Best not put money on it, but there seems to have been a change in how Hydro-Québec is managing the consequences of its decision to ignore its aging infrastructure in the upper Pontiac.
For years, when extreme heat, cold or a violent storm would throw residents in Sheenboro, Chichester, L’Isle-aux-Allumettes, Waltham or Mansfield into a blackout, the province’s $100-billion hydro company would be more or less missing in action. Local officials would have a hard time getting timely answers as to what the corporation was doing to get the lights back on. Over and over again, the company would blame the region’s dense vegetation encroaching on the network’s power lines, or the fact that those communities are in fact dependent on Ontario’s electrical grid, as reasons for a power failure. Over and over again, when asked what the company was doing to improve the reliability of the network, tree-trimming was the answer given.
Yes, when an ice storm or a wind storm or a rain storm hits, they are known to break trees. One could understand that managing this is challenging in a region like the Pontiac, where kilometres of old power lines stretch through dense bush, making them less accessible than a power line in Gatineau, or Quebec City. But this is the Pontiac, and what the Pontiac has always been. These trees didn’t spring up out of nowhere.
Throughout these power outages, it was elected officials and media who had to chase down answers to why residents here weren’t receiving the same basic service as those elsewhere in the province. The concept of any kind of proactive communication seemed out of the question.
The consequences of this repeated indifference from Hydro-Québec show up in the numbers. A recent investigation by Gatineau-based Le Droit used data gathered by a journalism professor in Montreal to better understand which regions of Quebec were worst hit by power outages in 2025.
Your wildest guess at who topped the chart? Bingo. MRC Pontiac. This county saw outages averaging 32 hours per address, the highest of all MRCs in the province. And Sheenboro, the county’s furthest west municipality aside from Rapides-des-Joachims, was hit hardest, with households averaging nearly 89 hours of outages last year. This makes it the worst municipality in the province for power outages, according to Le Droit’s findings. Allumette Island residents averaged 68.4 hours of outages, and Chichester, 51.8 hours. Inviting, right? That combined with the lack of cell phone service in these same upper Pontiac communities makes a really convincing argument for why a family or business should move here. “Welcome to the Pontiac, home to state-enforced off-grid living.”
Finally, after years of screaming from residents and local politicians, it seems Hydro-Québec is shifting its strategy and thinking proactively about how to prevent power outages across the network it has largely neglected. Late last week, upper Pontiac residents were advised the company would be implementing temporary and staggered outages. In its message to residents, the company acknowledged the service being provided was less than adequate, but that this strategy was its best shot at avoiding a longer and more wide-spread outage during the weekend’s predicted cold weather. Just a weekend prior, over 2,000 residents in the upper Pontiac endured some portion of the weekend’s cold snap without any electricity after the grid, overloaded from the surge in demand, crashed. While forcing outages may seem outrageous at first blush, it is proactive, and does indicate the company is at least trying to figure out how to keep the lights on in Pontiac households. And local mayors are saying comms with the company are improving as well.
In the end, only one round of forced outages was required on Friday morning, and another temporary outage late Friday night while Hydro-Québec worked to transfer some Waltham and Mansfield households to the Quebec grid to relieve pressure. Why this seemingly simple switch wasn’t done before is not entirely clear. And it’s far from a permanent fix. Demand on the grid will only continue to grow as extreme weather events increase here. The trees aren’t going to stop growing. And for Pontiac to bring more wealth and jobs to this region, it’s going to need a grid that can support a greater load.
Hydro-Québec is working on it, with plans to build a new substation near Fort Coulonge, rebuild the Cadieux substation in Bryson and update 30 kilometres of supply lines between the two. But these changes aren’t expected before at least 2030. In the meantime, the region needs solutions for right now. For next weekend. For this summer. This seeming shift in strategy is a good start, but can only be the beginning of a fundamental change in approach that finally offers the residents of this region the dignity and respect of being connected to a reliable source of power.
Sophie Kuijper Dickson