Ottawa’s National Electricity Strategy asks Canadians to believe that electricity demand is about to soar and that government-owned utilities can successfully build the infrastructure to meet it. Both assumptions deserve far more scrutiny than they have received.

The federal government announced the NES, a plan to double the capacity of Canada’s electrical grid by 2050. While this sounds dramatic, the compound annual growth rate to double capacity in 25 years is just 2.9%. However, that is more than the average real growth rate in gross domestic product (GDP) over the past five, 10 or 15 years.

MADSEN: Canada’s National Electricity Strategy is a taxpayer trap Back to video

Indeed, electricity consumption only grew by 1.6% in 2024 over 2023 and was only slightly higher in 2024, by 0.3%, than it was in 2011 and 1% higher than it was in 2007, according to statbase.org. That is far less than population growth, which averaged over 1% per year this century until last year’s drop.

Despite such low growth in the recent past, the NES implies greater intensification of........

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