The real fight for Canada’s energy future is being fought at a global scale – and the clean side is winning

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Chris Turner’s latest book, How to Be a Climate Optimist: Blueprints for a Better World, won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

When Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled his government’s new electricity strategy earlier this month, his intent seemed clear: to double the amount of electricity produced in Canada in a generation, with an emphasis on emissions-free sources. “The path to affordability,” Mr. Carney said, “is electrification. The path to competitiveness is electrification. The path to net zero is electrification. Electrification underpins everything – our emissions, our environment, our economy.” Not a lot of ambiguity there.

A reporter asked Mr. Carney whether the “ultimate aim” of all this electrification was simply to allow for new gas-fired power plants. “The ultimate aim is to affordably transition to a net-zero […] economy,” the Prime Minister replied, acknowledging that there was a “complementary role of gas in the short term, a role that is dwarfed in scale in terms of the clean electricity investments that the country will be making.” Again, not especially ambiguous.

The CBC’s coverage of the announcement nevertheless appeared under a headline reading, “Natural gas to play key role in strategy to double electricity grid by 2050.” The electricity strategy came the day before the announcement of progress in the federal government’s memorandum of understanding with Alberta regarding industrial carbon pricing and pipeline approvals. Alongside the friendly attitude toward natural gas use, many in Canada’s climate sector greeted the overall package as a capitulation to some degree to the interests of the oil-and-gas industry. Clean Energy Canada’s Evan Pitnick, for example, said the strategy “overemphasized” the near-term role of natural gas in electrification.

I can understand why Canadians – especially those working in climate advocacy circles – are reluctant to take the Prime Minister at his word that these strategic moves remain part of a full commitment to the country’s net-zero goals. There are certainly other urgent issues vying for higher priority, from tariff wars with the U.S. to the shock waves unleashed by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

But this skepticism flows mostly from a deeper source. For as long as Canada has had climate policies, it has attempted an awkward straddle across the widening strategic divide between the near-term profitability of producing fossil fuels and the long-term need to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The viability of this have-it-both-ways stance has never been more tenuous than in 2026 – but for reasons that suggest Canada’s energy transition will only accelerate from here on out.

Related: Ottawa begins consultations on strategy to double Canada’s grid capacity by 2050

This is not because our collective commitment to shrinking carbon footprints has intensified significantly. Like folks in much of the world, Canadians remain broadly anxious about the long-term threat of the climate crisis and keen to see governments act on it, while being easily distracted by the fuel prices they’re paying at the pump that day or the latest incoherent threat from the social-media account of the President of the United States. No, the case for Canada’s transition to a net-zero economy gaining momentum is now being made most forcefully by the global marketplace.

Put another way, some Canadian climate advocates are expressing deep concerns about the inadequacy of policies designed to constrain fossil-fuel use here in Canada alone. The real fight for our energy future, however, is being waged at global scale, and the clean side is winning that battle. The new federal electricity strategy seems to implicitly acknowledge this. Rather than pick the fight at home, it seems to be aimed at joining the global march to victory.

If this wider landscape isn’t often visible in Canada’s energy policy debates, this is because the past 75 years of abundant cheap energy and expanding lucrative trade with the United States have outfitted Canada with a distinctly North American set of blinders. Decades of peace and prosperity on the doorstep of the world’s largest and most innovative economy have convinced Canadians that they need only look due south across the world’s longest undefended border to identify the most promising way forward.

But the U.S. view of the economic horizon is uniquely blinkered now – especially on the emerging gap between a backward-looking nation doubling down on fossil fuels as its economic engine and a dynamic, future-facing world powered by clean electricity. The American government is controlled by a political party that has also long been the world’s most prominent and powerful climate-denial group, and this has rendered it completely blind not just to the basic facts of climate science but to the realities of the global energy marketplace today. Canadians might have long experience balancing their neighbour’s excesses against views from Europe or Asia, but the scale of the imbalance now is far beyond the usual measures.

If the first phase of Canada’s response to Donald Trump’s second term was “elbows up” on defence, it must pivot now to a “blinders off” approach to offence. Canada’s new electricity strategy might provide an example of how to start embracing that approach.

The broader context for Canada’s electricity plan is a world now racing toward an electrified future at a breakneck pace and staggering scale. The International Energy Agency calls it simply “the age of electricity.” The clean-energy think tank Ember Energy describes it more forcefully as “the electrotech revolution,” an entire new basis (and motor) for industrial society built on cheap and ubiquitous renewable energy sources, increasingly cheap and soon-to-be-ubiquitous batteries, and the huge efficiency gains from electrifying more and more aspects of daily energy use.

Ember’s analysis has been bolstered by the way that much of the world is responding to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its cataclysmic effect on oil prices (and on the cost of living generally). “For the first time,” Ember’s lead analysts wrote in a recent report, “there are scalable, cost-competitive alternatives. […] This shock has jolted the electric age forward.”

China, the pacesetter in the energy transition and the world’s foremost manufacturer of clean energy gear, saw its exports of solar panels double from February to March this year in response to the war in Iran, with more than 50 countries – including the United States – setting import records for Chinese solar. Demand for everything from electric vehicles to heat pumps has similarly surged, and the IEA expects the energy transition to continue to accelerate overall. “The main driver will not be climate change, the main driver will be energy security,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol told reporters in March.

An analysis of Canada’s new electricity strategy by Moe Kabbara, CEO of the energy think tank the Transition Accelerator, stands out amid the gloomier responses. Mr. Kabbara places the policy package not as part of Canada’s same old straddle but as an embrace of the supercharged electrotech economy that “reframes electricity policy as economic strategy” and treats electrification as “an industrial opportunity, not a procurement line item.”

Clean-electricity capacity in Canada, Mr. Kabbara notes, has already been growing faster than demand for more than a decade. If this continues to be the case as grid capacity doubles in the next 25 years, Canada will arrive at an energy system that is 90 per cent emissions-free, with electrified transport, heating and industrial processes almost fully supplanting current fossil-fueled approaches.

Opinion: Ottawa wants to double electricity supply. Provinces will determine whether it happens

“Describe this pathway to almost anyone – doubling the grid, reaching 90-per-cent clean, with a small gas wedge for reliability through the build-out – and they’d call it a win,” Mr. Kabbara writes.

This is a story already unfolding in Canada, even if it isn’t being told in any coherent and consistent way. In part because federalism granted the provinces final authority over energy questions, the Canadian energy transition is a tale told in disjointed, disconnected episodes. There remains no better way to surprise a Canadian audience about the nation’s energy systems, in my experience, than to point out that Canada is already one of the world’s leaders in clean power, with more than 80 per cent of its electricity coming from emissions-free sources today. A European energy wonk would look at that as a national climate problem all but solved; Canadians have instead tended to view their grids through the blinders of 13 distinct provinces and territories, each with its own separate achievements and challenges.

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If Canada’s energy transition story lacks coherence, it has begun to unfold nevertheless. Atlantic Canada is among the continent’s leading regions for heat-pump adoption – more than one in three households in New Brunswick and one in five in Nova Scotia have one – and Nova Scotia has also unveiled plans to become an offshore wind powerhouse. Hydro-Quebec, which already manages one of the world’s cleanest grids, has invested more than $10-billion in grid efficiency upgrades alone, and BC Hydro recently launched a new billion-dollar efficiency plan of its own. And the federal government, of course, has opened the door to Chinese EV imports – a peek, perhaps, past the blinders of the heavily integrated North American auto industry and its U.S.-led sluggishness on the embrace of the age of electricity.

Does this give the Prime Minister and his electricity plan too much benefit of the doubt? Perhaps. After all, the Canadian political tendency to reduce all energy debate into an argument about a pipeline is a set of blinders all its own, and could disrupt our energy transition in any number of unforeseen ways.

But the last 10 years of progress on climate action have been driven not by emissions targets and fossil fuel production constraints but by rapid advances in clean technology and extraordinary achievements in reducing the cost of its manufacture and expanding its availability. Solar panels so cheap and easy to install they adorn German apartment balconies as readily as flower boxes, inexpensive, efficient Chinese-made EVs that are already thick on the streets from Beijing to Mexico City, heat pumps built for even Canadian winter – this stuff is already here, or on its way, to disrupt Canada’s old status quo. And it fits well with a federal government at least nominally committed to the premise that electrification underpins everything.