Scott Stinson: Ontario’s electricity-import deal with U.S. undercuts Doug Ford’s energy tough talk

In one of his increasingly rare public appearances these days, Ontario Premier Doug Ford last week lamented the state of things.

He began a speech to a Toronto business audience by noting that next month would mark “two years of crisis and chaos from the White House.”

Amid the resulting upheaval, Ford said, there “has been a growing realization that Canada’s relationship with the United States has changed, permanently.”

He went on like this for a few more sentences. The great economic partnership is over, we need to be prepared for the long haul, tariffs are probably here to stay, that kind of thing.

What was notable about the premier’s assessment was not the content, for Ford has been saying versions of this for awhile. It was the tone. Not angry and combative, but sombre and almost wistful.

A lunchtime business crowd is admittedly not usually the place for fire and brimstone, but it was still striking that there was much more in the premier’s speech about dealing with the new reality of Donald Trump’s America than about trying to punch it in the nose. 

One possible reason for the shift in tone came days later, when the province’s electricity operator announced that it had signed a deal to import 600 megawatts of electricity from a U.S.-based company to help Ontario manage its supply during the winter months.

Ford has at times acted like energy exports from Ontario to neighbouring states like New York and Michigan were perhaps his greatest trump card in the two-year trade war. He applied a surcharge on those exports in the spring of 2025, in the early days of jousting with the Trump administration and then quickly removed them when it appeared that they had been a little too effective in raising the U.S. president’s ire.

Asked more recently about energy exports to the United States after the last round of trade talks between Ottawa and Washington ended without a deal, Ford said simply that “everything should be on the table” in terms of retaliatory actions that Canada could take. He’s been consistent on this, and has also repeatedly said that Alberta and Saskatchewan should be willing to hold back their oil and potash exports if that’s what it takes to get a good deal for Canada. (This suggestion has not been received warmly on the Prairies.)

The new deal to import electricity to Ontario would seem to undermine any future sabre-rattling that Ford might do on the energy file, although there are several caveats to be noted here. The Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) is, as the name suggests, not making decisions at Ford’s behest. And its contract with Alpha Generation is a short-term arrangement to provide electricity in case Ontario needs it during the cold winter months and while the Pickering nuclear plant is undergoing a refurbishment. In the days since the Alpha contract was announced, the IESO said that Ontario will still be a net exporter of electricity to the United States and that it exported seven times as much as it imported last year. The new contract is about increasing the flexibility of the provincial power grid during the high-peak demand of the winter months.

And while all of that may be true, the arrangement also underscores just how intertwined Ontario’s economy is with our southern neighbour. It’s not like we could arrange to import a short-term energy fix from Denmark or France, as much as we might be making entreaties to friendlier middle powers.

Ford knows the reality of all that intermingling all too well, having expressed his dismay at companies like Stellantis and Stelco that backed away from investments in Ontario now that the Trump tariff regime has hardened. All of the talk of alternative markets and diversifying our trade relationship over the long term is not going to alter the short-term situation in which an Ontario factory is closed by a U.S. owner — or when Ontario has to grit its teeth and go seeking a contract with a U.S. energy supplier. Elbows Up cannot be a permanent state of being, in other words.

Ford’s speech last week was followed by an on-stage interview with Andrew Furey, the former premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, and he was a little more upbeat about the prospects for change in that discussion. If the Republicans are dealt significant losses in the midterm elections early next month, Ford argued, Trump could find himself politically neutralized.

“I feel the ground is shifting down there,” Ford said. “The Republicans are going to pull the carpet out from underneath him.”

But given the economic consequences of the Trump regime that are only really starting to bite in Ontario, that just might be a case of the premier trying to speak something into existence.