Carney’s Electricity Plan Needs a Cost Meter, Not Another Slogan
Ottawa now says affordability requires regulatory flexibility. That is a confession that the old Liberal electricity plan was too rigid and too costly.
Mark Carney’s new National Electricity Strategy sounds clean, modern and inevitable: double Canada’s electricity grid by 2050, build faster, keep power affordable, and adjust the Clean Electricity Regulations to preserve reliability.
The accountability question is what this plan will cost — and who pays when the slogans meet the grid.
The Prime Minister’s Office says Canada needs to build quickly and at scale, while adjusting clean-electricity rules to provide flexibility and keep energy reliable and affordable in the short term. The Associated Press reported the buildout is expected to cost more than $1 trillion Canadian. It also reported that Carney’s strategy allows natural gas to play a larger role while Ottawa pursues a cleaner grid.
That is the part Canadians should notice. For years, Liberals sold climate policy as if regulation could command physics, construction capacity and household affordability into alignment. Now the Carney government is quietly admitting that the system needs flexibility — including gas — because reliability and price still matter.
Good. But a course correction is not the same thing as accountability.
If the old Clean Electricity Regulations were too rigid, Ottawa should say so directly. If provinces warned that the timelines would raise costs or threaten reliability, Canadians deserve to know which warnings were ignored. If the new strategy depends on nuclear, hydro, transmission lines, carbon capture, gas backup, Indigenous partnerships and massive permitting reform, then voters need more than a glossy national plan.
They need the bill.
The conservative accountability test is straightforward: publish province-by-province cost estimates, expected rate impacts for households and industry, the amount of federal borrowing or subsidy required, the role of gas generation, the emissions trade-offs, the permitting timeline, and the private beneficiaries of new public incentives. Show the contingency plan for delays, legal challenges and supply-chain bottlenecks. Then show how much of the cost lands on taxpayers, ratepayers or both.
Canada does need more electricity. Housing, manufacturing, AI data centres, mines, ports and electrified transport all require power. But Canada also needs honesty. A trillion-dollar transformation cannot be sold as “affordability” unless the government is willing to show the math before the cheques go out.
The same applies to provincial consent. Provinces operate very different grids, and Ottawa cannot pretend that Quebec hydro, Alberta gas, Ontario nuclear and Atlantic reliability problems are interchangeable pieces on one federal whiteboard.
Carney may be right that Canada needs to build bigger. But after a decade of Liberal cost overruns, Canadians should demand a cost meter on every megawatt.