As Canada works to meet rapidly growing electricity demand driven by electrification across buildings, transportation, and industry, there is a growing recognition that buildings must play a far more active role — not simply as energy consumers, but as integral system assets.
This month, Kevin Lockhart, the Pembina Institute’s Buildings Program Director, presented our perspective on Canada’s electrification, energy self-sufficiency, and domestic energy security at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Natural Resources. The conversation was timely, shaped by growing volatility in global energy markets and a rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape. What follows is a summary of our core arguments.
Redefining energy leadership
Canada's identity as an energy superpower needs a policy update. Energy leadership is no longer measured by export volume — it is measured by the ability to deliver clean, reliable, and cost-competitive electricity, and to use that advantage to attract investment, strengthen industrial competitiveness, and insulate the domestic economy from external shocks. Canada's relatively low-carbon electricity system is a genuine competitive asset. Whether it remains one will depend entirely on where we invest next.
Electricity is now economic infrastructure
Electricity is becoming the backbone of the Canadian economy — the platform on which affordability, resilience, and climate performance will be determined. As buildings, transportation, and industry electrify, grid capacity and grid intelligence become first-order policy priorities. Meeting projected demand will require doubling grid capacity over the coming two decades. How that demand is met, and at what cost, will shape Canada's economic competitiveness for a generation.
Supply is only half the system
Canada's energy system is made up of supply, demand, and the flow between them — yet policy conversations routinely stop at generation and transmission. Demand-side management (DSM), energy efficiency, distributed energy resources (DERs), local storage, and demand response (DR) are not supplementary measures; they are cost-reduction tools that can defer infrastructure spending, reduce system strain, and improve overall grid performance. Overlooking this side of the ledger means building a more expensive system than necessary.
Buildings as a strategic policy lever
Buildings are among the most powerful levers available to energy and climate policy, and among the most consistently overlooked. Federal housing investments through programs like Build Canada Homes, the Build Communities Strong Fund, and the CMHC Housing Design Catalogue represent a compounding opportunity: get performance standards right now, and those decisions lock in outcomes for decades, making homes safe, healthy, and affordable to heat and cool. Miss that window, and the affordability burden shifts from upfront construction costs to ongoing energy bills. As the Clean Electricity Advisory Council has noted, failing to integrate energy performance into housing solutions does not avoid costs — it defers and redistributes them onto households. Aligning housing investment with ambitious efficiency standards is one of the highest-leverage, lowest-regret policy choices available.
Electrification as industrial strategy
Electrifying buildings, transportation, and industrial processes creates domestic demand across supply chains — construction, manufacturing, grid technologies, critical minerals — making it a nation-building investment, not merely a climate intervention. This is the foundation of a made-in-Canada industrial strategy, and it warrants policy treatment at that scale.
Flexibility is a system asset
A cleaner grid is also a more flexible one. Programs like the Smart Renewables and Electrification Pathways Program and the Green Industrial Facilities and Manufacturing Program are already deploying grid modernization, energy storage and renewable energy technologies that increase the number of flexible electricity system assets and contribute to system reliability. Leveraging buildings and vehicles within this technology mix can ensure these assets support grid stability and flexibility, rather than passively drawing from it, to effectively reduce peak demand pressure and help maintain grid services during weather events, cyber risks, and other disruptions. Scaling these approaches is essential.
Workforce and inclusion are not secondary considerations
A transition of this magnitude is fundamentally a labour market challenge as much as a capital investment one — and workforce development must be treated as a core policy variable, not an implementation afterthought. Achieving a clean energy system by 2050 could generate up to 10 million job-years of construction employment, yet labour shortages are already constraining progress across multiple sectors. Training pipelines, job quality, and accessibility all require direct policy attention.
The same applies to Indigenous leadership in clean electricity: progress in remote communities has demonstrated what sustained, partnership-based investment can achieve, and expanding those efforts through equity participation and long-term funding is both an equity imperative and a system-effectiveness question.
The takeaway
Canada's path to energy leadership will not only be determined by how much energy we produce. It will be determined by how efficiently we use it, how intelligently we design the systems that deliver it, and how deliberately we align policy, investment, and people toward the same outcome. The opportunity is well-defined. The policy choices that capture it are available. The task now is execution.
