National consensus on the urgent need for Canadians to do something about climate change? Check.

Political consensus that the Paris Agreement to reduce emissions is a goal worth shooting for? Check.

Court decisions confirming the federal government has ample scope to act decisively? Check.

Growing realization that electrification on a grand scale is our best hope for solutions? Less obvious, but check.

Concrete plans and investment to make it happen? No, not yet.

The puzzle pieces are starting to fall into place for building a national, workable economy based on low greenhouse gas emissions. Political chicken fights aside, recent court decisions in Ontario and Saskatchewan confirm Ottawa’s leeway to manoeuvre. All federal political parties and provincial governments have at least tacitly accepted the Paris commitment to cut emissions to below 2005 levels by 2030. And they accept, transparently or covertly, that carbon needs to be priced in one way or another, through carbon taxes, levies on large emitters or some other mechanism.

There are some major pieces missing — notably, lots of money and infrastructure.

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With government regulations, carbon pricing and market signals becoming more clear, environment economists at the Smart Prosperity Institute have just finished mapping out and quantifying a path to meeting the Paris targets and moving to a low-carbon economy by 2030.

They see Canada transforming successfully with the help of $184 billion in investment over the coming decade, with more than half of that amount flowing into building up electricity from non-emitting sources: hydro and, to a lesser extent, solar, wind and nuclear.

The research paper makes a point of putting that money in context. It’s a “manageable reallocation of capital spending,” the economists say. Low-carbon investments are only a small portion of Canada’s overall investment effort, a tiny fraction of the country’s economy, and the spending will help companies and consumers alike save money through more efficient energy use.

But it is a lot of money all the same.

The federal government is phasing out coal-powered electricity and has also committed to 90 per cent of Canada’s electricity coming from non-emitting sources by 2030, compared to about 80 per cent in the years before 2020. We are starting from a solid base as one of the world’s largest producers of hydro electricity.

But at the same time, the need for clean electricity is expected to climb, because in order to reduce emissions in line with Canada’s goals, we need to “electrify just about everything,” in the words of the David Suzuki Foundation’s work on the path to decarbonization.

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That means driving electric cars and heating our homes with electric furnaces. It also means producing steel and extracting natural resources using electricity as the main source of power. Consumers and industry alike will be pushed — by market forces and government rules — to reorient their energy consumption away from fossil fuels and toward clean power.

Before all that non-emitting electricity can flow in abundance to houses and industry, Canada as a whole needs to figure out how to produce it at scale and deliver it efficiently.

The Smart Prosperity research calculates that the investment going into technologies and infrastructure for non-emitting electricity will increase to about $12 billion a year after 2020 — up 70 per cent. Between 2020 and 2030, the economists project investment of about $99 billion, with annual amounts growing by 7 per cent a year.

Where will all that money come from?

Private sector investors will find ways to respond to growing demand. But generally, electricity is most often a provincial government responsibility, and the federal government is heavily involved in setting emissions goals and signalling carbon prices.

There are some interesting ideas afoot.

In the last federal budget, Ottawa indicated it wanted the well-endowed Canada Infrastructure Bank to make electricity financing a priority, specifically urging more co-operation with the private sector to improve electricity-grid connections between provinces.

Quebec has a surplus of clean, low-cost electricity, for example, but not every province does.

But when it comes to financing and building infrastructure, governments have been notoriously slow at responding to need. The infrastructure bank has gearing up for business for more than two years and announced just three deals — none of them related to electrification.

And there’s a lot of cynicism about our ability to fully embrace low carbon.

When B.C. Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver tweeted Wednesday that his household was now carbon neutral because he had electric cars, electric heat, and renewable fuel for his barbecue, he was jeered for being elitist.

With the right kind of investment and some aggressive public-private collaboration over the next decade, his lifestyle could be the norm.

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