Yesterday, the federal government published the “Powering Canada Strong” national electricity strategy. The plan is to double Canada’s electricity supply by 2050.
That sounds ambitious until you look at what’s driving demand: Artificial Intelligence (AI) data centres, Electric Vehicle (EV) adoption, heat pumps, critical minerals, new housing, and industrial reshoring all landing on the grid simultaneously. At that point, doubling starts to look like the floor, not the ceiling.
Prime Minister Mark Carney framed this strategy as a nation-building exercise, organized around four pillars:
- Building the generation infrastructure needed to meet doubled demand
- Connecting Canada’s grids east, west, and north through expanded transmission
- Training and retaining the talent to build and run it all, and
- Manufacturing grid technologies and components here in Canada.
There are real commitments in the strategy that the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE) has pushed for. There are also gaps that engineers will notice immediately.
On Canada’s Workforce
The strategy projects up to 130,000 job openings in the electricity sector by 2050, while over 80 percent of employers already say skilled talent is their top constraint.
The federal response includes a $6 billion commitment targeting 80,000 to 100,000 new Red Seal trades workers over five years, a new Energy and Electricity Workforce Alliance, and targeted training funding. OSPE has argued for years that workforce planning is infrastructure, not a footnote to it. This strategy, in both its framing and its dollar figures, starts to reflect that.
A Shift in Tone Around Nuclear Energy
Ontario engineers who have spent years making the case for nuclear as a practical, scalable baseload option will find this section of the plan worth reading carefully.
Canada will be the first G7 country to deploy Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), with a total of four planned for use at Darlington nuclear station. A new nuclear energy strategy is in development, co-designed with provinces, territories, Indigenous peoples, utilities, and industry. The document treats nuclear as baseload, not backup.
Regulatory Timelines
Unpredictable federal timelines have had downstream consequences for how major projects get scoped, financed, and staffed. The federal strategy commits to reviews completed within one year, a single federal decision model for major projects, and a Crown Consultation Hub to coordinate Indigenous consultation. Naming these commitments explicitly creates something to push against if the government fails to uphold them.
What’s Missing from the Strategy
Professional Engineering Oversight
What raises concerns for OSPE is that there is no mention of professional engineering oversight. SMR deployment, grid digitalization, offshore wind, northern transmission corridors: all of these require professional accountability frameworks. The Professional Engineers Act exists for this reason.
AI Governance
The AI governance gap is harder to ignore given how much of the strategy depends on it. AI-driven analytics, autonomous grid controls, smart energy management: the strategy describes these as tools to be deployed, but it says nothing about who is professionally responsible when those systems make a consequential call and get it wrong.
International Engineering Graduates
Internationally trained engineers are not addressed. The strategy references credential recognition for tradespeople, but engineers aren’t mentioned, despite having a more complex licensure pathway, labour market gaps, and barriers that deserve specific federal attention.
The Building Code
Grid decarbonization and building performance standards both seek to address the same problem, though the connection between the two in the federal strategy is thin. OSPE’s Building Code Review Working Group is actively examining exactly this intersection, and it is a connection a national electricity strategy should not be treating as a separate file.
The strategy keeps its net-zero by 2050 headline, but the fine print has shifted. The federal government is amending the Clean Electricity Regulations to allow the electricity sector to use carbon offsets rather than reduce emissions directly. The distinction matters: offsetting emissions and eliminating them are not the same outcome. For a grid that is already 80 percent non-emitting, that difference deserves more scrutiny than the strategy gives it.
The government’s rationale is straightforward: keep natural gas in the mix to hold rates down and maintain reliability, which makes economy-wide electrification faster and more achievable, which delivers bigger emissions reductions than squeezing the last percentage points out of the electricity sector alone. That argument has merit. But it only holds if the electrification actually happens at the scale and pace being projected. Engineers know that the difference between a modelled outcome and a built one is where things go wrong.
A net-zero commitment backed by offset accounting rather than verified emissions performance is worth watching carefully. OSPE will be doing exactly that through the regulatory consultation process.
Next Steps
The federal government is treating electricity as an economic sovereignty file. That changes what arguments land. OSPE’s most effective contributions to this consultation will frame workforce and licensure as supply chain issues, AI governance as a grid reliability and security risk, building code reform and thermal network integration as a return on federal investment, nuclear as Canadian-owned technology anchoring domestic supply chains and jobs, and northern infrastructure as a sovereignty gap, not a service gap.
OSPE will be making a formal submission. The federal government has opened a four-month consultation window for stakeholders to submit feedback. The areas where our voice is most distinct are professional accountability and AI governance. Those aren’t being addressed by anyone else in quite the same way.
For questions or input on this file, please email advocacy@ospe.on.ca.
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