How Canada squandered its most valuable national asset

How Canada squandered its most valu­able national asset

At the height of U.S.-Canada tar­iff ten­sions in early 2025, Ontario Premier Doug Ford fam­ously threatened to cut off Cana­dian elec­tri­city exports to the United States.

“If the United States escal­ates, I will not hes­it­ate to shut the elec­tri­city off com­pletely,” Ford told a press con­fer­ence. He added that he felt “ter­rible for the Amer­ican people” in such a scen­ario, but that his hand would be forced.

There was once a time when the pro­spect of such a thing would have been dev­ast­at­ing to mil­lions of Amer­ican homeown­ers. The sud­den removal of Canada’s brawny reserves of hydro and nuc­lear power would have plunged whole states into brown­out, if not total dark­ness. Con­sumers would be forced into man­dat­ory ration­ing as U.S. util­it­ies des­per­ately stoked coal fur­naces and dialed up backup tur­bines to com­pensate.

But appar­ently unbe­knownst to Ford, that was no longer even close to true. At the time his threat was made, less than one per cent of U.S. elec­tri­city still came from Canada, and there were days when Canada emerged as a net importer of Amer­ican power. Sever­ing the elec­trical links between the two coun­tries wouldn’t have been noticed.

The eco­nomic story of Canada’s last 20 years is replete with missed oppor­tun­it­ies, par­tic­u­larly when it comes to energy. Canada failed to export its oil to any­one except the U.S., leav­ing it vul­ner­able to U.S. trade shocks. Canada dawdled on LNG infra­struc­ture, leav­ing it unable to cap­it­al­ize on Europe’s and Asia’s new­found thirst for the fuel.

Eclipsing all of those is argu­ably what Canada did to its single largest com­pet­it­ive advant­age. For much of the 20th cen­tury, Canada’s defin­ing eco­nomic trait was abund­ant, cheap elec­tri­city.

Cana­dians pion­eered much of the tech­no­logy needed to pull elec­tri­city from rivers or uranium, includ­ing the CANDU nuc­lear reactor and high-voltage trans­mis­sion lines. Whole global indus­tries — most not­ably the energy-intens­ive alu­minum sec­tor — were dom­in­ated by Canada for no other reason than that we had the excess power to run them.

Every­where from Que­bec to B.C., Canada’s mus­cu­lar elec­tri­city sec­tor was a point of national pride. In the 1960s, the Que­bec Lib­eral party prin­ted posters of a clenched fist hold­ing bolts of light­ning as a sym­bol of the province’s hydro­elec­tri­city sec­tor.

But now, at the pre­cise moment that elec­tri­city is becom­ing one of the world’s most con­sequen­tial com­mod­it­ies, Canada is barely able to keep its own lights on.

The U.K.-based Energy Insti­tute releases a Stat­ist­ical Review of World Energy each year, and from these fig­ures it’s pos­sible to track the world’s coun­tries by their rate of per-cap­ita elec­trical gen­er­a­tion.

Canada, vir­tu­ally alone among developed coun­tries, has been in decline on this met­ric for much of the last 30 years, with the indic­ator tak­ing a notice­able dive in just the last dec­ade.

In 1995, the aver­age Cana­dian lived in a coun­try where their per­sonal share of national elec­trical gen­er­a­tion was 18,937 kilo­watt-hours (kWh). As of the last count in 2024, it’s now at 16,023 kWh.

Over the same period, the aver­age cit­izen of China has seen their share of elec­trical gen­er­a­tion go from 825 kWh to 7,107 kWh, a more than 800 per cent increase.

In prac­tice, this is now yield­ing scen­arios that would have been incon­ceiv­able by the stand­ards of the mid-20th cen­tury.

Just this week, two Cana­dian provinces came close to being plunged into rolling black­outs amid record-low tem­per­at­ures.

New Brun­swick Premier Susan Holt announced that if her province hadn’t been run­ning all its power plants at max­imum capa­city, the neigh­bour­ing provinces of P.E.I. and Nova Sco­tia would have suffered poten­tially deadly out­ages. “It’s NB Power that’s provid­ing the bit of sur­plus power that we had to Nova Sco­tia and Prince Edward Island and other places,” said Holt.

As to how this happened, the basic answer is that Canada stopped build­ing dams, nuc­lear plants and other major, base­load sources of elec­tri­city.

The last new nuc­lear reactor installed in Canada was an expan­sion to the Dar­ling­ton Nuc­lear Gen­er­at­ing Sta­tion in Ontario that opened in 1993.

The hydro­elec­tric dams being opened in recent years — all of which have faced sig­ni­fic­ant delays and oppos­i­tion from envir­on­ment­al­ists — gen­er­ate a frac­tion of the power churned out by their leg­acy fore­bears. B.C.’s recently inaug­ur­ated Site C, for instance, is expec­ted to pro­duce 580 mega­watts (MW) of elec­tri­city. Com­pare that to B.C.’s Mica Dam, first opened in 1973, which has a capa­city more than five times higher at 2,805 MW.

And this remains the gen­eral pic­ture for the fore­see­able future. As recently as Novem­ber, the Canada Energy Reg­u­lator announced that the vast major­ity of planned Cana­dian elec­trical infra­struc­ture was either solar or wind; tech­no­lo­gies that both lack the raw strength and reli­ab­il­ity of leg­acy Cana­dian power plants.

Among the “near-term devel­op­ments” charted by the reg­u­lator, there were 6,206 MW of new wind projects, 2,337 MW of new solar and just 202 MW of new hydro­elec­tri­city.

At the same time, Canada has been pre­scrib­ing increas­ingly elab­or­ate demands on its leg­acy power plants. This ranges from adding sev­eral thou­sand new EVs each month and a sig­ni­fic­ant increase to immig­ra­tion, to “clean elec­tri­city” reg­u­la­tions man­dat­ing the clos­ure of aux­il­i­ary and backup plants employ­ing fossil fuels.

It all means that just as Cana­dian policy-makers are pon­der­ing an energy-intens­ive future of AI and elec­tric­ally powered trans­port­a­tion, fed­eral fig­ures are just now start­ing to show that Canada is exper­i­en­cing the unpre­ced­en­ted phe­nomenon of being a net importer of U.S. elec­tri­city.

As recently as August 2022, data main­tained by the Canada Energy Reg­u­lator showed that Canada had sent a net total of $700 mil­lion in elec­tri­city to the United States; an aver­age of $23 mil­lion in elec­tri­city exports per day.

As of the most recent tally, in Novem­ber 2025, the money was going in the other dir­ec­tion; that month, Canada pur­chased a net total of $90 mil­lion in U.S. elec­tri­city.