Paper short abstract:

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, proponents of liberal rule used the immense power contained in coal to organize, extend, and negotiate resistance to, a particular form of society and government. Synergy between liberalism and fossil fuels became a foundation of the Canadian project.

Paper long abstract:

In 2000, Ian McKay referred to Canada as a project of liberalism, and the study of Canada as fruitfully pursued through the study of those who worked to realize and resist that project. In this paper I would like to explore how to connect these ideas to the material realties of fossil fuel energy, particularly coal. As other scholars have pointed out, the synergy between fossil fuels on the one hand, and liberal democracy and capitalism on the other, is too strong to be accidental. Just as the liberal order expanded to include groups of people it had previously excluded, so too did the mineral energy regime simultaneously extend its material realities into the lives of more people. In both cases, inclusion encouraged, and eventually demanded, an end to resistance to the liberal order/mineral energy regime. I propose using a study of the control and consumption of fossil fuels as a starting point for analyzing why particular groups mobilized liberalism as a politico-economic structure of rule, why others joined the project and came to identify with it, and why marginalized groups sought to resist or opt out of the project altogether or in part. The logic of the liberal order in Canada crystallized around the ways that the materiality of fossil fuel energy facilitated inequalities and power relations within society by empowering those with access to carbon energy and further disempowering those without.