To build a national power grid, Ottawa should open its chequebook, not the Constitution
Canada was built around a railway. The country's next unifying project runs along many of the same rights of way, but it carries electrons instead of freight.
Ottawa has released its federal electrification strategy, and the 10 provinces and territories signed the National Energy Corridor Agreement this spring. The opening is real. So is the reflex that has buried national energy projects before. The moment anyone proposes a coast-to-coast grid, someone warns that electricity is provincial, that Ottawa has no business in it, and that the whole idea dies on the division of powers.
That warning is half right and entirely avoidable.
Canada's grid is balkanized. Power flows south into the United States far more easily than it moves east or west between our provinces. Quebec sells to New England; Manitoba and British Columbia sell south; trade between provinces is a rounding error next to it. That is not geography. It is the residue of a century of province by province self-sufficiency hardened into regulation.
Fixing it does not require a constitutional amendment, a reference case, or a brawl with the provinces over who owns what. Ottawa already holds the two tools it needs.
The first is cooperation. In 2018, the Supreme Court upheld a model built for exactly this kind of problem when it approved the cooperative national securities scheme: provinces opt in, Ottawa supplies the backbone, and no legislature gives up its jurisdiction. A national electricity framework can be built the same way: by agreement, not by force. Provinces retain control over how power is generated and priced within their borders. What gets harmonized is narrow—the rules for approving and paying for interties and long lines that allow one province to sell its surplus to another.
The second tool is money. The federal spending power lets Ottawa fund what it cannot directly regulate and attach conditions to the cheque. We saw it this past year, when Ottawa committed $40-million to study a 765-kilometre transmission line connecting Yukon to the British Columbia grid. Scale up that logic. Co-fund the high-voltage links that knit the regional grids together. Tie the dollars to open-access rules, so a generator in Manitoba can actually reach a buyer in Saskatchewan. Put capital behind a cost-sharing arrangement so energy-rich and energy-poor provinces both come out ahead. Premiers rarely refuse infrastructure someone else is helping pay for.
None of this is hypothetical. An underground high-voltage line—the SOO Green HVDC Link—already runs through a Canadian Pacific right-of-way in the American Midwest, joining the MISO (Midcontinent Independent System Operator) and PJM (Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection) markets that used to be walled off from each other. The engineering is proven and the financing models exist. What has been missing is a governance design that works within provincial jurisdiction rather than picking a fight with it.
The prize justifies the discipline. More than 80 per cent of Canada's electricity is already non-emitting—a head start almost no other industrial economy has. Tie the provinces together, and clean power becomes a strategic asset: the input for processing critical minerals at home, for the data centres that artificial intelligence now demands, and for leverage at a moment when our largest trading partner treats access to its market as a bargaining chip.
Ten provinces and territories have already sat down together. The C.D. Howe Institute's research paper, Powering the Federation, 2025, calculates what federal capital at scale could unlock: $1.7-billion in seed investment, mobilizing $92.5-billion in renewable-plant investment over a decade. A national grid now belongs at the top of the federal agenda—backed by the constitutional tools and the chequebook the provinces are waiting for.
The country has done this before. In the 1880s, the unifying technology was steel rail, and the political insight was that Ottawa had to pay for what the provinces could not. The technology has changed. The lesson has not.
Jatin Nathwani is a professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo, and a fellow of the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Barry Appleton is interim director of the Balsillie Legal Advisory Centre at the Balsillie School, co-director of the Centre for International Law at the New York Law School, and managing partner of Appleton & Associates International Lawyers LP.
The Hill Times