The following essay is part of a collaboration between MBP Intelligence and New Economy Canada, examining Canada's electricity strategy and the future of electrification. In the next few weeks, both Tyler Meredith and Ben Woodfinden will be publishing two-part essays on this question (the following is Part I). This follows a recent special edition of the MBP Intelligence Briefing with Merran Smith, Andrew Leach, Michael Powell. Ben Woodfinden’s Part I essay is here, and Tyler Meredith's is here.
Conservatives built this country's electricity. The way to make power affordable is to build a great deal more of it, financed honestly, with the workers to do the job.
Key Takeaways
- The abundance the strategy calls for is not optional and it is not utopian. Doubling the grid is the minimum required to electrify transport and heat, reshore industry, and power the data centres now arriving, and British Columbia has just demonstrated the scale: it built its costliest project in history and still needs far more.
- Abundance is the real affordability strategy. More supply lowers price; that was Sir Adam Beck's whole model. Concealed financing is the shortcut that lets a government skip the hard work of building affordability and fake it on the ledger instead.
- The builder-state is not a Liberal invention or a betrayal of conservatism. It is a conservative inheritance, from Beck's Ontario Hydro to W.A.C. Bennett's dams, and the Prime Minister has borrowed its ambition while dropping its discipline.
- The binding constraint will ultimately not be capital. It is people. The strategy itself projects up to 130,000 job openings in the electricity sector by 2050, and more than 80 per cent of employers already name skilled talent as their single most pressing constraint, ahead of inflation, regulation and interest rates. A build financed in full and staffed by nobody does not get built.
Whatever one makes of the financing, and the first part of this series made a good deal of it, the underlying ambition of Powering Canada Strong is correct, and a conservative should have no issue agreeing with it: Canada needs to roughly double its electricity supply by mid-century. As Canadians move their cars, their furnaces and their factory floors onto the grid, demand climbs; the International Energy Agency projects that global electricity consumption will rise by between 78 and 102 per cent by 2050, with electricity becoming the largest source of energy in every scenario it runs. Add to all this the relatively new and recent need for and drive to build countless data centres that are incredibly power intensive, and the power intensive AI revolution more broadly, and the demand curve bends up higer and quicker than it did even a few years ago. Massively expanding our energy grid is a necessity, we have no other choice.
British Columbia has just shown what the scale looks like in practice, and it demonstrates the scale of the challenge ahead. The province built Site C, renamed the John Horgan Dam in May, the most expensive infrastructure project in its history at $16 billion, its six units all spinning as of August 2025. It arrives into a system already straining past it: BC Hydro is midway through a $36-billion expansion of its network under a ten-year capital plan, and within weeks of the dam's completion the province confirmed it was now studying two further large dams, Site E and a project at Bute Inlet, with demand forecast to climb 20 per cent by 2030 and 50 per cent by 2050. A province built the biggest thing it had ever built and, before the concrete had cured, went looking for the next one. That is the shape of the problem. Timidity is not a serious option, and a conservatism that answered this moment with nothing but "spend less" would be answering a different question than the one I think we have no choice but to confront.
Abundance is the mechanism of affordability, not its enemy. Electricity is cheap where a great deal of it gets generated. Scarcity makes power expensive, and the surest way to hold prices down over the long run is to build enough supply. This was the entire premise of the man the Prime Minister keeps invoking. Which is where the argument turns, because he is invoking him for the wrong half of the story.
The tradition the Prime Minister half-remembers
In his 30 June video the Prime Minister reached for history, and he reached accurately. He named Sir Adam Beck, whose statue stands on University Avenue in Toronto, and credited him with a model that gave Ontario affordable, clean power for decades. He nodded to Quebec's maîtres chez nous, to the nuclear industry, to the great postwar dams. He is not wrong that this is a proud lineage, and he is not wrong to want to build in its spirit. What he has done is take the ambition of that tradition and leave behind the thing that made it trustworthy.
Because the tradition is, inconveniently for the current framing, a conservative one, and it came with conditions. Beck was a Conservative, elected to the Ontario legislature in 1902 at James Whitney's urging and made a minister in his government, and the commission Whitney appointed him to chair in 1906 ran on a doctrine Beck stated in three words: power at cost. Not power at whatever cost the books could be arranged to obscure. Power at cost, delivered through a co-operative of municipalities that could see the price they were paying and had signed on through their own councils, with the first Niagara transmission line switched on at Berlin, now Kitchener, in 1910. The abundance and the visibility were the same commitment. That is the covenant the Prime Minister has set aside, and the Part I of this two-part essay was an account of the setting aside.
It would be too easy to turn Beck into a saint of transparent finance, because he was not. His own flagship, the Queenston-Chippawa development, later renamed Sir Adam Beck I, was, as the Prime Minister's own video notes, the largest generating station in the world at the time, and it ran so far over budget that by the 1920s Hydro's debt accounted for more than half the province's total, and a 1924 commission found many of Hydro's construction projects "unjustifiably elaborate and costly." The founder of power-at-cost overbuilt and overspent on the project that bears his name. But this does not weaken the point. The temptation to build grandly and account for it later is not a Liberal vice or a Conservative one; it is the standing temptation of anyone who builds, and it has caught the best of them. Which is why the discipline matters, and why "we have done this before" is a reason for care rather than a licence for faith.
The West, and the free-enterprise builder
When we turn to western provinces, British Columbia specifically, we also learn some lessons that should give a small-government conservative especially the most to think about.
W.A.C. Bennett governed British Columbia for twenty years as a Social Credit premier, the longest tenure in the province's history, and he was no social-credit mystic: he pursued conservative fiscal policy, acted as his own finance minister, and had begun political life as a Conservative MLA. He was also the most aggressive public builder the province has ever seen. His government took over the privately owned BC Electric, the province's largest hydroelectric firm, and folded it into the new BC Hydro; his "two rivers" policy dammed the Peace and the Columbia rivers, the former crowned by the 186-metre dam that carries his name, the latter financed in large part by the US$254.4 million lump-sum prepayment that the Columbia River Treaty delivered for downstream power rights. A free-enterprise politician nationalised a utility and built the biggest public works in the province's history, and there is no contradiction here. What he understood is that the libertarian tradition out West was always thinner than its reputation, and that enterprise on a frontier depends on an order, and an infrastructure, that only public authority reliably supplies. Bennett built the arteries so the market could use them.
He was, it must be said, no cleaner on the accounting than Beck. His famous "pay as you go" record, the balanced budgets, the province he declared debt-free in 1959, was achieved in part by transferring debts to government agencies such as the Toll Highway and Bridge Authority, with the great dams carried on the Crown utility's own books. The debt did not vanish. It moved to ledgers the public did not read, which should sound familiar to anyone who read Part I. Even the patron saints of public power reached for the off-book manoeuvre. The tradition worth reclaiming is not a fantasy of costless building. It is the harder thing: building in abundance while telling the public the truth about the price, an ideal the tradition itself only sometimes lived up to.
Its living heir is Site C. Approved under Christy Clark's free-enterprise BC Liberals, who were open about pushing construction beyond the point where a successor could cancel it and kept it from utilities-commission review, the project was inherited by New Democrats who had sharply criticised it in opposition but, as Horgan later stressed, had not promised to cancel it. John Horgan referred it to the commission, published the costs of every option, and chose to finish it, conceding in the same breath that it "should never have been started" but that cancellation would saddle the province with four billion dollars and nothing to show. The budget roughly doubled anyway, from $8.8 billion at approval to $16 billion at completion. And it will still not be enough. Seventy years of right-of-centre hydro-building in British Columbia, from Bennett to Clark, teach the two lessons of this series in a single file: the abundance is necessary, and the cost is never as contained as the promoters promise, which is the argument for reckoning with it in the open rather than discovering it on the bill.
One further wrinkle belongs here, because it links this file to the sovereignty talk that runs through the whole agenda. Bennett built provincially, and he built to strengthen the province against Ottawa; his was infrastructure as provincial autonomy. The current strategy runs the other way, with Ottawa entering a field the constitution assigns to the provinces and calling the entry national sovereignty. When Michelle Rempel Garner answered Leslyn Lewis's scepticism about a Meta hyperscale data centre proposed for Alberta by calling it a great investment in a field squarely within provincial jurisdiction, she was voicing the older instinct: that the level of government closest to the resource is the one that should build. That instinct is not an obstacle to abundance. It is a claim about who is best placed to deliver it, and it deserves an answer the strategy has not yet given.
The constraint money cannot buy
Here is the part of the problem no financing structure solves, and the part the affordability debate keeps skating past.
Money can be found. Between the tax credits, the Infrastructure Bank, the Growth Fund and the AAA balance sheet, capital is the tractable input. What cannot be conjured is the people who build. The strategy's own numbers concede the bind: 28,000 new electricity workers needed by 2028 and up to 130,000 job openings in the sector by 2050, while more than 80 per cent of electricity employers already identify finding skilled talent as the most pressing constraint on their five-year outlook, far surpassing inflation, regulatory requirements and interest rates. Set that beside the roughly 700,000 skilled-trades workers the federal government expects to retire by 2028 across the economy, and the shape of the bottleneck is plain. Michael Powell put it about as well as it can be put on our podcast: money can be found; people cannot be created.
And the trouble is not only how many. It is the machinery for making them. Canada's apprenticeship system is a series of choke points, where a young person can land a first-year placement and then wait years for the higher-level training seat that turns an apprentice into a journeyman, because the seats, the instructors and the employer sponsorships are not there in the numbers the build requires. The government's answer, a Team Canada Strong push to bring up to 100,000 new entrants into the Red Seal trades over five years, is welcome and insufficient in the same breath, which is roughly what Electricity Human Resources Canada said on the strategy's release: recruiting people into the trades matters only if the colleges and training centres have the capacity to certify them at the far end.
This ought to be conservative ground, and richly so. A country that spent two decades financialising its economy and steering every ambitious young person toward a credential and a screen now finds it cannot build the physical thing its future depends on, because it undervalued the people who build physical things. The dignity of skilled work, the apprenticeship as a formative institution rather than a training scheme, the vocation that offers a young man unsettled by an economy tilting toward software a way to earn a good living with his hands and his name on real work: these are not soft themes tacked onto an energy brief. They are the hard constraint. Abundance is a human-capacity problem before it is a capital problem, and a strategy that treats labour as the fourth pillar, to be sorted once the financing is arranged, has the order backwards.
Sovereignty, rightly understood
The agenda's other great justification is sovereignty, the word doing the most work across the whole file, licensing the electricity build, the nuclear revival, the sovereign-compute push and the pipeline all at once. A conservative should take sovereignty seriously and, for that very reason, should insist on the real thing rather than the branding.
Real energy sovereignty is abundance you actually control: legacy hydro, reliable baseload, the interties that let a surplus in one province firm up a shortfall in another, the uranium and the nuclear expertise Canada demonstrably possesses. Some of what is being sold under the label is thinner than the label. The flagship "sovereign AI" announcement, the Telus data-centre cluster in British Columbia, drew the tart observation from the NDP that Telus, though Canadian-owned, had already moved fourteen petabytes of Canadian data onto Google Cloud as part of its corporate AI strategy; Telus counters that the new facilities themselves will be Canadian-controlled at every layer, and the fair reading is that the argument is live, which is itself the point, because as the CBC noted, servers on Canadian soil do not by themselves settle who controls the hardware, the customers or the returns, and no federal funding has even been committed yet. The nuclear strategy, released in June as the electricity strategy's explicit complement, tells a sovereignty story that leans for now on the GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300, an American-designed reactor built on a US-certified licensing basis, burning enriched fuel Canada cannot produce, with Ontario Power Generation planning to source it from a plant in New Mexico. And data centres are mobile in a way dams and transmission lines are not: they shop the continent for the cheapest power and can leave as easily as they came, which means new supply built to attract them can end up subsidising an industry that decamps, while the ratepayer keeps the bill for the generation.
Lewis, the party's newly named AI critic, put the question in her July exchange with Rempel Garner: who will "ultimately own, control, and benefit" from the infrastructure being celebrated. It is the right question, and it is not an anti-building question. The two conservatisms in that exchange, Rempel's build-it confidence and Lewis's who-owns-it scepticism, are not really opponents; they are two halves of one serious position: build, and build so that the ownership, the cost and the benefit are visible and Canadian, rather than announced at a podium and obscured in the structure. Sovereignty worth paying for is sovereignty you can audit.
What we owe the people who come after
But there is also a deeper reason the concealment should trouble a conservative specifically. You do not have to be a disciple of the philosopher George Grant to grant the point, but Grant saw it clearly: the older Canadian conservatism was never the anti-state creed it is sometimes mistaken for. It held that a nation is a real community with common undertakings, and that the state could rightly be used to build the things a people needs in order to remain itself, the railways and the Crown corporations and the public power that let a scattered northern country hold together against the pull of the continent. Beck and Bennett belong to that conservatism. The builder-state, in this country, has conservative parentage. But the same tradition that trusted the state to build also distrusted the state that hides what it is doing from the people it governs, because concealment is the characteristic vice of the managerial temperament, the treating of citizens as a problem to be handled rather than a public to be levelled with.
Which is why the phrase that recurs through the strategy, spreading costs across generations, should be read with care. Offered honestly, it is fair: a durable asset ought to be paid for by the generations that use it. It curdles into its opposite the moment the spreading becomes a way to make today's power look cheap by billing tomorrow's ratepayers for costs this generation was not willing to see. Edmund Burke described society as a partnership between the living, the dead, and the yet to be born. The unborn are the one party to that partnership who cannot read the contract, object to its terms, or vote the government out. To load them with liabilities they cannot see, in order to flatter a number the living generation prefers not to look at, is an injustice on those yet to be born.
Build like Beck. Build like Bennett. Build in the open.
So the conservative case is not the one the caricature expects. It is neither "do not build" nor the reflex that government should simply get out of the way and let the market raise the grid, because the market did not build Ontario Hydro or BC Hydro and will not build the interties now. It is that Canada should build in abundance, as the confident conservatives of the last century did, and that it should do the two things they did not always do: staff the build, by rebuilding the trades and the apprenticeship pipeline that make abundance possible, and finance it in the open, so the public agrees to the cost with its eyes open rather than discovering it, a generation late, as a line on the bill.
The Prime Minister closed his 30 June address by promising to build clean energy "on a scale that would astound even Sir Adam Beck." Perhaps. Beck built at a scale that astounds us still; his own creed was that nothing was too big, too expensive to imagine, too visionary. But he told Ontario what it was paying, and called the arrangement power at cost, and that second achievement is the one the current strategy has not matched but could still choose to, and one Conservatives at both federal and provincial levels can make.
Canada can afford to build. What it cannot afford is to build the way it priced carbon, on the theory that the voter who cannot see the cost will not mind paying it. Beck knew better. So, at his best, did Bennett. The task is to build like them, in the full light of the price.