Nova Scotia Light and Power Company, Limited (NSLP) was an electric and gas utility company with its head office in Halifax, Canada. The company still exists as a shell but is no longer active; however, for more than a century, it was the major producer of energy in the province of Nova Scotia, and its largest public transit operator.
Origins
NSLP marked as its origin June 11, 1866, and the inauguration of street railway services in Halifax, Nova Scotia, by the Halifax City Railroad Company (HCR).
However, the antecedents of the company go back even farther, to March, 1840 and the charter of the Halifax Gas Light and Water Company, later renamed the Halifax Gas Light Company (HGL). The company's directors included Edward Cunard, third son of shipping magnate Samuel Cunard. By 1843, HGL was producing coal gas and distributing it via underground pipes to 281 stores and businesses in downtown Halifax.
Halifax businessman William D. O'Brien chartered HCR in 1863, beginning operations three years later with five horse-drawn tram cars. HCR suspended operations after ten years; but in 1886 a new company, the Halifax Street Railway Company, purchased the remaining HCR assets and resumed horse-powered operations.
In 1885, Halifax industrialist John Starr launched the Halifax Electric Light Company (limited), opening the city's first electric generation plant, a 70 kW facility located at Black's Wharf, near the corner of Lower Water and Prince Streets. Two years later, HGL purchased Starr's firm.
In 1889, a group of investors including Charles Annand, publisher of the Morning Chronicle newspaper, founded the Nova Scotia Power Company, Limited, taking over street railway operations with the intention of electrifying them; however, the firm was undercapitalized and was unable to build a generating station.
In 1893, Halifax lawyer Benjamin Franklin Pearson launched a second gas-producing firm, the People's Heat and Light Company. In 1897, the company took over HGL. Pearson, with significant holdings in the Nova Scotia coal industry, saw the future in electric power and with three partners incorporated the Halifax Electric Tramway Company Limited on March 20, 1895. The company took over the operations of the Nova Scotia Power Company and then, in 1902, the People's Heat and Light Company. In 1917, the consolidated company became Nova Scotia Tramways and Power Company Limited; finally, in 1928, the company was reorganized as Nova Scotia Light and Power Company, Limited.
Ownership
In 1919, Stone & Webster, a Boston-based engineering firm with interests in a number of North American electric utilities, purchased controlling interest in the company. In 1924, the firm sold its interest to Royal Securities Corporation, the brokerage house headed by Nova Scotia financier Izaak Walton Killam. Royal Securities widely sold shares in the company to the public at large and, in later years, NSLP used its broad ownership base as a public relations tool. By 1970, NSLP was owned by 10,785 stockholders; 6273 of them were women. Company directors held only 1.6 per cent of the stock. The top ten investors combined held less than 16 per cent of the company's shares.
Lt.-Col. John Crerar (Jack) MacKeen (1898-1972), a prominent Nova Scotia businessman and Killam protege, led NSLP for its last four decades. He served as president starting in 1931, before assuming the title of chairman of the board in 1961, a post he held until January 1972, nine months before his death. He was succeeded as president by W.N. Wickwire QC; however Wickwire died on August 24, 1962, after only a year in office. The company's general manager, A. Russell Harrington (1914-2006), assumed the president's title in 1962 and held both jobs until the company's takeover in 1972.
Expansion
From its modest beginnings, with a single 70 kW generating plant powering a small area of central Halifax, the growth of the company's electrical generation capacity was steady and significant over the years. When NSLP ceased operations in January 1972, it was producing 1.82 million net kilowatt hours, through a network of three thermal generating stations and 15 hydro stations, in addition to its connections to the interprovincial power grid.