Canada is in the midst of an infrastructure conversation dominated by superlatives: nation-building corridors, gigawatt-scale transmission lines, multi-billion-dollar critical minerals plays. Yet most of the major projects are planned top-down, driven by national targets and provincial mandates, with little attention paid to what host regions and communities need or stand to gain.
Many of these ambitions depend on one shared requirement: electricity. Pairing major project planning with regional electricity planning can help Canada get more economic value from the infrastructure it is already building while creating lasting benefits for host communities. In fact, many of Canada’s international peers already use a tool to overcome the gap between local needs and broader electricity system plans, called regional energy-economy planning.
Canadian utilities and markets aren’t built for localized regional co-ordination
Canada’s challenge isn’t scale alone, it’s also that electricity planning at the provincial-territorial level rarely operates at the regional scale or connects to regional economic development. By “regions”, we mean the smaller areas within a province or territory that make up the broader whole. This regional coherence gap sits alongside an interprovincial one, which our Power Play report tackles directly.
In utility-dominated systems, provincial utilities like BC Hydro plan around their own generation, transmission, and system-reliability mandates, not around a regional economic strategy that hones in on a smaller, more localized area. Regional growth strategies and community energy plans exist but are weakly coupled to utility investment decisions.Communities, such as the off-grid Atlin community, are developing their own community energy plan to encourage more engagement from BC Hydro, and to make the case for investment that reflects local priorities such as reliability and reducing diesel dependence.
Decentralized, market-based electricity systems work differently but reach a similar outcome. There’s no single utility planning the whole system. Instead, private power producers decide where and when to build, based on where they can connect the fastest and sell at the best price. Investment follows market signals, not any plan for regional development or community-scale energy systems.
Indigenous Nations face another problem entirely. Their territories and rights cross provincial borders, adding complexity and another chance for their governance and interests to be missed. Any credible model of regional co-ordination has to treat Indigenous leadership as central, not layered on after the fact.
Planning electricity and regional economic development together has benefits
Regional energy-economy planning offers a way to address current planning gaps. These plans typically focus on building an electricity system that maximizes regional economic development and community well-being.
Reliable, low-cost power is already one of Canada’s clearest competitive advantages for attracting industrial investment and retaining industry. But that advantage doesn’t always reach the community level. It depends on whether electricity infrastructure is planned alongside regional economic priorities. When they are, communities gain a real shot at hosting that growth, and investors gain certainty power will be there when needed.
Attracting investment is also only part of the equation. Once a community lands a power generation or transmission project it doesn’t automatically translate to local economic development. That depends on whether regional plans build in jobs, ownership, or returns for host communities from the outset, rather than assuming benefits will trickle down.
Regional planning can also reduce project risk and speed delivery. When electricity siting is built into regional land-use planning ahead of time, communities can identify where projects should go and how they can support local economic priorities. This helps ensure communities capture more of the benefits from new investment, while reducing conflicts that can slow projects down. Investors get confidence the community has bought-in and communities get a say before decisions are made not after.
Governments beyond Canada are already planning electricity differently
Others have already tried this approach. Germany, France, Basque Country, New South Wales, South Africa, Québec, and the United Kingdom have all begun scaling electricity planning to the regional level, deliberately linking it to local economic development.
Their approaches differ in detail, but share a common architecture. National decarbonization targets are translated into regional power generation and transmission obligations, with governance spanning national to municipal tiers. On the ground, priority zones for renewables and grid investment are mapped in advance rather than fought over project-by-project. Financing and procurement tools de-risk regional buildout, and planning frameworks ensure communities and Indigenous or local rightsholders share in the benefits.
Canada already has an early version of this. Québec’s Bill 69 establishes a framework for a 25-year, multi-energy regional development strategy aligned with its 2050 carbon-neutrality target. It provides a basis for guiding Hydro-Québec’s future expansion alongside broader priorities, though many rollout details remain unclear.
Communities aren’t waiting for a framework, they are building their own
Without a formal framework in place in Canada, bottom-up coalitions are stepping up. Across the country, informal regional alliances, municipal energy strategies, and Indigenous-led coalitions are doing the connective work higher-level governments are not.
Indigenous Power Coalition is an example. Launched to reposition Indigenous Nations from consulted rightsholders to project proponents and owners, the coalition—and its Western Transmission Catalysts initiative — is organizing Nations across Western Canada to lead interprovincial transmission development.
In the Upper Skeena region of northwestern British Columbia, Skeena Energy Solutions offers another example. Working across rural and remote communities where infrastructure and funding often fall short, the organization built a regional energy plan that offers a “how to plan” guide, walking through regional energy assessment, emissions baselines, and local renewable options, with example case studies of what communities have already built.
Neither group waited for a provincial framework to act. Both saw a need and built plans themselves that work across neighbouring Nations and communities. But local action can also be limited by current policy. For example under current rules many provinces limit a communities’ ability to share and move electricity to neighbours, requiring it to be sold through Crown utilities instead.
Indigenous-led and co-owned clean energy projects already account for more than one-tenth of Canada’s generating capacity, representing $27.1 billion in investment, $441.4 million in annual Indigenous returns, and over 51,000 person-years of employment. That trajectory shows what’s possible when communities lead, and what a regional energy-economy planning framework could accelerate.
Governments in Canada need to think more regionally
So what would it look like if Canada took regional energy-economy planning seriously? There’s no single model to import wholesale, nor should there be. Canada’s regions have distinct economic structures, electricity systems, and governance arrangements, meaning different starting points call for different policy instruments.
Provincial governments and utilities currently hold the pen on electricity and broader integrated energy system planning. The Canadian Climate Institute’s recent Power Play report called for the federal government to provide more information on national needs for provincial planning. There’s an even stronger case for more regional input into the process, so plans can better support local strengths and priorities. Community-identified renewable energy opportunity zones are just one example of how regional input can target investment where it delivers the greatest local and system-wide benefits.
Achieving this kind of deep, place-based sustainable development also requires policies to support projects at different scales and with different ownership models. Financing mechanisms should flow as readily to community- and Indigenous-led initiatives as they do to mega-projects. Policy should also encourage local and Indigenous leadership, ownership, and benefit-sharing as core design principles from the outset of project development, wherever communities have the interest and capacity to lead.
At a moment when Canadian energy policy is fixated on a handful of enormous projects, Canada could bring more focus and support to a family of regional models that build lasting, place-based economies alongside electricity infrastructure. Canada already has the pieces: capable utilities, an emerging provincial model in Québec, and community and Indigenous-led initiatives. What is missing is a framework flexible enough to hold both, that recognizes, supports and connects them, on their own terms.
