British Columbia is carefully watching the actions of both Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) when it comes to managing its power supply, B.C. Premier David Eby says.
Aggressive moves from each could have an impact on B.C’s ability to buy and sell electricity in the United States.
For his part, Ford is going direct with his political and economic fight with the United States, saying he is following through on his promise to slap a 25 per cent surcharge on electricity from his province that is sold to 1.5 million customers in Minnesota, New York and Michigan.
He says he recognizes individual Americans are not to blame for the ongoing threats of tariffs and annexation, but that he wants to send a message to U.S. President Donald Trump that Canada should not be taken for granted.
“You touch the stove once, you get burned, you don’t touch that stove again,” Ford said. “We’re going to make sure that we follow through with what we said we were going to do.”
“We have to follow through until he drops tariffs completely.”
Meanwhile, mass firings at a U.S. power supplier, a result of actions from DOGE, has Eby looking east, rather than south, for future power sales.
But he’s so far expressed little interest in following Ford’s lead in hitting the United States in its power banks.
“We’re working with other premiers and with the federal government on how we can support the Team Canada approach with no-tariff responses,” he said on March 5 about the possibility of B.C. imposing its own surcharges.
“There’s no monopoly on good ideas … but we’re going to do it in a co-ordinated way with other premiers and the federal government.”
An integrated B.C.-U.S. power system
Part of that hesitation is because of the highly integrated nature of the B.C. power system with the western United States, primarily Washington state but also Oregon and California.
The bulk of B.C.’s power is generated using hydroelectric dams, which generally produce enough electricity to make the province self-sufficient.
But that’s not always the case: In 2024, for example, extended drought and reduced snowpacks meant about 20 per cent of B.C.’s power was imported from other regions, including the United States, said Sam Harrison, a senior analyst at Vancouver-based Navius Research.
Even so, Harrison said, the province also managed to earn a profit of roughly $1.5 billion by selling electricity to other jurisdictions, primarily the United States.
That’s because B.C. sells electricity south when rates are high and tries to buy when they are low, maintaining an edge of profitability.
Eby said if British Columbia were to shut off power sales to the United States, it would likely result in brownouts and blackouts along the West Coast.
But it would also mean foregoing the “almost a billion dollars” earned each year by selling southward, not to mention causing harm to some key allies south of the border.
States along the West Coast, he said, lean Democrat, with governments that are in opposition to Trump — and that during California’s wildfires, the president seemed to show “a complete indifference” to the region because of those political differences.
“It’s a factor for me,” he said.
Planning around DOGE, working with Alberta
That said, Eby also said he is working on “contingency planning” should things escalate.
For example, he noted the impacts of Elon Musk’s DOGE — Department of Government Efficiency — on B.C.’s power partners.
B.C.’s power grid is connected to the United States through the Bonneville Power Administration, an agency within the U.S. Department of Energy that both buys from and sells to British Columbia, as needed.
The agency is down hundreds of positions following mass firings by the Trump administration.
Eby said he’d been assured Bonneville is still able to maintain critical operations, but he has his doubts.
“They assure that they are focused on the high-voltage network that we depend on, but from a distance, the chaos, the uncertainty and potential instability that these kinds of decisions cause means that we have to have backup plans in place,” he said.
Most of that, so far, is by seeking to improve ties to Alberta’s grid.
Eby and Harrison both said B.C. has been hindered in the past because Alberta has its own regulatory scheme for managing power, focused around private providers, while B.C.’s grid relies on the publicly-owned B.C. Hydro.
But with increased interest in interprovincial trade, Eby said progress was being made on harmonizing standards to allow power to flow more freely across the Rockies, something Harrison applauded.
Eby also said similar conversations were happening with Yukon, where the barriers are more about geography and a lack of infrastructure rather than politics.
B.C. has also announced plans to rapidly increase its own power supply both through the finalization of the Site C dam and the fast-tracking of several wind power projects across the province.
Eby said much of the work being done was similar to the planning that goes into place for preparing the province for responding to natural disasters such as fires or storms.
“Unfortunately, now it’s contingency planning around a man-made disaster made by the president of the United States,” he said.
What about natural gas?
Harrison said that unlike electricity, which is primarily consumed in B.C., natural gas production, which can be used for heat and power, is a major export for the province.
“We produce about 10 times more natural gas … than we consume ourselves,” he said.
Most of that goes through pipelines to the United States, primarily through the Westcoast Transmission line, which spans more than 2,900 kilometres from Fort Nelson in the far north to the Canada-U.S. border. When a portion of that pipeline ruptured in 2018, it had impacts in Washington as well as throughout B.C.
The main concern, Harrison said, would be tariffs or surcharges reducing demand and cutting into the profits of the B.C. industry.
He noted the province is taking steps to develop a liquefied natural gas industry, which allows gas from pipelines to be compressed and sold overseas.
He said that would help diversify the economy, but it would still not be enough to offset the potential losses in U.S. markets, and noted that compression has a high carbon cost, which runs counter to the province’s environmental goals.
“There’s trade-offs,” he said.
