THE GRID IS ON FIRE —
AND WE KEEP BUYING BULLETS
Canada is spending enormous sums preparing for threats that might one day arrive while allowing a threat that is already here to repeatedly switch off the lights.
There is an uncomfortable question Canada desperately needs to answer:
If there is only enough money left to make the military stronger or make the electricity grid dramatically safer and more reliable, which one saves more Canadian lives?
My answer is brutally simple:
Electricity.
Not because national defence doesn't matter. It does.
But try running a hospital without electricity.
Try operating a dialysis machine without electricity.
Try keeping someone dependent on oxygen alive without electricity.
Try keeping a nursing home safe during a heat wave without electricity.
Try pumping water, treating sewage, refrigerating food, communicating, fuelling vehicles, charging medical equipment or keeping emergency shelters functioning without electricity.
Now imagine a wildfire cuts the only transmission corridor into your community.
For a day.
Three days.
Three weeks.
Sixteen days.
Suddenly, electricity isn't a convenience.
It is emergency infrastructure. It is medical infrastructure. It is life-support infrastructure.
And Canada has built far too much of it like a gigantic wooden domino set.
THE GREAT CANADIAN ELECTRICITY TENTACLE
Canada's electricity system stretches across an enormous country of forests, wetlands, mountains and increasingly volatile fire zones.
Much of that network depends on overhead infrastructure.
Wooden poles.
Wooden crossarms.
Transmission corridors.
Substations.
Long lines reaching isolated communities through landscapes where firefighters themselves can struggle to operate.
And when the fire wins, the electricity disappears.
More than 1,000 utility poles were damaged by wildfire across Canada last year, according to figures compiled from provincial and territorial utilities.
That number should not merely produce another government press release.
It should produce a national infrastructure panic.
Because the real vulnerability isn't the pole.
It's what the pole represents.
A community connected to the rest of civilization by one fragile electrical artery.
One line.
One corridor.
One substation.
One road.
One fuel supply.
One point of failure.
And when that single connection burns, the community doesn't merely lose Netflix.
It can lose health care, refrigeration, communications, water systems, sewage treatment, heating, cooling and the ability of vulnerable people to remain in their homes.
That's not a grid.
That's a tentacle.
And a tentacle can be cut.
JASPER WASN'T AN ANOMALY. IT WAS A WARNING.
A community can have modern homes, excellent roads, sophisticated communications and a provincial electricity system — and still effectively be hanging from one electrical thread.
Jasper experienced exactly that vulnerability.
A wildfire damaged the transmission connection.
The community experienced rolling blackouts.
Backup generation had to be deployed.
Then came the catastrophic 2024 wildfire.
Residents whose homes survived were nevertheless left without electricity for as long as 16 days.
Think about that.
Your house survives the fire.
You survive.
And then your electricity disappears for more than two weeks.
That is the cruel modern version of disaster:
Your building survives, but the infrastructure required to make it habitable doesn't.
And this is where Canada's wildfire conversation becomes dangerously superficial.
We obsess over flames.
We should be obsessing over systems.
Because the fire doesn't have to burn your house to destroy your life.
It only has to burn the infrastructure connecting your house to everything else.
THE MOST DANGEROUS WORD IN THE GRID IS "ONLY"
Only one transmission route.
Only one substation.
Only one fuel delivery route.
Only one major road.
Only one backup generator.
Only one connection.
Every time somebody says "only," an infrastructure engineer should hear an alarm bell.
Because disasters don't attack systems one component at a time.
They attack dependencies.
A wildfire can simultaneously threaten:
electricity + roads + telecommunications + fuel + water + health services.
That is what makes remote communities particularly vulnerable.
And this is where the economics gets ugly.
A densely populated city can sometimes absorb infrastructure failure because there are alternatives.
A remote community can't.
There may be nowhere else to get electricity.
No alternative hospital.
No second transmission line.
No nearby fuel supplier.
No convenient detour.
No neighbouring suburb to evacuate into.
The infrastructure can be geographically enormous while serving comparatively few people.
That makes it expensive.
But here's the political trap:
Expensive does not mean optional.
THE FALSE ECONOMY OF "WE CAN'T AFFORD IT"
Yes, burying every power line in Canada would cost an astronomical amount of money.
Yes, underground infrastructure has its own engineering challenges.
Yes, not every kilometre of transmission line needs to disappear beneath the ground.
And yes, electricity rates matter.
Affordability matters.
Taxpayers matter.
Utilities cannot simply throw unlimited money at every conceivable hazard.
But there is another number nobody likes putting on the spreadsheet:
the cost of failure.
What does a 16-day outage cost?
What does evacuating an entire community cost?
What does replacing hundreds of destroyed poles cost?
What does an emergency generator cost?
What does transporting diesel into an isolated community cost?
What does losing refrigeration for food and medication cost?
What does cancelling medical treatment cost?
What does rebuilding infrastructure after the fire cost?
What does a business closure cost?
What does forcing residents to leave their homes cost?
And what does a preventable death cost?
The cheapest infrastructure is not necessarily the infrastructure with the lowest construction price.
Sometimes the cheapest infrastructure is the infrastructure that doesn't fail.
HERE'S THE PART THAT WILL MAKE PEOPLE ANGRY
We have become remarkably comfortable discussing billions of dollars for defence while treating electrical resilience as if it were an optional home renovation.
It isn't.
Canada can have fighter jets.
Canada can have naval vessels.
Canada can have armoured vehicles.
Canada can have missiles.
Canada can strengthen its Arctic defence.
All of that may be necessary.
But here's the uncomfortable thought experiment:
What happens to national security when the electricity goes out?
Hospitals struggle.
Communications degrade.
Fuel pumps stop.
Water systems can fail.
Food distribution becomes harder.
Financial systems depend on power.
Cell towers require power.
Data centres require power.
Emergency services require power.
Heating and cooling require power.
And increasingly, transportation itself requires power.
A country without resilient electricity is not a resilient country.
It is a country with expensive military hardware sitting on top of vulnerable civilian infrastructure.
ELECTRICITY IS A WEAPON — EVEN WHEN NOBODY FIRES ONE
We traditionally define national security in terms of armies, aircraft, ships and weapons.
That definition is obsolete.
A hostile state doesn't necessarily need to destroy a city to create chaos.
A prolonged disruption of critical infrastructure can cause enormous damage.
But here's the irony:
Canada doesn't need an enemy to discover this vulnerability.
Nature is already conducting the stress test.
Wildfires are doing what cyberattacks, sabotage and hostile actors might attempt to do:
find the weak points.
And the weak point isn't necessarily some secret government server.
Sometimes it's a wooden pole in the forest.
THE GRID NEEDS A WAR-LEVEL MOBILIZATION
Not necessarily a war budget.
A war mentality.
There is a difference.
We need to stop asking:
"Can we afford to make the grid more resilient?"
and start asking:
"How much national resilience can we afford to lose?"
That means aggressively prioritizing the places where one failure can isolate an entire community.
It means more redundancy.
More microgrids.
More local generation.
More battery storage.
More strategically positioned backup generation.
More hardened substations.
More fire-resistant poles and equipment.
More steel where appropriate.
More wildfire-resistant mesh.
More aggressive vegetation management.
More sectionalizing so one failure doesn't cascade into a regional blackout.
And, where the economics and geography justify it:
BURY THE DAMN LINES.
Not everywhere.
Not blindly.
Not regardless of cost.
But where a single overhead corridor represents an existential vulnerability to an isolated community?
Absolutely.
AND THEN THERE'S THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: MICROGRIDS
Imagine a remote community where the main transmission line fails.
Instead of the entire community going dark, a locally controlled system automatically isolates itself.
Solar.
Wind where practical.
Battery storage.
Backup generation.
Possibly small-scale hydro.
Demand management.
Critical-load prioritization.
Medical facilities protected.
Water systems protected.
Emergency communications protected.
Refrigeration protected.
The community doesn't necessarily operate normally.
But it survives.
That's the distinction between a resilient system and a cheap system.
A cheap system asks:
"How much does electricity cost?"
A resilient system asks:
"What happens when electricity stops?"
Canada has spent decades optimizing the first question.
Wildfire is forcing us to answer the second.
STOP BUILDING FOR YESTERDAY'S CLIMATE
Here's another uncomfortable reality.
Infrastructure has long been designed around historical conditions.
But historical conditions are becoming increasingly poor predictors of future risk.
If wildfire seasons become more severe, longer or more geographically widespread, infrastructure designed around yesterday's fire regime becomes progressively less appropriate.
And that creates an extraordinary infrastructure paradox:
The older the infrastructure gets, the more dangerous it can become — while the climate surrounding it changes.
A pole that was perfectly adequate decades ago doesn't become morally responsible simply because it is still standing.
THE MEDICAL ARGUMENT IS THE KILLER ARGUMENT
Forget ideology.
Forget climate politics.
Forget the culture war.
Walk into a dialysis unit.
Look at someone dependent on powered medical equipment.
Look at a person using a breathing machine.
Look at a nursing home during a 35°C heat wave.
Look at a rural community whose water system requires electricity.
Then tell them:
"Sorry. The grid upgrade wasn't financially viable."
There are moments when an infrastructure decision stops being an accounting exercise.
It becomes a question of what kind of society we are willing to build.
CANADA'S ELECTRICITY GRID IS NOT JUST AN ENERGY SYSTEM
It is:
a health system.
A communications system.
A food-security system.
A water system.
An emergency-response system.
An economic system.
A climate-adaptation system.
A national-security system.
And increasingly:
a survival system.
That is why treating grid resilience as merely another utility expense is intellectually bankrupt.
SO, DEFENCE OR ELECTRICITY?
If somebody forced me to roll the dice and said:
"You have enough money for one major national resilience priority. Strengthen the military or make the civilian electricity system dramatically more resilient."
I'd choose the grid.
Because a reliable electricity supply quietly saves lives every single day.
It keeps hospitals functioning.
It keeps medicines cold.
It powers medical devices.
It keeps water flowing.
It keeps food refrigerated.
It keeps people cool during lethal heat.
It keeps emergency communications alive.
It keeps businesses operating.
It keeps communities habitable.
And unlike a fighter jet, electricity infrastructure doesn't need an enemy to become lifesaving.
The military protects the country from threats.
The grid protects the country from reality.
And reality is already burning.
THE BIGGEST MISTAKE WOULD BE WAITING FOR THE NEXT FIRE
After every disaster, we ask what went wrong.
We inspect the poles.
We replace the lines.
We rebuild the substation.
We restore power.
We write the report.
Then the emergency fades from the headlines.
And the old vulnerability quietly returns.
That is how infrastructure disasters become recurring infrastructure policy.
Build. Burn. Rebuild. Repeat.
That isn't resilience.
That's subscription-based disaster.
Canada doesn't need another round of heroic crews rebuilding the same vulnerable infrastructure after the next fire.
It needs to make that infrastructure harder to destroy in the first place.
Because the goal of wildfire adaptation isn't to become better at rebuilding the grid.
The goal is to make rebuilding unnecessary.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Canada cannot fireproof an entire forest.
It cannot stop every wildfire.
It cannot guarantee that every pole survives.
And it cannot bury every electrical wire from coast to coast.
But it can stop pretending that a fragile electrical connection is an acceptable long-term strategy for a community that may be surrounded by wildfire.
More than 1,000 damaged poles aren't merely 1,000 pieces of broken wood.
They are 1,000 reminders of systemic vulnerability.
And every isolated community hanging from a single transmission corridor represents another roll of the dice.
Eventually, somebody loses.
The question isn't whether Canada can afford to harden the grid.
The question is whether Canada can afford not to.
Because when the next wildfire arrives, nobody in the ICU will care whether the pole was inexpensive.
Nobody on dialysis will care about the utility's quarterly budget.
Nobody gasping for air will care about the cost-benefit analysis.
Nobody trapped in a heat wave will care that burying the line was considered too disruptive to electricity rates.
They will care about one thing:
IS THE POWER ON?
And if the answer is no, Canada's most sophisticated defence system in the world won't turn the lights back on
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