Rural Cooperatives:
If They Can Have It, Why Can’t We?

One of Alberta’s greatest successes is the extension of natural gas service to most of its rural population. As late as 1973, many rural Albertans still relied upon timeworn methods to keep warm; they chopped wood, hewed coal, collected cow patties (“farmer’s coal”), and thawed propane tanks. All of these methods involved risk, and none of them was easy. Until the advent of plastic pipe in the 1960s, major gas distributors limited their service to properties within about 400 m (¼ mi.) of their lines. As Alberta gas began to flow to other provinces and even to the United States, it seemed reasonable for one farmer living southwest of Calgary to theorize that “if they could get gas all the way to California, then they could get it to me.” While the approval of polyvinylchloride (PVC) plastic pipe for distribution

systems convinced distributors to extend service to those within two miles of lines, many farms were still left without.

Principles of local control and ownership were especially attractive to a generation of farmers who had survived the Great Depression due to their self-reliance, and the cooperative tradition was already well-established in Alberta. A precedent had already been established by grain growers who united in order to procure goods or services at the lowest possible cost. They combined forces to build and run grain elevators and to market and transship their grain. The province’s 1913 Co-operative Associations Act permitted co-ops to bring telephones to the countryside in the 1940s and electricity in the 1950s and, finally, natural gas in the 1960s.

With the same spirit of self-determination that no doubt sustained their pioneering ancestors, these farmers often dug their own trenches, welded their own pipes, and laid their own lines. Every member of several families might be involved in joining their homesteads to the big transmission lines during pipe-gluing bees. Natural gas co-ops were managed atop the kitchen table, in the basement, or in the spare room. Directors remained on call twenty-four hours a day, answering phones, installing meters, keeping books and billing, providing office supplies, and repairing lines during all hours and in all weather—all for a pittance, if for anything at all. Early directors sometimes battled skepticism, mistrust due to previous failures, ignorance of the benefits of gas, or outright resistance to change, all obstacles just as challenging as the

unwelcoming bedrock and murky muskeg.

Their approach was supported by the Lougheed Progressive Conservative government, which had actually made the notion of rural gas service part of its election platform and in 1973 created the Rural Gas Program, intended to establish widespread gas service throughout Alberta’s rural areas. Due in part to this support, by 1988 Alberta’s rural gas system was among the biggest gas distribution systems in the world.

Undoubtedly, the Rural Gas program lessened rural de-population by bringing reasonably priced natural gas to every farm, but its impact is probably most clearly illustrated by one beneficiary’s comment: “Gas just made life on the farm so much better. After you got gas on the farm, you had everything.”