By Tom Parkin
September 30th, 2025
BURLINGTON, ON
Ontarians are paying the price in money, emissions and uncertainty about where Ontario’s future electricity will come from.
Kilowatt hours of electricity generated by fossil fuels, by month, May 2018-Jul 2025
Premier Doug Ford is emptying a bottle of Crown Royal whiskey during a photo op.
While he eats ice cream, pours out Crown Royal and works hard to distract people, Ontarians are paying a price for Doug Ford’s electricity muddle.
After the PCs’ June 2018 election, their first major energy move was to cancel contracted generation projects, some mid-construction.
The cost paid by Ontarians was $231 million to get nothing.
Then his government lost more than four years in a muddle over how to contract new power supplies, not releasing a framework until December 2022. And all the while their muddle was costing time and money, long-scheduled maintenance and a couple turbine retirements were reducing generation capacity. The cost has been a stopgap return to fossil-fuel generation, a lot of hype about four small modular reactors with very large price tags, and uncertainty.
Fossil-fuel generation up 273% since PCs elected.
This July, almost 4.1 million kilowatt hours of power was generated by burning fossil fuels, according to a Statistics Canada report released Monday morning. That’s the highest level since at least 2007.In the twelve months before the PCs were first elected, a monthly average of about 0.9 million kilowatt hours was generated from fossil fuels, according to the Statistics Canada report. But during that period, Ontario’s nuclear power stations were generating a monthly average of 7.5 million kWh.
Now, in the most recent reported twelve months, because of long-planned maintenance, nuclear generation is down to a monthly average of 6.9 million kWh. While Ontario grew. And factories electrified.
The result is, in the most recent reported twelve months, average monthly fossil fuel generation is up 273 per cent at 2.4 million kWh, according to today’s report.
And the Independent Electricity System Operator’s 2025 Annual Planning Outlook shows no substantial reduction in fossil fuel use until 2034.|
Percentage of Ontario electricity generated from nuclear, May 2018-Jul 2025PCs’
SMR plan: inadequate and over-hyped.
Now the Ford PCs are hyping a plan for four small modular reactors (SMR) as a noisy distraction from the problem they created.
The SMRs come at the extraordinary price of $21 billion to produce just 1,200 MW. In contrast, refurbishing Darlington’s four reactors will cost $12.8 billion to produce 3,512 MW. And that 1,200 MW is like a raindrop in the desert for a province of Ontario’s size, not some salvation.
The IESO’s 2025 Annual Planning Outlook shows even with the SMRs Ontario faces uncertainty about where future power will come from.
Source: Annual Planning Outlook, April 2025, IESO
GE Vernova is aiming to deploy small nuclear reactors across the developed world over the next decade, staking out a leadership position in a budding technology that could play a central role in meeting surging electricity demand and reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The SMR, is designed to reduce the cost of building new nuclear plants.
And there are energy security concerns. All existing Canadian nuclear generation uses CANDU technology, intellectual property owned by federal crown corporation AECL and licensed to CANDU Energy, with head office in Montreal. CANDU uses uranium mined in Saskatchewan and processed at plants in Blind River, Port Hope and Peterborough, forming a nationally secure energy supply chain. But the SMRs come from a company majority owned by GE Verona with its head office is in Wilmington, South Carolina. And its technology creates a dependence on a foreign supply chain for uranium enrichment.
Only six countries have uranium enrichment facilities, and Canada isn’t one of them. An estimated cost to build such a facility is $100 billion over a 20 year timeline.GE Verona plans to enrich uranium at Urenco USA’s plant in Eunice, New Mexico and ship it across the boarder to Ontario, raising the risk of an increasingly authoritarian United States gaining more leverage to wield “economic force” to gain control of our resources and preferential trade and security arrangements.
This is a very expensive government in many ways. Ontarians need to start asking themselves how much of Doug Ford’s distraction tactics they can afford as jobs tank, housing stalls, ERs overflow — and an electricity muddle costs money, emissions and uncertainty.
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