Should Canadians have a right to live off the grid?

Ah, off the grid living in Canada.  Under the stars with not a care in the world.  Uh, not quite. A woman in Nova Scotia who wants to be living off the grid has found the idea is more complicated than it might have at first seemed.

And she’s not alone.

Cheryl Smith, who lives in Clark’s Harbour, a fishing village that is located on the southernmost point of Nova Scotia, wants to live in a modest home without electricity. But officials with Shelburne County say she needs an air exchange system and smoke detectors to meet code.

“The rules are rules, unfortunately,” says Clark’s Harbour Mayor Leigh Stoddart. “I know what she’s trying to do and I applaud her for her effort because she wants to live off the grid.”

Smith says she is baffled by the bureaucracy in her attempt to achieve off grid living.

“If what we’re trying to do is move the world into a greener place and make it more environmentally friendly so there’s something still left for our children, then why am I being forced to rely on electricity or fossil fuels if I don’t want to?” she said.

From Lasqueti Island B.C. to Bancroft, Ontario to Western Prince Edward Island thousands of people in Canada live off the grid. Most of them don’t do it because they are idealists or revolutionaries, it’s just that the place they happened to live has never been serviced.

While technology has made the idea of plopping down far from the madding crowd easier than ever, the seemingly unyielding march of red tape has moved in lockstep. In some jurisdictions, in fact, off the grid living has been made illegal.

For the increasing amount of people, however, who are seeking out the off-the-grid lifestyle, the prospect has grown tangled. While technology has made the idea of plopping down far from the madding crowd easier than ever, the seemingly unyielding march of red tape has moved in lockstep. In some jurisdictions, in fact, off the grid living has been made illegal.

Nick Rosen, author of “Off the Grid: Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government, and True Independence in Modern America” estimates there are three-quarters of a million off-the-grid households in the United States, a number he thinks is growing at ten per cent a year. Rosen says the profile of the typical off-the-gridder has changed.

“Going off the grid is like insuring yourself against a time the lights may go out,” he told Christian Science Monitor. “In the 1970s you had a lot of old-style hermitlike survivalists. But these people are different. This isn’t the Stone Age anymore; you can live a quite comfortable life.”

While some new off-the-gridders may have been tempted by Tesla’s new $3,500 Powerwall System,  the fantasy has become increasingly litigious. In Cape Coral Florida, a judge ruled that a woman, Robin Speronis, was not allowed to live on her property unless she hooked up to the city’s water supply.

A code enforcement officer declared her home uninhabitable, but only after Speronis talked about her lifestyle to a local news anchor. She said she didn’t know how the officer could have known about her living situation without entering the dwelling.

There is undoubtedly a common thread of conscious or unconscious libertarianism in many who self-identify with the movement.

In enforcing the measure, the Florida city cited the The International Property Maintenance Code, an amalgamation of three legacy codes that looked to standardize disparate regional codes and was put in place in 1997. But even the man who laid down the law in Cape Coral thinks might be in need of updating.

“Reasonableness and code requirements don’t always go hand-in-hand… given societal and technical changes that requires review of code ordinances,” Special Magistrate Harold S. Eskin, told a local paper.

Complicating things for those who want to pack up and disconnect is a dozen smaller matters, such as the prospect of insuring your home when it doesn’t comply with codes that give insurers comfort that they are making a fair bet. It seems figuring out how to be successfully living off the grid in Canada is a particularly difficult puzzle.

“If someone is living in a house with no heat and no water, that’s not somebody we would like to insure,” says Cyril Greenya of Marietta, Pennsylvania’s Donegal Insurance Group. “If they have wood fireplaces or coal stoves, that’s not something we want to insure. Now you’re talking about a fire hazard.”

Flickering just beneath the surface of many who choose to go off-grid is lingering belief that society has become increasingly conformist, if not dictatorial.  You can hear it in the protests of Joe and Nicole Naugler, a Kentucky couple who had their children seized by Child Protective Services over accusations of child neglect, and in Tyler Truitt, a former marine who was warned that his house, which he outfitted with solar panels and rainwater collection systems, was condemned and he would be arrested if he tried to return to it.

There is undoubtedly a common thread of conscious or unconscious libertarianism in many who self-identify with the movement.

It makes little sense, from a planning and engineering perspective, to isolate ourselves into small, separate, fully-independent atom-like homes. It makes more sense to pool and share resources whenever possible, and to all play a fair role in doing so.

But it’s not just anti-establishment types that think a sea-change may be coming in the way a large part of society lives. It’s the other side, too.

Two years ago, the Edison Electric Institute, the trade association for shareholder-owned electric companies issued a report that warned a change in the way people view the grid may be altered a swiftly as land lines were in the face of the rise of cellphones.

“One can imagine a day when battery storage technology or micro turbines could allow customers to be electric grid independent,” said the report.

Two journalists who studied off-grid living in Canada for years came away with mixed takes on the idea. Phillip Vannini and Jonathan Taggart traveled for two years across the country, documenting the experience for a book and film. The pair talked to more than 200 off-the grid Canadians in more than 100 homes.

Vannini and Taggart found some things that surprised them: many off-the-gridders lived in suburban, not rural, areas. They were hard to categorize, demographically. The homes they lived in were overwhelmingly well-lit and heated.

But they also concluded that living off-the-grid isn’t for everyone and probably doesn’t make sense for society as a whole.

“It makes little sense, from a planning and engineering perspective, to isolate ourselves into small, separate, fully-independent atom-like homes,” they said in a piece for The Tyee. “It makes more sense to pool and share resources whenever possible, and to all play a fair role in doing so. Off-grid living can then teach us about learning that role, about what it means to do our part.”

Below: Off The Grid: Living off land hour from Vancouver

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