That's a great question.
Actually, at the time that happened, BC Hydro was developing northern transmission, and they made the decision to spend the money to remain connected solidly to the U.S. at all times.
Hydro-Québec looked at the same problem and decided that they would isolate themselves, because they have very long lines going up to their northern hydro plants. It was cheaper for them. They would have had to go to over one million volts. Right now, they have 765 kilovolt lines. That's three-quarters of a million volts up there now. They chose to do it that way.
The irony is.... You asked what Quebec gets from that. I'll tell you exactly. Quebec does have more outages than Ontario has—they have gone black a number of times—but when they go black, they have a hydro system that can recover in a matter of a few hours. When you have a blackout in Quebec, the lights come back on quite quickly. If you have a blackout in Ontario, you may be out for a week. The reason for that is the difference between a hydro system and a thermal system, which is the eastern interconnection.
In Canada, if we are going to use DC lines.... The U.S. is fundamentally divided into two, the eastern interconnection and the western interconnection, and they are essentially isolated. If we happen to have a small line going from Alberta, for example, through Saskatchewan to Manitoba, we would ultimately be connecting the whole eastern U.S. with the whole western U.S., and the line would break somewhere in between.
What we need to do is take care of that, and probably use DC.