Niagara: A History of the Falls (37 page)

Since Beck’s childhood, his life had centred around water-power. He came from a family of Lutheran millers who had been using water to turn their mill wheels in the old days in Baden, Germany. As a boy in Baden, Ontario – Waterloo County – Adam Beck built miniature dikes in the little brooks that ran into his father’s millpond. From his earliest days, he was challenged by the potential of water and the question of how it could be further channelled to serve mankind.

The German immigrants were devotees of the work ethic At the age of ten, Adam found his summer holidays interrupted when his father took him to the family foundry that ran in conjunction with the mill. “Slap him if he doesn’t work, or I’ll slap you,” he told an employee. The younger Beck, who never went to university, learned to work a ten-hour day. For the remainder of his restless life he found it difficult to take a prolonged holiday.

Beck soon learned the value of community co-operation, for those were the days of barn raisings and quilting bees, when people banded together to help each other out. That concept would fire Beck’s later obsession to attain a publicly owned hydroelectric system.

When Beck was twenty-two, his father’s business failed, and the family moved to the United States. But Adam stayed in Canada, determined to make it on his own. He took various jobs – one in a brass factory and another, later, in a cigar factory. Then, discerning an unfilled need, he started a cigar-box company in the heart of the Southern Ontario tobacco fields. There the young workaholic did everything from sharpening his own saw to delivering the product in a two-wheeled handcart.

By 1898, Adam Beck was well enough off to enter politics. In 1902 he was elected mayor of London and soon revealed his social philosophy when he refused to extend the lease of a privately owned local railway. Beck was determined that the city itself should run the line. Although in politics he was nominally a Conservative, the term, in those days, did not have the connotations it later acquired. The Ontario Liberal party, rusty in office under George W. Ross, contained the die-hards. The Conservatives, led by James Pliny Whitney, were more progressive. In the provincial election of 1902, narrowly won by the Liberals, Beck ran as a Conservative and was elected to the legislature. That, of course, was the year of the great coal famine and also of the gift of the franchise to develop Niagara power to a private concern, the Electrical Development Company.

With the municipalities demanding that a commission be set up to look into the whole thorny question of public power and most of the press on their side, Ross could not refuse. In August he bowed to the pressure, put Elias Snider in charge, and made Beck one of the commissioners. From that moment the cigar-box manufacturer began to dominate the movement. As his biographer and colleague, W.R. Plewman, has said, he went at it “as naturally as Queen Victoria of England went to the centre of any stage upon which she had occasion to stand.”

He was forty-six years old, an assertive and dynamic personality – eloquent, impetuous, aggressive, and often unbending in his pursuit of “power for the people.” A handsome man with steel-grey eyes, he had the profile of a romantic stage actor to fit his own theatrical nature – aquiline nose, aggressive jaw, high forehead. In repose, it was said, he seemed “to be carved in granite.” A self-made man, he dressed like an aristocrat in clothes of British cut, and he acted like one, too, for he was an avid horseman and breeder who, when he found the time, rode pink-coated to hounds.

In 1905, an aroused electorate, disenchanted with the creaky thirty-four-year-old Liberal regime, threw Ross’s government out of office. James Whitney became premier, and Beck was named minister without portfolio. He might more aptly have been called “Minister of Public Power.” One of Whitney’s first moves was to refuse to ratify the agreement his predecessor had made with the Electrical Development Company to allow it to generate an additional 125,000 horsepower from Niagara Falls. Whitney also pledged that no more franchises would be granted until a thorough examination into Niagara power had been conducted. “The water power of Niagara,” he declared, “should be as free as the air.”

Beck, meanwhile, had found the villain he needed in his own campaign. He attacked the EDC from the public platform and in the legislature and declared that the agreement with the private company was worthless. It was supposed to protect the public, but, he said, “the promoters get the capital stock for nothing, the total cost of acquiring and developing the property being borne by the proceeds of the bond issue.” Thus began a long and bitter wrangle between Beck and the private power interests.

In July, Premier Whitney appointed his own three-man commission of inquiry to examine the subject of electrical power. Beck, who was already a member of the Snider commission appointed by the previous government, would be chairman of this new body. That position did not prevent him from stumping the province, attacking the private companies for charging too much and pointing to the benefits for industry in cheap power generated by a publicly owned company. For, although Beck also emphasized the advantages of power in the home, “Power for the People” really meant power for industry. Niagara Falls was seen, correctly, as the source that would create an industrial heartland in Southern Ontario. The manufacturers who demanded public power did so, not out of any political philosophy, but simply because they knew it would be cheaper.

The two commissions – Snider’s and Beck’s – submitted their reports within days of each other in the spring of 1906. To Snider’s fury, much of the data gathered by his own commission when it appeared in the press was credited to Beck. Snider never forgave Beck for that. Beck, in his turn, had no faith in the Snider commission, which had, in effect, been superseded by his own. Snider’s report recommended a municipal co-operative that would own both the generating plants and the transmission lines. Beck was not proposing public ownership of the generating plants, but he did want the province to build the transmission lines. In addition – and more significantly – he urged the creation of a provincial hydroelectric power commission mandated to regulate the private companies.

Beck had no intention of letting his report gather dust on the legislative shelves. The night it was tabled he organized a massive demonstration. Fifteen hundred people wearing cardboard badges bearing the words “Cheap Power Convention” marched on Toronto’s Romanesque city hall (a Lennox building) and then paraded to the legislative buildings in Queen’s Park, where they received Whitney’s promise – appropriately guarded – that the government would either supply power itself or regulate that business in the public interest.

Beck’s cause was further advanced by the revelation that the Electrical Development Company intended to charge Canadians a much higher price than its American customers, even though the transmission costs in Canada were lower. He was nervous about Whitney’s intentions, worried about the possibility of weak legislation. A seasoned political friend gave him some advice. “Why do you wait? Why take a chance? Why not draft your own bill and tell the cabinet what you want passed?” Beck did just that, with the help of the province’s chief justice. Then he campaigned for press support, inviting reporters into his office, eloquently outlining his dream, and giving the newspapermen the kind of black-and-white story they liked – the People versus the Vested Interests.

Beck got exactly what he wanted. In May 1906, the government created the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario, known to succeeding generations simply as “the Hydro” or, later, “Hydro.” Beck would be its chairman. Its power was astonishingly broad, but such was the strength of the public power movement that scarcely a voice was raised against it. The new commission would distribute power to the municipalities and it would also regulate the private companies. Hydro would not generate power itself but was given wide powers of expropriation.

The Electrical Development Company fought back on two fronts, in the Canadian newspapers and in British financial circles. In those days, much of the daily press was literally for sale. The EDC was able, through an advertising agency, to buy space in both the letters-to-the-editor columns and the editorials of some newspapers. At the same time the company tried to frighten the British from investing in the province. The strategy backfired by angering the premier, who told Nicholls that it had only injured the EDC’s cause.

Beck now faced a second battle. On January 1, 1907, the ratepayers of the various municipalities would have to give their councils permission to enter into contracts with Hydro. An intense public relations battle took place, with Beck and his engineers campaigning across Ontario like evangelists, spreading the gospel of Hydro and depicting the private interests as greedy scoundrels.

Beck cleared the 1907 hurdle. At the municipal elections, twenty communities voted for the proposition. But they still had to approve a $2,750,000 bond issue to pay for the municipal network that would deliver the power. The fight was on again, reduced once more to a good-versus-evil struggle by Beck’s propaganda. The villain was “the Electric Ring … the Most Dangerous Ring in Canada.” That meant the EDC.

The newspapers plunged into the battle. The Toronto
World
, which supported Beck, attacked both the Electrical Development Company and the rival
Globe
. “Both are public enemies,” it cried. In fact, the
Globe
favoured public ownership but believed in fair play for the private interests. Yet the private interests themselves were hardly playing fair. The
Globe
, the
Mail
, the
News
, and the
Star
were all being paid advertising rates for letters, articles, and editorials supporting private enterprise. “A perfect deluge of letters” (Whitney’s phrase) – some anonymous, others with fictitious names or such noms-de-plume as
Veritas
or
Citizen –
was appearing in newspapers in major centres in the province. All, apparently, were the work of a Toronto advertising agency with money to burn. The
World
was offered and turned down $350,000 to change its shrill policy. It was, in fact, losing so much advertising that it found itself in financial trouble and asked the government, vainly, for advertising help.

On January 1, 1908, the municipal electors again gave Beck what he wanted – a solid vote in favour of the bond issue. Now Whitney found himself in a dilemma. Three of the country’s most powerful capitalists controlled the EDC. If that company failed – and it too was in financial straits – Canada’s credit abroad would be badly compromised. Yet the premier, facing a provincial election that year, could scarcely halt the growing pressure for public power. The best he could hope for was that one of his appointments, John S. Hendrie, minister without portfolio and a former mayor of Hamilton, might serve as a brake on Adam Beck’s ambitions. Hendrie, a member of the three-man Hydro-Electric Power Commission, was sympathetic to the private power lobby.

But Beck’s ambitions had already damaged the EDC; talk of expropriation had hurt its credit badly. Mackenzie stepped in with a dazzling series of mergers and realignments that placed it under the umbrella of his newly organized Toronto Power Company. Now the EDC, its transmission lines, and its contracts with Mackenzie’s Street Railway Company and Pellatt’s Electric Light Company were all part of the same package. Mackenzie assumed direct control, with his partners in subordinate positions.

Whitney easily won the summer election in 1908, and Beck was returned with a huge majority. But he remained obdurate in his near fanatical opposition to Mackenzie. When, in August, Canadian General Electric submitted the lowest tender to build the Hydro line, Beck tried to block the contract because Mackenzie’s colleague, Nicholls, controlled the company. Whitney stepped in and persuaded the vengeful Hydro chairman to allow CGE to have two-thirds of the project.

The first sod for the transmission line was turned on November 18 at Exhibition Park in Toronto. Whitney was on hand to make a conciliatory speech. “We have undertaken to safeguard the interests of the people,” he said, “but only with the assurance that it will not be at the expense of private rights.”

In actual fact, the premier was growing more and more disenchanted with the private power lobby. Mackenzie brought suit to try to prevent Toronto and London from taking power from Hydro. The Whitney government immediately introduced an act placing these contracts beyond the jurisdiction of the courts. That touched off a vicious press campaign in Montreal, London, and New York, designed to convince the financial world that the “socialist legislation” would damage Canada’s credit in the money markets. The British press was especially vitriolic. The
Financial Times
of London wrote of “an outrageous parody of lawmaking,” and the
Monetary Times
referred to “bullying legislation which takes away the first right of the British subject.”

All such comments were published in a widely distributed pamphlet whose purpose was to force the federal government to disallow the act. A petition for disallowance was heard in October, but Hydro went forward with construction anyway, convinced, correctly, that Ottawa would throw out the case. Whitney had never had any doubts about that. The London manager of the Bank of Montreal had already told him privately that Canada’s credit was in no way harmed. The press campaign had not only nettled the premier but, by its intemperance, had also turned many London investors against the private power interests. The battle between Beck and Mackenzie, two strong and stubborn personalities, was over, at least for the moment.

When the power was switched on in Berlin on the night of October 11, 1910, the premier referred to the long and bitter struggle. “We have been attacked, vilified, and slandered,” he said. “Large sums of money have been expended in creating and fomenting prejudice and ill feeling against us. And still larger sums have been expended in conducting a campaign against us outside of Ontario. Our opponents left nothing undone that could be done, and men of influences, from the humblest man in the land up to the Prime Minister of Great Britain, were approached in the endeavour to destroy our power legislation and render it impossible for the wonderful new force to be used and enjoyed by the people.… We, Adam Beck’s colleagues, can never forget his steady confidence in the result and the bravery and pluck with which he stood up against all attacks.”