Manitoba has a problem. Actually, it has a lot of problems but proper cell phone and internet service is a glaring one. Many years ago, as in about 150 years ago, Manitoba, as it is today, was a land of opportunity. Farming was starting to take hold, the fur...
Manitobans interested in politics, economics, indigenous and/or environment issues should read a new book, “In Our Backyard, Keeyask and the Legacy of Hydro Development”. After digesting the information and messages provided by this worthy work, you might find...
Largely unique among state-owned enterprises, ‘SEOs’, worldwide, Canadian Crown corporations have two key advantages over current and future private sector competitors: non-taxable status and access to low-cost public sector borrowing rates. Other implicit edges...
Divesting SaskEnergy Can Increase Its Profitability WINNIPEG, MB, March 18, 2021 - The Frontier Centre for Public Policy has just released Abundant Natural Gas, Ample Opportunity: A Valuation & Strategic Appraisal of SaskEnergy by Ian Madsen, a senior policy...
A Snapshot of Property Rights Protection in Canada After 10 years
The writ has been dropped and Albertans are off to the polls on May 29. That leaves just four weeks for political leaders and voters to sort out what is arguably the most divisive, yet significant, issue for this election - health care. On Day 2, NDP leader Rachel...
Governments continue to mismanage publicly owned utilities, from East to the West. Newfoundland and Labrador’s government, still reeling from a 1969 agreement providing Churchill Falls’ electricity to Quebec at meagre prices (to 2041), built another utility...
Hydro was once heralded as “Manitoba’s oil”. The Limestone Dam was finished in 1990, twice the size of Keeyask (still under construction) – at one-sixth its cost. With Limestone running, residential and industry customers could look forward to having cheap and...
BC Hydro is the electric power generating holding company and retail utility supplying the province of British Columbia (BC). As its name implies, it is nearly entirely a hydro-electric generation-based provider. The Peace River Site C project is scheduled to be...
Nalcor is the electric power generating holding company supplying the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, ‘NL’. It is also the parent company of Newfoundland & Labrador Hydro, ‘NLH’, the actual utility that distributes and sells electric power to households,...
SaskPower is the electric power generating holding company and retail utility supplying the province of Saskatchewan. It also buys power from independent suppliers within the province. Unlike some of its Crown utility peers in Canada, it is not in bad financial...
Ontario Power Generation (OPG) is Ontario’s largest electric power generating utility. In 2016, OPG supplied electricity to approximately 50 percent of local and provincial power utilities. OPG‘s wide provincial geographic scope and vast array of productive generating...
Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, ‘AECL’, is the federal Crown corporation which develops nuclear technology, mainly now in Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, which sells nuclear isotopes for medical and other purposes. Using an intrinsic value method, and discounting to...
Prince Edward Island Energy, or PEI Energy, is a Crown-owned electric merchant power provider (but not a utility) for Canada’s smallest province by area or population. As it is spending heavily on expanding its generation capacity, it has negative free cash flow....
Qulliq Energy Corporation, ‘QE’, is the electric power utility for Nunavut Territory in northeastern Arctic Canada. It could be worth as much as $255M were it divested; or, it could be worth less if its expensive diesel-fuelled power generation business experiences...