Eventually, the Bill Comes Due

Eventually, the Bill Comes Due

From newspapers and telephones to AI and a doubling of Canada's electricity grid

I grew up in a very different Canada.

We had newspapers.

We had television.

We had telephones.

There was no internet in our homes. No smartphones. No social media. No streaming. No artificial intelligence. And certainly no giant data centres consuming enormous amounts of electricity to power the digital world.

When something happened somewhere else in the world, you often didn't know about it until you saw it on the evening news or read about it in the newspaper the next day.

And that brings me to something I've been thinking about lately.

I recently discovered the history of Typhoon Freda, which struck the Pacific Northwest in 1962, and Typhoon Tip, the enormous 1979 storm that became the most intense tropical cyclone ever recorded by central pressure.

I didn't learn about these storms as a child.

And I suspect many younger people haven't either.

We have more information available to us today than any generation in history, yet somehow pieces of our environmental and weather history can still disappear from public memory.

Perhaps that's because we are living through so much change at once.

And now we are being asked to imagine Canada in 2050.

Canada wants to double its electricity system

Prime Minister Mark Carney recently posted:

"Electricity demand in Canada is expected to double by 2050. So we need to double our grid."

That's not a small statement.

The federal government's National Electricity Strategy says Canada needs an electricity system capable of generating and delivering twice as much power by 2050. The government identifies industrial expansion, electrification of buildings and transportation, artificial intelligence and data centres, critical minerals and advanced manufacturing among the forces driving demand.

The government's strategy estimates that expanding and modernizing Canada's electricity infrastructure could require more than $1 trillion in investment between now and 2050.

Think about that for a moment.

We aren't simply talking about building a few more power plants.

We need generation.

Transmission lines.

Distribution systems.

Storage.

Substations.

Workers.

Materials.

Land.

Permits.

Transportation infrastructure.

And eventually, all of the infrastructure required to build and maintain that infrastructure.

And this is where I think the conversation needs to become much bigger.

Because electricity isn't the only system experiencing rapid growth.

Look at British Columbia

Metro Vancouver added approximately 183,000 residents in 2024, more than twice the number added in 2023, according to TransLink's 2024 Transit Service Performance Review. TransLink says ridership growth was outpacing its ability to expand service.

In 2024, TransLink recorded 240.9 million journeys, an increase of about three per cent over 2023.

And 137,000 bus trips were overcrowded — 11.2 per cent of all bus trips exceeded vehicle capacity at least once.

Anyone riding the buses didn't need a spreadsheet to understand what that meant.

You could see it.

You could feel it.

People packed onto buses.

People left waiting because there wasn't enough room.

People standing at bus stops while another full bus went past.

This isn't an argument against public transit.

Quite the opposite.

It's an argument for building enough public transit for the population we are planning to have.

Growth doesn't happen in one department

This is the part that concerns me.

Population growth doesn't just mean building more housing.

More people need water.

They need sewer systems.

They need electricity.

They need schools.

They need hospitals.

They need roads.

They need buses and trains.

They need grocery stores.

They need emergency services.

They need jobs.

And they need energy to power all of it.

Then we add electrification.

We want people to drive electric vehicles.

We want buildings to move away from fossil-fuel heating.

We want industry to electrify.

We want artificial intelligence and data centres.

We want new manufacturing.

We want economic growth.

We want population growth.

And we want all of this to happen while dramatically reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Individually, each objective may make sense.

But collectively, they create an enormous infrastructure challenge.

And then there is the climate promise

This is where I keep coming back to COP21.

Remember the Paris Agreement?

Remember the goal of trying to keep global warming to 1.5°C?

We were told that we needed to fundamentally change the way we planned for the future.

But planning for climate change isn't only about building renewable energy.

It is also about asking:

How much are we building?

Where are we building it?

How much energy will it require?

Where will the materials come from?

How will we transport people?

How will we house them?

How will we protect water supplies?

How will we protect forests and ecosystems?

What happens when extreme weather hits the infrastructure we've built?

And perhaps most importantly:

Are all of these plans being made together?

Because a city can approve housing without simultaneously having enough transit.

A province can increase its population without having enough housing.

A country can plan for electrification without having enough generation or transmission.

And governments can make climate commitments without necessarily explaining how every part of the growing economy will fit inside those commitments.

That is how growth outruns the plan.

This isn't about blaming newcomers

I want to be very clear about something.

This isn't about blaming immigrants or newcomers.

People don't create immigration policy.

Governments do.

People don't decide how many homes will be built.

Governments, municipalities, developers and planners make those decisions.

People need somewhere to live.

They need transportation.

They need electricity.

They need jobs.

And if the public transportation system doesn't get them where they need to go, some people will need cars.

That's not a moral failure on the part of the individual.

It's a planning issue.

If governments choose rapid population growth, then governments have a responsibility to build the infrastructure required to support that growth.

You cannot tell people:

"Come here."

And then tell the people already living here:

"Sorry. The buses are full. Housing is unaffordable. Traffic is terrible. The electricity system needs to double. And we're still trying to catch up."

That's not a newcomer problem.

That's a planning problem.

And now we're planning for 2050

This is what makes Mark Carney's announcement so interesting to me.

The government is looking at Canada 24 years into the future and saying:

We need roughly twice the electricity system we have today.

That's enormous.

And yet, in British Columbia, we're already seeing what happens when population growth puts pressure on infrastructure.

TransLink itself says demand continued to outpace its capacity to respond in 2024.

So perhaps the question isn't whether Canada should grow.

Perhaps the question is:

Can Canada build fast enough to support the growth it has chosen?

And can we do it without destroying the very environment we say we're trying to protect?

Because the future isn't just one number.

It isn't population.

It isn't electricity.

It isn't housing.

It isn't immigration.

It isn't climate change.

It isn't AI.

It isn't transportation.

It's all of them at once.

And that's what makes this moment so extraordinary.

We grew up in a world of newspapers, television and telephones.

We're heading toward a world of artificial intelligence, electric transportation, enormous data centres, electrified buildings, expanding cities and an electricity grid that Canada says needs to become twice as large.

That's a tremendous transformation in a single lifetime.

And perhaps before we make another promise about what Canada will look like in 2050...

We should ask a very simple question:

Have we actually built the plan to get there?

Because growth isn't the plan.

Planning for growth is the plan.

Because eventually, the bill comes due — in housing, transportation, energy, infrastructure, the environment, and the quality of life of the people who live here.

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