This article was published by The Energy Mix on March 30, 2026.
With the federal government expected to release its long-awaited national electricity strategy this week, Canada could be in line to lose $110 to $220 billion in new investment and 40,000 to 80,000 direct jobs if it fails to deliver a clean power grid “at the scale and speed that industry and investors need,” a recent report concludes.
While senior executives across Canada’s finance, technology, heavy industry, mining, and clean energy sectors recognize that clean power is essential, it’s only worth pursuing “when it is predictable, cost-competitive, and available at scale,” states the report released earlier this month by the Shareholder Association for Research and Education (SHARE).
Canada enters the energy transition with an advantage over many other industrialized nations, with about 85% of its power coming from non-emitting sources, consultants at Dunsky Energy + Climate report. Clean economy sectors like electric vehicles, batteries, and the grid itself have received about $65 billion in new investment, producing at least 26,000 direct jobs and tens of thousands more across related supply chains.
That investment is taking place at a moment when access to electricity is central to site selection and capital allocation for new projects, adding asset value and enabling market access for new investments in tech, artificial intelligence, and mining.
But “Canada’s clean electricity edge is under threat,” Dunsky warns. “Grid constraints, permitting delays, and interconnection uncertainty are already slowing or cancelling investments.”
Canada faces those challenges in a moment of intensifying global competition, the report adds, with other jurisdictions “rapidly decarbonize their grids with the aim of attracting clean investment.”
The national electricity strategy has been in development for some time. Insiders say its release is now just days away, and it’s expected to focus on east-west transmission, Indigenous leadership, and better collaboration among provinces. Earlier this month, Ontario announced a “major nation-building milestone” when 10 provinces and territories—everyone but Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nunavut—agreed to work together on new transmission infrastructure.
There was no official word on the national strategy’s release as this story went to virtual press. But The Energy Mix has learned that it may appear as soon as this Wednesday or Thursday and feature federal investment in grid interties between provinces, though the form of investment—through loans, grants, federal ownership, of investment tax credits—remains to be seen. The strategy is expected to remain silent on the fate of the federal Clean Electricity Regulations, and it isn’t clear whether it will address the role of gas-fired electricity or carbon capture and storage on the grid.
The Dunsky report calls for long-term coordination and policy certainty across federal, provincial, and territorial governments to make permitting and grid interconnections faster and more transparent, all with the goal of accelerating the buildout of clean generation, storage, and transmission. It points to Indigenous partnerships as an element that could “unlock project development”, and stresses the role of demand-side solutions to “lower system costs, defer infrastructure, and improve reliability—especially for fast-growing data centre and industrial loads.”
SHARE Public Affairs Director Jennifer Story said the consultants sought interviews with executives whose companies will need reliable supplies of green energy. “There’s a growing number of investors and companies that are hearing back from regulators, hearing back from provincial decision-makers, that they’re in the queue or that their needs can’t be met.,” she told The Energy Mix in an interview.
“If Canada is really serious about creating new opportunities in our economy to buffer the effects of the worsening relationship with the United States, this is a really obvious place to do it,” she added. “We’ll certainly be looking to see whether or not [the federal electricity strategy] goes the distance to meet this need.”
With net-zero commitments and carbon pricing systems in place in 10 of Canada’s 11 biggest trading partners—the U.S. is the outlier—Story said faster buildout of a clean electricity grid could be an essential nation-building project to protect Canadian sovereignty.
“It does tie in to trade strategy,” she told The Mix. “Some countries and regions are imposing carbon border adjustments, for example. Responding to that reality means again demonstrating clearly that we can supply our issuers, our publicly-traded and private companies, with the clean power they need to not have those border adjustments be a barrier to market access in other parts of the world.”
And to attract climate-aligned investment, “we also need to demonstrate to those investors that the companies they’re considering, the projects they’re considering, have not just green but also reliable, affordable, consistently available clean power.”
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