Project of the Century - A Blueprint for Growing Canada’s Clean Electricity Supply – and Fast - INTRODUCTION: FROM ABUNDANCE TO SCARCITY AND BACK

It is shaping up as the number one national undertaking of the 21st century – dwarfing in ambition even the 19th-century construction of the Grand Trunk and Canadian Pacific railways and the mid-20th-century nation-building trifecta of the St. [...] These conjoined objectives touch everything from the mining and processing of critical minerals, to the capture and sequestration of the carbon in hydrocarbons, to the shrinkage of nuclear plants into small modular reactors, and to the erection of tens of thousands of kilometres of transmission lines, much of it across Indigenous territories. [...] Or perhaps, more to the point, the twin visions – the net-zero-or-better electricity system by 2035 (15 years before the economy as a whole) and the doubling or tripling of the electricity supply by 2050. [...] As the roadmap states: “It is impossible to unlock Indigenous potential without transferring both the authority and the revenue required to govern.” The choice to pursue genuine partnerships with First Nations marks a critical pivot point as to whether or how much a given electricity development can put the adversarial days of lawsuits and protests in the rear-view mirror in favour of a speedier p. [...] In past energy transitions – water to steam; steam and coal to fossil fuels and electricity; horsepower to the internal combustion engine – the marketplace in the form of innovators and consumers dictated the pace of change.