The client list reads like the membership roll of the global development-finance system: the World Bank, the Asian and African Development Banks, the EBRD, the EIB, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, Sweden’s SIDA, France’s AFD, Germany’s GIZ, the UNFCCC. The company they hire, in more than a hundred countries, to advise electric utilities and governments on how to run and modernize their power systems is not a Wall Street consultancy or a European engineering giant. It is Manitoba Hydro International — a publicly owned subsidiary of a provincial Crown utility, headquartered in Winnipeg.

Most Canadians have never heard of it, which is fitting, because a few years ago it very nearly ceased to exist.

Shut down, then switched back on

In February 2021, a reorganization of Manitoba Hydro decided to wind MHI down. The rationale was risk: an independent review found the firm had exposed Manitoba ratepayers to liability by taking on work in high-risk countries, and separately that Manitoba Hydro’s own customers had in effect subsidized MHI through shared use of the parent utility’s assets. It was a defensible worry, and the wind-down looked like the end of a century-adjacent institutional story.

Then, in July 2024, Manitoba’s NDP government reversed it. MHI was formally relaunched and began, in the words of the provincial finance minister, to “once again start bidding on energy projects in countries around the world.” The case for reopening was mostly economic: over roughly two decades of operation, MHI had netted an average of C$6 to 8 million a year, revenue that flows back toward keeping domestic hydro rates down, and the year of dormancy had cost the province tens of millions in lost opportunities. It also sustained high-skill technical jobs in Winnipeg. A public utility that can earn commercial income abroad to subsidize its ratepayers at home is a genuinely unusual asset, and the province decided it had thrown one away.

The niche almost no one else fills

What makes MHI interesting beyond Manitoba’s rate base is the gap it occupies. It is a publicly owned utility-consulting firm with a century of real operational experience — Manitoba Hydro’s roots run back well over a hundred years — available to developing-country governments at rates that development banks are willing to fund. Private consultancies charge more and answer to shareholders; MHI answers to a province and comes with the credibility of an operator that actually runs a large grid. That combination is rare, and it happens to line up with a surge in demand.

As the energy transition accelerates, developing countries urgently need exactly what MHI sells: grid modernization, integration of renewables, utility management, high-voltage testing, operator training. The development banks that fund this work — the World Bank, the ADB, the AIIB — are precisely MHI’s clients. FinDev Canada, the country’s own development-finance institution, is a natural co-financing partner for MHI engagements in Africa and Asia, which points at a coordinated Canadian development play that mostly does not yet exist but could.

The governance question that never went away

The reason MHI is worth more than a business footnote is the question its 2021 shutdown raised and its 2024 relaunch did not resolve: who bears the risk when a public utility goes global? When a provincially owned firm bids on a grid project in a politically volatile country and something goes wrong, the downside can land on ratepayers who never signed up for international exposure. That tension is not unique to Manitoba — it applies to every publicly owned utility that turns its expertise into an export — but Manitoba is the jurisdiction that shut the experiment down over exactly that concern and then chose to run it again.

The relaunch is a bet that the upside — commercial revenue, jobs, a rare Canadian instrument for energy development abroad — is worth the risk the province once decided it wasn’t. It is a small story with a large principle inside it: whether a public asset built to serve one province’s customers should be sent out to compete, and profit, in the wider world. Manitoba has answered yes, again. Whether the answer holds through the next difficult contract is the thing to watch.

Reading list

  • Province of Manitoba: MHI restart announcement (July 2024)
  • CBC News: coverage of MHI’s revival and 2021 wind-down
  • Manitoba Hydro International company profile and project record
  • Province of Manitoba: 2021 MHI review findings