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Review

Cover: The Lights on the Tipple Are Going Out: Fighting Economic Ruin in a Canadian Coalfield Community

The Lights on the Tipple Are Going Out: Fighting Economic Ruin in a Canadian Coalfield Community

By Tom Langford

Review By Arn Keeling

January 16, 2025

An archway above the road into the coal-mining town of Sparwood, BC (notably facing the town, not the highway) long bore the message, “Modern Mining Benefits All of Us.” Considerable social and environmental scholarship in Canada questions this assertion, given the histories and shifting economic fortunes of resource-dependent communities. For mining regions in particular, the “cyclonic” or boom-bust nature of extractive economies exploiting finite resources and producing volatile commodities provides an unstable platform at best for sustainable local communities and livelihoods. Sociologist Tom Langford provides fresh and compelling insights into these dynamics through his social and economic history of one of Canada’s most enduring mining regions, the coalfield communities of the Crowsnest Pass/Elk Valley. Deeply rooted in extensive research in local, provincial, and national archives, this excellent study transcends its focus on resource economies and deindustrialization to provide a wide-ranging social, labour, and even environmental history of this unique transprovincial region.

Straddling the Great Divide between Alberta and British Columbia, the Crowsnest Pass boasts a 125-year mining heritage. While the district’s early mining history, with its radical labour politics and terrible disasters (especially on the Alberta side), is well-explored by good local and scholarly histories, Langford examines the later period of postwar social and economic upheaval driven by technological change, corporate consolidation, and labour movement politics. The study is framed as an exploration of labour and community resistance to “economic ruin” driven by the shifting fortunes of the coal industry in this period, including a comparison of local community strategies by Crowsnest (Alberta) and Elk Valley (BC) residents. As such, the region provides a novel comparative context for understanding of the intersections of union and community politics, contrasting federal provincial government policies, and the broader political economy of coal (for instance, the shift from Canadian to Japanese markets).

For readers in British Columbia, Lanford’s study provides much more of interest. Chapters 1-4, in particular, explore labour union efforts to resist or mitigate the rolling crises of deindustrialization, providing detailed insights into labour political activism and worker movement more generally. The fifth chapter reviews quixotic early attempts at economic diversification in the region, centred around alternative industrial enterprises and tourism development (especially at Fernie). Chapter 6 examines community-based resistance to pollution from coal mining and the impacts of proposed community relocation in the Elk Valley, initiatives led in substantial part by working-class women. In all, the narrative provides extraordinarily detailed insights into community life, the labour movement, and extractive economies amidst the shifting fortunes of the Crowsnest/Elk Valley region.

Perhaps idiosyncratically for a historical study, Langford’s final chapter not only thematically summarizes this history, but also includes a more speculative consideration of the region’s inevitable post-coal future. Given the likely impact of decarbonization on coal regions—and notwithstanding recent controversies around renewed coal extraction on the Crowsnest side—Langford draws on the lessons of the region’s social and economic history for future deindustrialization. He thoughtfully links this post-industrial future with the new actors and opportunities arising from Indigenous rights and land stewardship. Outlining a vision for a conservation and restoration economy in the region, Langford proposes centering people, communities, and the land, rather than reindustrialization, in efforts to secure a viable and stable future. While Langford’s prescriptions may be debated—not least by those living in the region—they provide a compelling coda to this unique and engaging study.

Publication Information

Langford, Tom. The Lights on the Tipple Are Going Out: Fighting Economic Ruin in a Canadian Coalfield Community.Vancouver: UBC Press, 2024. 387 pp, ill., index.