Jonatan Julien

Quebec's electricity advantage — cheap hydroelectric power that attracted industry for decades — is running into the limits of its generating surplus at exactly the moment when electrification is driving demand up sharply. Jonatan Julien is managing this transition: new wind contracts, expanded hydro assessments, and the politically difficult conversation that electricity rates — frozen far below actual cost levels for years — need to change. None of these decisions are popular. Rate increases hurt households. Industrial customers who located in Quebec specifically for cheap electricity lobby hard against any change. But the alternative — pretending the surplus is infinite while demand grows — just pushes the crisis further down the road. Julien has been engaging with the real situation rather than the politically comfortable one.

Jonatan Julien serves as Quebec's Minister of Energy and Natural Resources — a portfolio at the centre of one of the most consequential decisions in Quebec's recent economic history: how to manage the electrification transition with a Hydro-Québec system that is approaching the limits of its surplus generating capacity while simultaneously serving as the backbone of Quebec's economic identity and the province's primary tool for industrial attraction. Quebec's electricity advantage — cheap, abundant, low-carbon hydroelectric power — has been the province's single most important economic development tool for decades. Industries have located in Quebec precisely because of electricity pricing that reflects the sunk cost of Hydro-Québec's generating assets rather than market prices. As electrification of industry, transportation, and heating accelerates demand, the comfortable surplus that Quebec took for granted is being consumed faster than new generation can be built. Julien has been responsible for navigating this: new hydroelectric projects are being assessed (the Romaine complex expansion, potential new northern sites), wind energy contracts have been expanded dramatically, and the electricity rates that industries and households have paid are being restructured to reflect the new supply reality. None of these are politically comfortable decisions. His management of the energy file has been technically serious — engaging with the actual engineering and financial constraints of the electricity system rather than relying on political messaging — which is the appropriate posture for a minister whose most consequential decisions will be felt for decades.