Pedestrians outside Toronto's Royal York Hotel after Monday afternoon's blackout.
When Canadians think of electricity, they think about how to create it: from coal and nuclear, hydro dams and natural gas, wind and solar. They tend to forget that electricity needs to get to them, too. On Monday, people in the Greater Toronto Area were reminded that, without a good grid, all that power potential is useless.
Where electricity supply and demand aren't in sync, transmission problems can arise. And the western part of the GTA has had a sustained, and now growing, imbalance. Those fast-growing suburbs house more than a million people, but with less use of coal-fired power, there is less electricity supply. Meanwhile, downtown Toronto has virtually no generation at all.
The outage arose from an explosion at one overstretched transformer station; humidex readings into the 40s pushed demand to near-record levels, and there was likely little flexibility to move power around.
Few politicians will campaign on improving the electricity system. The investments cost hundreds of millions of dollars, are generally undertaken by publicly owned utilities (rather than private generators or other interested parties) and upset people in the grid's path, while delivering invisible benefits.
Yet our expectation - power always on, regardless of others' power needs - requires constant upgrade and investment. It takes a dramatic event, such as the 2003 blackout or Monday's outage, to focus attention on transmission.
Our well meant choices almost always compound the problem. Moving from huge generators to smaller-scale clean-energy generating projects requires a more nimble transmission system. The digital economy depends even more on the electricity grid, and is less likely to generate its own power, unlike some large industrial operations.
Meanwhile, our aspirations for a "smart grid" - in which we make most efficient use of the electricity generated, and allow people to send surplus electricity back into the grid with ease - look increasingly remote when we don't get the basics right.
Electricity infrastructure is a modern economy's central nervous system. A reliable system differentiates developed societies from developing ones. Once again, our overstretched grid has cried out for help.