The public meeting in the fourth act of An Enemy of the People takes place in a large, old-fashioned room in Captain Horster’s house. Every hall in town has refused Dr Stockmann. Horster, a ship’s captain with no stake in the Baths, offers his own room. The townspeople arrive with their minds made up, and the first business is to elect a chair. The meeting elects the printer Aslaksen, who states his qualifications in a single sentence: “I have learned in the school of life and experience that moderation is the most valuable virtue a citizen can possess…”
Aslaksen is the most modern man in the play. He adopts the Mayor’s framing and leaves the chemistry to others. His contribution is procedural, and its effect is that no one hears the evidence about the water. He backs the Mayor’s motion that the doctor’s report go unread. Later he puts a motion of his own, which declares Dr Thomas Stockmann an enemy of the people. He announces the result with a precision any returning officer would envy: carried “by the votes of everyone here except a tipsy man.”
Stockmann’s reply is the speech the play is remembered for. “The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom amongst us,” he tells them, “is the compact majority.” Ibsen gives him the best lines and then lets them fail. A man who denounces the majority to its face has chosen an odd way to win a vote. The town goes home. The doctor’s windows get broken.
The hall in Point Tupper
On 16 October, EverWind Fuels announced a C$10-billion AI data center at Point Tupper on Cape Breton Island, paired with new onshore wind. Anthropic is the reported tenant for its ninety-five-megawatt first phase, on a twenty-year lease.
(A disclosure, as before: this newsletter drafts in company with AI models, Claude among them. Readers can weigh that interest as they would any other.)
A province-wide petition against AI data-center development had 12,700 signatures by the following Monday afternoon. Residents questioned the effects on wells and power bills, along with their opportunity to influence the proposal.
Provincial New Democrat leader Claudia Chender requested an emergency debate. Premier Tim Houston pointed to existing approval processes and said data centers could not raise residents’ electricity rates. EverWind says it will pay for its electricity infrastructure. Its cooling plan includes recycled water, with additional use on hot, windless days. The company estimates average daily use of 100,000 liters for phase one and 500,000 after expansion. Those are estimates the public can question; an approval condition would give them a different force.
Jorden Dye, director of the Business Renewables Centre, supported pairing new demand with renewable generation. Thomas Arnason McNeil, an energy coordinator at the Ecology Action Centre, asked what would protect ratepayers and people relying on groundwater.
The debate contains interests that can overlap without becoming identical. A household with a well needs evidence about groundwater. A clean-energy advocate wants demand matched with new generation. Employment may matter to either, while the household electricity bill matters across the province. “The community” is the room that holds those differences.
A collection of expressions
A stakeholder map identifies who is affected and what they want. The boundary matters: people near a fence can face different consequences from electricity customers across a province. International project finance offers one way of assessing support across affected groups.
The International Finance Corporation’s 2012 Sustainability Policy requires informed consultation and participation where financed activities risk significant adverse community impacts. IFC investigates whether that engagement enables participation leading to broad community support. Its definition allows some individuals or groups to object. Those requirements govern IFC financing and offer a benchmark for other lenders.
Broad support is a financier’s judgment, distinct from a community vote. The policy separately addresses consent requirements for Indigenous Peoples in specified circumstances. A finding of support therefore needs to be read alongside the standard used and the people included in it.
A neighborhood process may give the wells close attention while missing effects on a wider electricity system. A province-wide count may bury the households nearest the site in a much larger population. Whoever speaks as a recognized representative must be able to account for the people represented. A boundary needs reasons grounded in who bears the effects.
Aslaksen with a slide deck
Imagine an information session held while shift workers are at work. Attendance goes into the engagement register. Questions are collected on cards, then answered in a summary sorted by theme. A woman’s question about her well disappears into “water (general).” A tidy record can preserve the fact that she attended while losing the fact she needed answered.
A process needs to detect that failure. IFC’s framework includes environmental assessment as well as engagement; counting support alone cannot substitute for either. The question about the well must survive into the evidence put before whoever grants permission. The next question is what that person must do if the answer shows a problem.
Stockmann is right about the water and has no idea what to do with being right. By the fourth act, he tells the meeting that the majority is never right. Every developer’s consultant would be glad to hear that from the leader of the opposition. Some objections are narrow, or captured by interests far from the hall. Some are correct and badly argued. To romanticize the objectors does them no more good than to dismiss them.
A support count reports positions. An assessment tests effects. The two can inform the same decision, provided the record keeps the minority’s evidence visible even when the majority wants the project. A figure for water demand and a finding about available supply give both sides something to examine before permission is granted.
Ibsen’s town voted on the Baths without hearing the doctor’s evidence. It named him its enemy, and the water stayed bad.
Companions
- Hyper-Local Dissent, on the community as an entry in a risk register.
- Many Witnesses, on keeping the losing account on file.
- What Would Count as Benefit, on benefit claims no number could attach to.
- The Same Account, on who queues when the system runs short.
Bibliography
Armstrong, Lyndsay, and Devin Stevens, ‘EverWind’s $10B AI data centre draws public backlash, call for debate’, The Energy Mix and The Canadian Press, 20 October 2026.
Ibsen, Henrik, An Enemy of the People (1882), trans. R. Farquharson Sharp (Project Gutenberg), Acts III and IV.
International Finance Corporation, Policy on Environmental and Social Sustainability (Washington, DC: IFC, 1 January 2012), paragraphs 30–31.