The Perennial Temptation

In 1945, Canadian homes were still heated either by coal or by wood. My grandparents had shivered through depression-era Ottawa winters, desperate for fuel. Now the war was over, and fortunes were to be made, but to avoid flooding the housing and labour markets, the Canadian military did not demob everyone at once. This left my grandfather kicking around at a sniper training facility in Fort Benning, Georgia, with time on his hands to think about the future.

He twigged to a newfangled idea going around: oil furnaces. Alberta’s big Leduc discovery had yet to happen, and the epicentre of Canadian oil was still in Southern Ontario. He bought the rights to sell some small gadget to do with oil burners, and to hear my grandmother tell it, she had to smuggle a prototype into Canada in the folds of an evening dress (many of her stories involved evening dresses). As oil grew, so did my...