That's a great question.
I'll just point out that I said that Canada had become a net importer, not Hydro-Québec. Although Hydro-Québec had become an importer in the last year, you will also note that BC Hydro was a net importer for the last three years. It's not so much that Quebec shouldn't trade electricity and make profits—it's very good at that—it is that Canada used to export over five terawatt hours annually to the United States, and now, basically, we have a relatively equal trading relationship.
It was a tremendous abundance of electricity that Canada used to have. We'd get more value by selling it to the United States, and that has evaporated, which goes to your next question about abundance in data centres. This is where we're at in Canada, because we have run through our electricity abundance and now we are picking and choosing winners and losers of who in this country should get electricity.
We don't have enough for everyone who wants electricity, so we have to prioritize. That violates some principles of the right to service that had traditionally—for decades—underpinned Canadian electricity generation.
We have all seen in the United States—we saw it here with Wab Kinew this week—this sense of making data centres into a villain that creates electricity price increases, and it's bad for the environment. It's taking away from more positive industries that would create more jobs. From a strategic perspective, not wanting to develop AI data centres in your own country to have that sovereign capability and have your data stored here will allow China and the United States to gain competitive advantage in AI.
To me, AI is not just manufacturing or industry; it's also going to be a weapon. It will absolutely be used in a strategic way as a weapon. We have to have capacity in Canada. When I see that BC Hydro has a strategy of prioritizing sectors like LNG and mining over data centres, when Quebec has different rates for data centres and when Wab Kinew in Manitoba is saying to some data centres that they don't want them there because they're not good for humanity, that does concern me as a political scientist thinking about Canada's data sovereignty, as we've been calling it.