noting this possibility, the EMR explained that if exploration for oil and gas in Canada's "frontier lands" did not reveal large supplies or if oil sands development experienced delays, its simulations showed that Canada would not be able to meet her own energy demands by 1985.192 It is important to note the dual function of simulation in 187 EMR, An Energy Strategy for Canada, 3. 188 EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 71. 189 EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 72. 190 Memo to Cabinet, "An Energy Policy For Canada – Phase I – Analysis," Vol. 3, File, Energy Policy 1973, Toombs Fonds, LAC; J.L. Gray (the president of Atomic Energy of Canada, Limited), "Nuclear Power, State of the Art and Future Expectations" (paper presented at the Annual General Meeting of the Canadian Institute of Metallurgists, April 16, 1973). According to notes on the archival copy, Canadian energy advisors took Gray's optimistic judgement largely on faith. See, Memo to Cabinet, "An Energy Policy For Canada – Phase I – Analysis," Vol. 3, File. Energy Policy 1973, Toombs Fonds, LAC. 191 Collins, More, 46. 192 EMR. An Energy Policy for Canada, 95. "Frontier lands" was a phrase used by the EMR to refer to 56 An Energy Policy for Canada: mathematical models provided proposals for massive increases in nuclear energy with a semblance of reality while at the same time they outlined the dangers of exponentially growing energy demands. As the decade wore on, Canadian government advisors and environmentalists concerned about long-term sustainability would take a chapter from the Club of Rome and use these forecasts to challenge the "politics of growth."193 The report's admission that increasing energy consumption might be impossible to support foreshadowed coming energy problems, and the specter of oil shortages emerged as analysts grew alarmed by increasing demands and stagnating supplies. In fact, the EMR's muted concerns about the future of Canadian oil were far from the only examples of growing pessimism about Canadian oil reserves in the early 1970s. In late 1972, the NEB released pessimistic estimates of Canada's oil reserves which warned of possible shortfalls by 1986.194 In the spring of 1973, the Canadian media briefly noticed the issue when Maclean's argued that the government needed to begin conservation and reduce oil exports.195 According to EMR records, the department was well aware of potential shortfalls in oil production. However, based on its projections of the frontier lands' potential oil reserves and quick development of the oil sands, the Department remained confident that Canada's long-term potential remained vast and capable of contributing towards the country's economic growth.196 Validated by its forecasts of Canada's potential and anxious to support the Trudeau government's assertion of federal authority over Canada's energy industry, the EMR published An Energy Policy for Canada with an optimistic view of Canada's prospects. Only four months after the EMR published An Energy Policy for Canada: Phase 1, the oil shock of 1973 struck. The Trudeau government had planned to announce a new national energy policy for Canada in late 1973 or 1974, so the oil shock provided the federal government with an opportunity to expand federal authority, albeit somewhat areas outside of established oil bearing areas in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. Generally they included the Northwest Territories, the Arctic, and areas of the shores of Newfoundland and Labrador. 193 Collins, More, 139. 194 Robinson and Hooker, "Energy Policy and Modeling in Canada," 215. 195 "Selling Today What We'll Need Tomorrow" and "The Limits of Friendship," Macleans, March 1973, Press clippings, Vol. 3, File Energy Policy References, 1973, Toombs Fonds, LAC. 196 EMR, "Notes on the Energy Crisis and the Role of Energy in Canada," April 1973, Vol. 3, File Energy Policy References, 1973, Toombs Fonds, LAC. 57 hurriedly, now that some sort of national policy had become necessary to blunt the pain of rapid price increases.197 The supply interruptions and resulting price spikes of the Yom Kippur war and OPEC's embargo had effectively demonstrated a point that the EMR attempted to make with systems theory. Energy, in the form of oil, was fundamental to Canadian, indeed, all western economic and social life.198 Today this point seems banal, but in a world accustomed to declining energy prices and turning up the oil furnace or electric heater at the first chill, it was groundbreaking. In Canada, the oil shock forced questions of energy onto the national agenda and intensified a debate between the interests of Canadian and multinational oil producers and Canadian consumers. This debate would soon expand to include environmentalists and advocates of energy conservation and renewable energy. On December 6, 1973, Trudeau announced a new energy policy that would define his government's efforts to manage the energy sector for the remainder of the decade: energy self-reliance.199 Focusing on the rough equivalency between Canada's oil exports and imports, Trudeau's government outlined a plan to freeze oil prices over the winter, create a national market, construct pipelines to connect producing and consuming provinces, invest heavily in Canadian production, and create a national oil company, Petro Canada, to lead new exploration and speed the extraction of non-conventional oil.200 Only the price freeze and export tax controls went into immediate effect.201 Funds received from these taxes subsidised the importation of oil in Eastern Canada and allowed Canadians to adjust gradually to new prices. With this set of policies, the Trudeau government hoped to shield Canada's economy and Canadians' prosperity from price instability. For the remainder of the 1970s the government worked to ensure domestic supply through price manipulation and development incentives. 197 Memo to Cabinet, "An Energy Policy for Canada – Phase I – Analysis, Vol. 3, File Energy Policy 1973, Toombs Fonds, LAC; Fossum, Oil, the State, and Federalism, 29; "Energy Minister will seek their advice at Toronto talks," Globe and Mail, November 23, 1973. 198 David Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 217-220. 199 "Fuel Policy: Freeze Extended to Spring Oil Self-Sufficiency Pledged," Globe and Mail, December 7, 1973. 200 "Statement by the Prime Minister on Oil Policy," December 6, 1973, Vol. 3, File Energy Policy 1973, Toombs Fonds, LAC. 201 Doern and Toner, Politics of Energy, 91. 58 Technical Knowledge and Political Debate The preceding sections have shown how the Trudeau government restructured the state around its "rational management" approach and embraced technical knowledge. These changes constructed a highly technical discourse around policymaking and made mobilizing expertise and rationalistic analyses central to political debate. Expanding upon my argument, this section examines how the structure of the state created policy feedbacks that government bureaucrats, followed by environmentalists and advocates of renewable energy in the late 1970s, exploited to criticize government policy and propose alternatives. In short, political discourse privileged Canadian groups that possessed the scientific or economic training upon which the Trudeau government attempted to base its policy and reshaped political discourse, particularly around energy. This privileging of technical knowledge had the effect of strengthening the influence of politically marginal groups inside and outside of government able to use simulation and systems analysis to examine policy and mobilize them to suggest alternatives. The energy crisis and the announcement of a national energy policy unleashed far more debate over the state of Canada's oil and gas industry than the Trudeau government had anticipated. Much to its surprise, the dispute directly challenged the EMR's simulations and development forecasts, the "facts" upon which the Trudeau government had hoped to make policy. In this conflict, the Trudeau government would find that technical knowledge and "rational management" neither removed political conflict nor effectively demonstrated the state's ability to make policy or justify its interventions. Rather, its assertions of knowledge would become central to the conflict when first the petroleum industry, and later government advisors and environmentalists, used the government's method to criticize its conclusions and propose their own. In late 1973 and early 1974 this conflict centered on the government's price manipulation and export controls. As noted above, Canadian petroleum had historically been more expensive than oil on the world market. With price jumps in the fall of 1973, Canadian resources had suddenly become cheap. For the provinces with fossil fuel reserves and the multinationals that produced them, the Trudeau government's price freeze and export taxes stood in the way of substantial profits and seemed intolerable regardless of the benefits other Canadians received from artificially low oil prices. The 59 provinces, supported by powerful multinational corporations, argued that the terms of confederation gave them ownership of mineral resources, and in response the federal government asserted its authority to regulate trade, which set off a decade of acrimonious negotiation.202 The large multinationals that controlled the Canadian oil industry instituted a second tactic, which took advantage of their extensive knowledge of Canada's oil resources and targeted the Trudeau government's assertion of objective knowledge. This approach was particularly well suited to attacking the EMR's claims that it could manage Canadian energy development. It also exploited the government's relative inexperience with energy and its inability to collect information directly about Canada's oil reserves or actively develop them. As the Trudeau government outlined its policy, oil companies began speculating publicly that if oil prices did not rise they would be unable to finance further exploration, which could result in oil shortages within a decade. In its 1974 Annual Report, Texaco, one of the major multinationals working in Canada, outlined the industry position: The prices for Canadian crude had not been permitted to rise as rapidly as foreign crude prices... To retain Canada's present self-sufficiency in petroleum, Texaco Canada and others in the oil industry have been asserting repeatedly for several years that long lead times and staggering amounts of risk capital are needed to find, develop and deliver new oil and natural gas from frontier and offshore regions and to extract synthetic oil from the tar sands and other non-conventional sources.203 Making their assertion an explicit threat, the multinationals supported their position with estimates that projected national oil shortages by the mid 1980s.204 These industry projections directly contradicted earlier appraisals of Canada's oil reserves, which had confidently stated that Canada would have enough oil to last until well into the twenty-first century, in an effort to convince the NEB to support increased exportation of oil. As James Laxer notes, Texaco and other multinationals used these estimates to pressure the government to move to the higher international price by promising they could afford to 202 See Doern and Toner, Politics of Energy and Fossum, Oil, the State, and Federalism for extensive discussions of this conflict. 203 Texaco Annual Report, quoted in Laxer, Oil and Gas, 42. 204 Laxer, Oil and Gas, 45. 60 supply Canada with oil if prices increased to international levels.205 Simulations of Canada's oil supplies had thus become a tool of open political conflict. This major setback in the Trudeau government's attempt to expand federal authority through the employment of objective knowledge, the result highlights the weakness of expertise as a means of domination and standardization. As political theorist Yaron Ezrahi argues, by relying on the authority of scientific or economic expertise to legitimate its decisions, the state opens itself to criticism from groups able to use that form of expertise to interrogate its claims.206 Rather than enhancing the power of the state, as Scott and many environmental historians argue, computer simulations and supply forecasts actually broadened debates because they allowed a large and diverse group of experts to comment on government policy. The Trudeau government, with no way to assert the superiority of its numbers over those of the oil industry, particularly since it partially relied on the industry for information, had to consider industry criticisms. To make matters worse for the federal government, the NEB, which relied upon the figures provided by the oil industry, concurred with the multinationals' drastically reduced estimates of Canada's oil reserves.207 In its 1974 report to the EMR on the exportation of oil, the NEB strengthened its earlier warnings of possible shortages and issued further estimates that Canadian production could be 950,000 barrels below demand by 1982.208 Contrary to industry wishes, it recommended curtailing exports altogether, a response which might have helped self-sufficiency, but would have removed an important source of federal revenue. Recognizing that it had been outmaneuvered, the Trudeau government responded by moving ahead with its plans to form a national oil company, Petro Canada. Although defeated in its attempt to use econometric simulation and energy forecasting as a tool that would depoliticize energy policy and allow objective management of oil and gas development, the Trudeau government remained committed to a broader approach of "rational management" and determined to expand Canadians' control over the country's 205 Laxer, Oil and Gas, 46. 206 Ezrahi, The Descent of Icarus, 35. 207 National Energy Board and Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources, Report to the Honourable Minister of Energy, Mines, and Resources in the Matter of the Exportation of Oil (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1974). 208 NEB and EMR, Report to the Honourable Minister of Energy, Mines, and Resources in the Matter of the Exportation of Oil, Appendix 3. 61 oil industry. In this context, Petro Canada should be understood as both a statist effort to assert federal authority and a means of supporting the Trudeau government's regime of policymaking, which relied on access to accurate information.209 The national oil company would improve the government's knowledge of Canadian oil and gas reserves and, as its abilities developed, threaten multinationals with replacement if they refused to undertake new exploration and development. The EMR's response to the new estimates strengthens this interpretation of the Trudeau government's actions. Embarrassed by its suddenly overly optimistic analysis of Canada's potential, it launched an investigation into the data the oil and gas industry had provided it to see if it had been willfully misled about the state of Canada's reserves.210 The resulting report concluded that although industry estimates had been varied substantially, they had not been purposefully inaccurate. More importantly for the ongoing debate, its current pessimistic estimates remained within the range provided by government analysts, a point that An Energy Policy for Canada had recognized before the oil crisis. However, rather than abandoning simulation and forecasting as flawed, the EMR attempted to improve its understanding of oil and gas. Throughout the remainder of the decade, it carried out further studies of oil supply. The department even reaffirmed its determination to improve its abilities and provide the Trudeau government with more accurate information in its 1976 An Energy Strategy for Canada. Addressing past problems head on, the report's foreword noted the EMR's past mistakes over estimation of supply, but asserted that EMR's methods had developed and it was possible to model accurately Canada's energy needs and manage development.211 The Trudeau government's ideology of rational management and reliance on quantification played a central role in policymaking and political conflict in the 1970s. The failure of the Trudeau government's effort to establish an agreed upon set of "facts" from which it could make policy underlines how assertions of objectivity and technical expertise were employed to both legitimate and contest government policy. Technical knowledge became a political tool when non-government experts contested the state's claims. The government advisors who enabled a state to "see" its subjects and execute its 209 Fossum, Oil, the State, and Federalism, 52. 210 Memo to Minister, Toombs Fonds LAC. 211 EMR, An Energy Strategy for Canada, iii-iv. 62 designs also employed their expertise to challenge government policy and suggest alternatives. In fact, as analysis of the problems posed by the energy crisis led to multiple conclusions, government advisors and federal bureaucrats who disagreed with the Trudeau government's emphasis on growth and resource exploitation used the government's own analysis to attack its policies as short sighted. These advisors' cooption of the Trudeau government's rationalistic discourse to enhance their otherwise marginal political position helped start some of the first discussions of sustainable development in the 1970s. The Office of Energy Conservation (OEC) was one of the first to take advantage of the openings provided by Canadian political discourse when it pushed long-term sustainability into policy.212 The OEC was a minor office within the EMR, created as part of the government's attempts to manage the energy crisis in late 1973. Charged with devising ways for Canadians to conserve energy, the OEC quickly found itself working against the EMR's and the Trudeau government's primary policy goal: the increase of energy supplies.213 Newly formed, politically marginal, and bearing an unpopular message, the OEC cast about for a means of making itself heard in policy discussions. In 1974, it hit upon the office's technical expertise, particularly in economics, and thereafter the OEC took advantage of the privileged place of technical knowledge within the Trudeau government to champion energy conservation. Its members used their expertise to attack the very foundations of energy policy and question the most fundamental goals of the Trudeau government, indeed of the postwar consensus, namely, rapid economic and energy growth. David Brooks, the first director of the OEC, played a central role in championing these iconoclastic positions. A relatively new employee of the EMR, Brooks joined the department just before the Trudeau government reorganized it in the early 1970s. Although he originally worked in the EMR's mining section, he had a strong interest in environmental problems and was concerned by the government's plans for resource 212 The OEC would be renamed the Renewable Energy and Conservation Branch in 1976. Continuing its efforts to change policy, it would manipulate the government's growing concern over energy scarcity and its continued reliance on simulation to make solar heating a part of Canadian energy policy. This development is discussed in chapter six. 213 The EMR connected energy use with economic growth. Indeed, it assumed that economic growth required increased energy use in its energy analysis in the early 1970s. EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 1: 29. 63 exploitation. An economist by training, Brooks focused on the economic justifications for energy conservation. To argue against the central goals of federal energy and economic policy, Brooks focused on two closely connected ideas: First, that "low energy growth" would not disrupt the economy, and second, that heavy investment in energy production, primarily fossil fuels, did not represent a cost effective use of capital. Conservation, according to Brooks, could provide energy at a much lower cost. Agitating within the EMR and publishing his views publicly, Brooks and the OEC began making the case for conservation.214 In a paper co-authored with Josette Doe, another economist at the OEC, Brooks compared Canada to other industrialised nations in order to highlight the potential for energy conservation. Using the EMR's own estimates as the basis of their comparisons, the two economists discussed three levels of conservation: efficiency increases, demand moderation, and political or macroeconomic questions about how Canadians used energy.215 Taking on the all-important macroeconomic question of the relationship between energy use and economic growth, Brooks and Doe asserted that contrary to popular belief, a causal relationship did not exist between energy use and economic growth.216 To demonstrate their assertion, they compared Canada to Sweden, which had achieved exactly the same level of economic growth while using half the energy. Brooks and Doe argued that Canadians, beginning with the federal government, needed to alter their investment patterns to address the social and political structures that led to such inefficiency.217 Stating that energy prices would invariably increase in the future, they suggested that focusing on lifetime costs rather than initial costs would make Canada radically more energy efficient, since it would accurately reflect increased future costs, encourage investment in efficiency, and reduce environmental damage as well.218 With this starting point, Brooks and the OEC then expanded their position. 214 Brooks also co-authored an article in the iconoclastic journal Alternatives which embraced the countercultural argument of E.F. Schumacher that Canada should avoid large scale energy projects because of their unsustainable expense and their threat to local self-reliance and democratic choice. See Brooks and Alma Norman, "A Question of Choice," Alternatives 3, 2 (Winter 1974): 2-10 215 David Brooks and Josette Doe, "Energy Conservation: How Big a Target?," ASHRAE Journal (August, 1974): 37-42. 216 Brooks and Doe, "Energy Conservation: How Big a Target?," 38. 217 Brooks and Doe, "Energy Conservation: How Big a Target?," 42. 218 Brooks and Doe, "Energy Conservation: How Big a Target?," 40-41. 64 Utilizing the EMR's econometric models of energy in a deft act of policy jiu jitsu, Brooks suggested that not only was heavy investment in oil and gas unlikely to meet Canadian needs, but it also would draw investment away from other priorities.219 This assertion conflicted with federal policy, which hinged on massive investment in oil and gas exploration and production.220 Focusing on the high opportunity costs, Brooks and the OEC outlined how such investment undermined the government's own stated priorities in 1974, which included the "rational use of resources" and a "balance in the distribution of people and ...wealth."221 Energy conservation, according to OEC, would be effective anywhere and cost less, which enabled greater social investment and would actually support the government's stated goals of equality and long-term management. Furthermore, since it conserved resources for future use, it allowed greater flexibility. As Brooks attempted to convince the EMR that energy conservation was possible and even profitable, other members of the OEC worked to enhance the office's marginal position within the department. In 1974, they delved into the emerging practice of energy analysis and began to use it to evaluate Canadian decisions about energy. Energy analysis developed in the early 1970s as a hybrid practice which drew upon foundations in systems analysis, ecology, and input-output models. The publication of Howard Odum's controversial book Environment Power, and Society brought energy analysis to a wider audience.222 Odum, however, cannot be credited as its creator since the practice really consisted of a repurposing of input-output models pioneered in the 1940s by economist Wassily Leontief and applying them to energy use.223 Regardless of its derivative origins, energy analysis proved extremely useful as a systematic means of examining energy efficiency. As questions of energy scarcity took on importance in the 1970s, energy analysis became an extremely powerful tool for both government advisors and 219 Office of Energy Conservation, Energy Conservation and the Roles of Government (Ottawa: EMR, 1976); "Life Expectancy of Canada's Oil Resources, January, 1975," Vol. 4, File Energy Policy References, 1975, Toombs Fonds, LAC. 220 Minister's Energy Council, January 29, 1975, Vol. 4, File Energy Policy References, 1975, Toombs Fonds, LAC. 221 French, How Ottawa Decides, 79; "The Government's Priorities, Re: Energy," Vol. 4, File Energy Policy References, 1975, Toombs Fonds, LAC. 222 Howard Odum, Environment, Power, and Society (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1970); Office of Energy Conservation, Energy Analysis: Methods, Uses, Implications, A Review and Critique of the State of the Art (Ottawa: Energy, Mines, and Resources, 1976), 7. 223 A. Belykh, "A Note on the Origins of Input-Output Analysis and the Contribution of the Early Soviet Economists: Chayanov, Bogdanov, and Kritzman," Soviet Studies 41, 3 (July 1989): 426-429. 65 technically sophisticated environmentalists. For example, as Chapter five will discuss, Amory Lovins employed similar techniques to argue nuclear power was inefficient.224 For the OEC, energy analysis had two specific advantages. It "provided [the means] to look at a total system and optimize energy use of the whole system," and it offered a way of measuring net energy, the energy gained minus the energy used to produce a given unit of energy.225 The ability to measure Canada's total energy and critically examine different forms of energy production to determine which promised the greatest efficiency made energy analysis a useful tool in an office tasked with formulating conservation policy. Just as significantly, it provided the OEC with a method of supporting its arguments for energy conservation in a highly technical manner and communicating its positions as the results of objective thermodynamic calculations. Within the Trudeau government, with its emphasis on technical knowledge and the application of science to policymaking, energy analysis gave OEC a tool it could use to advance its views within the EMR and help them receive the best response from cabinet. By both taking advantage of the office's economic expertise and manipulating the larger structures of the Trudeau government, the tiny OEC gained a voice in policymaking. 224 Amory Lovins and John H. Price, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy (San Francisco: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1975). 225 OEC, Energy Analysis, 19, 35. Figure 6: Energy Analysis Model. This diagram represents the energy flows associated with a generic energy facility. By applying this input-output analysis, the OEC could calculate the efficiency of any source of energy. OEC, Energy Analysis: Methods, Uses, Implications, 1976 66 By 1976 Brooks' and the OEC's efforts began to affect Canadian energy policy. In that year the EMR's energy policy announcement made energy conservation a formal element of policy. The EMR set a target of a less than 3.5 percent increase in energy consumption, a significant decrease from the 5.5 increase of the previous fifteen years.226 The department also began to distribute guides touting the economic benefits of conserving energy in an effort to cut Canadian oil consumption.227 The Trudeau government, however, still invested in the exploration and development of Canada's oil and continued to see resource exploitation as a central driver of economic growth, as it had been for generations.228 Anxious to dedicate himself more directly to environmental advocacy, Brooks left the OEC in 1976. He quickly founded Friends of the Earth Canada and became a leading member of Pollution Probe's sister organization, Energy Probe, and he continued to champion conservation. At these environmental organizations, his expertise in the field of economics and his knowledge of government culture remained extremely valuable as a means to guide the groups' efforts to change federal policy. While leading these environmental organizations, he also continued to consult with the EMR on energy. In 1977, for instance, Brooks served as a member of the National Advisory Committee on Conservation and Renewable Energy convened by the EMR to advise its efforts to "moderate energy demand through conservation policies and increase the supply from renewable sources."229 In the early 1980s, he also oversaw 2025: Soft Energy Futures for Canada, an expansive government study of renewable energy and conservation, which aimed to provide a plan for moving away from oil.230 Brooks' knowledge of Canada's energy policy and the structure of its government would provide invaluable assistance to the Campbell government of Prince Edward Island and advocates of solar energy in their efforts to convince the federal government to fund renewable energy in the late 1970s. Changing energy prospects and economic expertise enabled the tiny OEC to have 226 EMR, An Energy Strategy for Canada, 129, 149. 227 OEC and EMR, Keeping the Heat in: How to Re-Insulate your Home to Save Energy and Money (Weston, ON: Southam Murray Printing, 1976). 228 EMR, An Energy Policy for Canada, 148. 229 "Information to Cabinet Re: Appointment of National Advisory Committee on Conservation and Renewable Energy, 1977" Vol. 236, File 220-31, Gillespie Fonds, LAC. 230David Brooks, John Robinson, and Ralph Torrie, 2025: Soft Energy Futures for Canada (Ottawa: Department of Energy Mines and Resources and Environment Canada, 1983). 67 a small, but significant, effect on energy policy. Although unable to reverse entirely the Trudeau government's commitment to growth, OEC advisors, and later environmentalists, effectively employed technical knowledge to question government policy and suggest alternatives. Advocates of renewable energy and conservation used their technical expertise to force their way into discussions of energy policy and economic development. Once there, they pushed the federal government to fund renewable energy and by the late 1970s convinced it to provide hundreds of millions of dollars to develop solar heating and create a Canadian solar industry. In short, the highly technical discourse constructed by the Trudeau government enabled Canadians' discussion of environmental limits and underwrote the country's first program of sustainable development. Conclusion This chapter has made two central arguments: that technical knowledge is a zone of political conflict rather than a tool of social domination and that regimes of quantification and expert authority encourage manipulation by those groups with the requisite expertise. In areas such as energy policy, where knowledge of physical environments and the economics of their exploitation are integral to state policy, knowledge becomes both a means of analysis and a tool of political debate. Furthermore, these conflicts can destabilize state policy, as in the oil industry's employment of energy forecasts to undermine the Trudeau government's policy goals. Even more significantly, this malleability enables groups to employ the very legibility created by technical knowledge, in this instance knowledge of energy supplies, to challenge the state and outline alternatives. This analysis suggests the modern Canadian state is neither an all-powerful and monolithic entity, nor a passive entity buffeted by social groups and political interests. Rather, it is a powerful, but conflicted, actor fractured by both internal struggles and its ongoing efforts to establish and maintain its authority. Approaching the Canadian state as a central, but circumscribed actor helps historians analyze how government policies are constructed and how the groups within and outside of the state mobilize to exploit the terms of political discourse set by the state and the types of knowledge it privileges. Even as it makes certain ideas hege
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Experts at work : the Canadian state, North American environmentalism, and renewable energy in an era… Trim, Henry 2014
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