Why Provinces Barely Trade Electricity

Two kinds of electrical line can pull a proposal into the federal assessment system, and the tests that catch them have nothing in common. A new international electrical transmission line is caught by its own dimensions: at or above a stated voltage, needing at least a stated run of new right of way, it is a designated project and nobody has to decide that it is. A new interprovincial power line is caught only if an order under section 261 of the Canadian Energy Regulator Act designates it. The second limb carries no voltage and no length. It carries a pointer to a discretion.

Those two sit in the same item, one under the other, and read as a pair they say something the Regulations were not written to say. A wire running south is an object the federal system measures. A wire running east is an occasion for somebody to decide whether to look.

The premise above is not established here

Nothing in this build reports how much electricity crosses a provincial boundary, in either direction, in any year. There is no generation series, no capacity register, no interchange figure and no price. The energy section states that position for the section as a whole, and it is a brief statement because there is very little to state.

So the sentence at the top of this page is one that nothing held in this build can test. Writing it as though it could would be the most damaging thing available to do with a subject that most readers feel they already understand. What is left, and what turns out to be worth more than a borrowed number, is to read the instruments that do exist and ask what each of them was built to notice.

One wire is measured, the other is noticed

The Regulations define new right of way rather than leaving the phrase to ordinary usage, and the opening of that definition rewards a slow reading. It names an international electrical transmission line, a pipeline, a railway line and an all-season public highway. No other electrical line is in the list. The measured corridor, which is the quantity the international limb turns on, is a concept the drafters built for a line leaving the country and for nothing else that carries current.

Follow that through. There is no size at which a line between two provinces becomes a designated project on its own account. It becomes one when an order is made, and the making of that order is governed by a statute nothing in this build holds a copy of. The permitting page can state the capacity at which a mine enters the system, because the quantity sits in these same Regulations and travels with its citation. Nothing of that kind can be said about an east-west wire, because for an east-west wire there is no quantity to state.

Anyone hoping to assemble a picture of interprovincial transmission out of federal assessment records is therefore counting decisions rather than lines, and a count of decisions tells you about the decider.

A reactor in heat, a dam in power

The generating items are scattered across the Schedule and their units do not agree with one another.

A new hydroelectric generating facility is caught at a stated production capacity. A new in-stream tidal facility at a lower one. A new tidal facility that is not in-stream is caught with no threshold attached at all. Wind appears only in an offshore area or in boundary water, and there it is measured by counting turbines rather than by capacity, so an onshore wind farm is absent from the Schedule at any size whatever. A new fossil fuel fired power generating facility is caught at a stated production capacity, and sits under a heading about fuels rather than under anything electrical. And a fission or fusion reactor is measured in thermal capacity, which is heat, while every other generating item in the Schedule is measured in the power it can deliver.

That last one is not a drafting quirk. It means the generating entries cannot be added together even in principle, because some of them count heat and the rest count power. Treat the designated project list as an inventory of what the country can generate and you have built a total out of units that do not combine, over a category with a wind shaped hole in it.

The list is not an inventory. It is a set of places where a federal instrument touches an electrical asset, and the touching happens for reasons that have very little to do with size.

Two Acts named, two bodies not

The Act provides separate machinery for a designated project that includes activities regulated under two other federal statutes, one governing nuclear safety and control and the other energy regulation. Terms of reference, panel membership and the powers a panel may exercise all change when either is engaged. Federal assessment does not treat energy as one subject with one process. It treats it as two specialised annexes fitted to a general one.

What this page will not do is name the bodies those two statutes establish. The energy section sets that rule and gives the reason: naming a regulator here takes a retrieved page published by that regulator, and none is held. One of the two titles has a body's name inside it and is cited above for the section it carries. The line is drawn at the title, which is an uncomfortable place to draw it and the right place all the same.

The nuclear items are worth one further note, because the uranium page divides its subject from this one at the fence around the property. The Schedule reaches well past that fence. It names a facility for processing, reprocessing or separating isotopes, and a facility for manufacturing a product derived from them, each at a stated capacity. That is a list of triggers and not an account of the fuel cycle, and the energy section's finding that nothing retrieved for this build sets out that cycle stands undisturbed.

The portfolio sits in a provincial department

Set the federal material down and look at who actually holds electricity. Alberta names its department Energy and Minerals. Saskatchewan has a Ministry of Energy and Resources. Ontario has a Ministry of Energy and Mines, and so, under a shorter name, does Newfoundland and Labrador. In each of those the department that administers the rock administers the power as well, which is why a desk built on mineral records keeps arriving at this subject sideways rather than by design.

The pattern is not uniform, and the exceptions carry as much information as the rule. British Columbia names its ministry Mining and Critical Minerals, with no energy in the title at all. Nova Scotia has a Department of Natural Resources, which contains everything and therefore separates nothing.

An arrangement that varied is a fact about ownership. Each jurisdiction decided on its own where to file the subject, and each answers to its own legislature for what it decided. A country whose power systems were organised that way does not subsequently acquire a national grid by accident, and what crosses a boundary is a question about arrangements between governments before it is a question about conductors.

A system is not a project

The Act binds Her Majesty in right of Canada or a province, in one short section near its front, so whether a proponent is a company or a provincial Crown makes no difference to whether the Act applies to a facility it proposes.

The federal handle on provincial electricity is therefore real, and it is a handle on a project. It grips when somebody proposes a facility of a stated size or a line of a stated kind. It does not grip a system. An interprovincial trade question is a question about a system, and the nearest federal instrument to it was designed to answer a different question about one facility at a time.

The Act's own definition of the effects that make a matter federal points the same way. The only limb of it that mentions a provincial boundary is about pollution reaching interprovincial waters. Nothing in that definition concerns electricity crossing a boundary, and nothing in it concerns anything else crossing one that is not water, a fish or a bird.

What would settle it

Three documents, in the order in which they would help.

The Canadian Energy Regulator Act itself, saved as a consolidation carrying its own currency dates. The entire east-west trigger in the Regulations is a pointer into that statute, and until a copy is held, this page cannot say what an order under that section requires, who may seek one, or what the decision turns on.

Then the orders made under it, or whatever register holds them. That is the list of interprovincial lines the federal government has taken an interest in, and an empty register would be an answer every bit as informative as a full one.

Then a published series of generation and interchange by jurisdiction, from the body that collects it, carrying a period and a concept in the way every quantity in our coverage of Canadian industry must carry them. With one of those in hand, the claim at the top of this page becomes something a reader can check rather than something to pass along.

Until one of them arrives the defensible position is narrower than the title and more interesting than the usual answer to it. Distance and terrain are the reasons most often reached for, and they may well be sound. What can actually be read off the instruments is that Parliament wrote a measurement for a line going south and a discretion for a line going east, and that every province files electricity with a department of its own choosing. A record assembled that way will be thin about east-west trade whether or not the trade itself is thin, and nothing inside the record distinguishes the two.