Robin Fisher, "Regulating Fuels in the Depression: The Coal and Petroleum Control Board of British Columbia," BC Studies 66 (Summer 1985)

Read 10 Oct 2026. Pattullo’s fight with the oil companies, 1934-1940, by his biographer.

• His outlook: “a longstanding personal commitment to government regulation of public utilities. This was not a view that he had developed in response to the depression.”
• The fight: after the companies lost in the courts in 1940 and stopped selling gasoline, he would not let the industry become “a sort of gasoline super state,” and looked to the day the province “will not be dependent upon foreign gasoline in the hands of insolent companies.”
• Verdict: “Pattullo was patently not motivated by ideology, and his ultimate objective was the preservation of capitalism”; yet his government “was less the client of big business and more vigorous in its response to the depression than most Canadian governments during that discordant decade.”

See pattullo-bloody-sunday.