Issue 93 - September 2026
Issue 90 - June 2026
The National Electricity Strategy
Other stories:
Issue 89 - May 2026
Powering Progress Scorecard
Electricity Canada’s Powering Progress scorecard is a graphic compilation of Electricity Canada member data showcasing opportunities and leadership on sustainability initiatives. Current Affairs sits down with Averil Gougeon, Policy Analyst at Electricity Canada to discuss the data.
Hi Averil, thanks for joining us! What is Electricity Canada’s Powering Progress scorecard?
The Powering Progress Scorecard is a snapshot of national performance and it’s built from aggregated data across 42 indicators reported by Electricity Canada members from across the country. The scorecard is designed to drive continuous improvement, show leadership on sustainability, and increase both transparency and public understanding of how utilities are performing across environmental, social, and governance indicators.
We’ve always had a long form report on the sustainability indicators, but the scorecard is meant to be a digestible snapshot of our members hard work in the sustainability space rather than a long form written report.
What are the steps to pulling all of that data together from Electricity Canada members?
It is quite the process! You can tell as you read the sustainability scorecard that the indicators are pretty diverse, and members do lots of legwork to provide this data to Electricity Canada. There’s a lot of internal cross-departmental coordination. When that research is completed, our team verifies and validates submissions and checks in with members for any anomalies or outliers. That process helps us maintain data integrity for the project and then after validation, we aggregate the data nationally and analyze it to identify key trends. Then we jump into the design component of how we can translate these findings into something accessible and digestible to the public.
What do you want people to take away from each section?
There are five sections to the scorecard: community relationships, reliability, fair and safe workplace, environment, and electrification. Each section represents a different dimension of sustainable development. When it comes to environmental, social, and governance, no single section sort of is more important than the others, because they provide a good holistic picture of utility sustainability performance.
The first header is community relationships, which highlights how utilities invest in communities through capital projects, partnerships, and different policy commitments.
Reliability focuses on outage performance and then how utilities are managing climate related risks that would affect the service continuity.
Fair and safe workplace covers governance practices, health and safety performance, and diversity inclusion policies that would support a strong workforce.
Environment tracks, emissions, spills, air quality, and other indicators related to environmental protection and performance.
And electrification is where we look ahead and highlight how the electrification of transportation and heating is changing our grid. That’s where we see the greenhouse gas emission data sit because electrification is creating opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions economy wide. It also gives information on EVs, for when people are changing from fuel vehicles to electric vehicles or hybrid vehicles.
For our members, this is fleet specific and shows how they're committing to the same electrification that the general public is.
In the next five years, where do you see the biggest opportunity for advancement in environment, social and governance?
That's a tricky question because sustainability is an area where the priorities and opportunities are constantly evolving and so are advances in technology. How utilities might analyze data, manage assets, and how they're thinking of operating their systems more efficiently, maybe using more renewable energy all factors in.
Looking forward, one of the biggest opportunities for the electricity sector is that enablement of electrification. So, encouraging electrification across the Canadian economy and ensuring that the new infrastructure that's being built is reliable, resilient, and hopefully renewable. To make that successful, planning over the next five years must be proactive by thinking about the grid but also aligning that with what long-term sustainability goals are going to look like.
Overall, what does the scorecard say about our member companies?
It's a good news story that shows our members' commitment to overall sustainable action and a commitment to being transparent throughout their journey.
This round we saw overall decreases in figures like outages and interruptions, meaning an overall increase in reliability, and a 13% decrease in scope 1 emissions from last year. Meanwhile, more fleet vehicles are being electrified and overall spending on infrastructure is increased.
I think it's important to recognize and thank our members for continuing to submit that data year over year. It's impactful. It's useful. And it’s a great way to share with the general public what we're doing and for the utilities to be able to benchmark their own progress.
Read the full Powering Progress Scorecard on our website.
Other stories:
- Electricity 2026 Spring Hill Day on April 14
- Electricity Canada response to the Spring Economic Update
- CAMPUT 2026
- NERC Wildfire Workshop
Issue 88 - April 2026
Electricity Canada celebrates advocacy win with Bill C-8
On Thursday, March 12th the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security (SECU) has adopted the regulatory alignment amendments to Bill C-8 that Electricity Canada has been advocating for nearly four years. Current Affairs sits down with Eric Jacques, Manager, Security and Infrastructure Protection who has been leading this file, to learn more.
Hi Eric, thanks for joining us. What is Bill C-8 and what were Electricity Canada's concerns with it?
Bill C-8 is a federal piece of legislation on cybersecurity. It was introduced way back in the summer of 2022 and reintroduced last year after the last federal election. The overarching goal of Bill C8 is to strengthen the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure under federal jurisdiction. For the electricity sector, that means nuclear power plants and interprovincial and international power lines. It aims to strengthen the cybersecurity of those infrastructures by mandating operators to implement cybersecurity programmes, report cybersecurity incidents, and also follow government directives.
Our main concern was around the risk of regulatory duplication. Our sector is already regulated by North American Electric Reliability Corporation Critical Infrastructure Protection (NERC CIP) standards, which requires operators to protect against cyberthreats and identify critical assets. With Bill C-8, we saw a risk of adding another layer of compliance and duplication between regulatory regimes without necessarily adding an extra layer of security. Through C-8 our members would have had to comply with another set of cybersecurity requirements through another compliance mechanism. That adds a lot of paperwork… and not much security. In the province of Ontario, the new cybersecurity legislation requires all electric utilities in Ontario to report cybersecurity incidents, so in that province you’d be adding a third level of cybersecurity requirements.
Talk us through the process of getting the Bill amended.
Well, in one sentence, it's a lot of meetings with a lot of people.
First, we had to identify what our concerns were and what our recommendations were. So, the process started with getting our members together. When the Bill was introduced, we formed a cross-business task group. We had members with different expertise that were working in cybersecurity , compliance , and law that participated and formed a task group to identify some of our key concerns with Bill C-26 at the time. We ended up with a list of our concerns and recommendations and once we had that in our hands, we started our engagement with government partners. We met with dozens of different stakeholders throughout the last four years to get this to the finish line. For Bill C-26, Electricity Canada participated in the House of Commons review of the Bill and the Senate committee review of the Bill. It was really an opportunity for us to get in front of parliamentarians, clearly lay out our concerns and recommendations. When the Bill was reintroduced at C-8 we participated in the same process.
As I mentioned off the top, one of our main concerns was the risk of regulatory duplications. We were able to have language changed in Bill C-8 that encourages the government to look at what already exists when developing new regulations and to, as much as possible, align with those existing regulatory regimes and frameworks. It sets us up very well for the regulatory development process that will follow the passage of the bill. This is where Electricity Canada will continue to work closely with our federal government partners and ensure that the government follows the spirits of those amendments when it drafts new regulations.
Who did you have to consult to get the end result?
We try to talk to everybody, for example Public Safety Canada, Natural Resources Canada, the Cyber Centre, the RCMP, the Canadian Energy Regulator, ministerial staff, political staff, as well as departmental officials. We spoke to Parliamentarians, including Members of Parliament, Senators, both from the governing party and opposition parties. We really talked to everyone to express our concerns so, when we would makes our asks at committee, those concerns and recommendations were already well understood.
You’ve been working on this project for four years, what were the lessons learned?
Persistence for sure! I think one of the things I've learned through our government relations work and working in advocacy is that it's very rare to have such things as quick wins, and so you really have to be persistent in communicating your message and being clear on it. Along with persistence, you must recognise that work that you do now can pay off years later. So, there's not necessarily an immediate payoff, but through time, as we've seen with C-8, we were very clear on our message for close to four years, and so years later, what we were trying to say was already well understood, and that contributed to our success.
For a second lesson learned, I think you need your champions. For us, we were very fortunate to have a Member of Parliament that understood our concerns, really believed in them, and was willing to work with us to improve this legislation. You really need your champions and need to do what you can to support them as well as they're trying to improve these legislations. In this case, we benefitted from this being a minority Parliament and where opposition parties had the deciding votes at committee, and we worked closely with Madame Claude DeBellefeuille from the Bloc Québécois, who really understood and our concerns and championed those amendments.
Read Electricity Canada’s full submission on our website.
Other stories:
- Electricity Canada CEO Francis Bradley to retire in September
- Hill Day 2026
- Clean Electricity Investment Tax Credits are now law
- Water works in Canada