"It is not clear yet which side of the border the failure started on, we may never know what caused it."
NERC (who should know) claims they will find out and all indications point to FirstEnergy Corp in Ohio. Perhaps you are blinded by your dislike for your former country, but electric utilities in the U.S. are in the same sorry state of affairs as Ontario's.
We receive an enormous amount of electricity from Quebec and we must NOT put up ANY barriers to ensure that that supply continues. This appears to be the fault of an American utility - let's not blame others for our own mess...
The last news report I saw said that the Ohio power corp said it was not responsible
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/afp/20030818/bs_afp/us_power_firstenergy_2ndlead_030818205650&e=5 I may be blinded by my dislike of the liberal government in my former country, I still love my country, or what is left of the country I love. I prefixed my position with the belief that Canada will not rewire, AMNZ stated he believe the US will but that it will be expensive. I believe that the US will find the funds to rewire, I am certain that Canada will not. The richest province in Canada (Ontario) has a lower standard of living than that of the poorest state (Missouri). All the electical utilities are wasteful patronage organizations that return minute profits on investment dispite the fact they are monopolies. The money is not available in Canada to set up new grids. Perhaps as you say, the money is not available in the US. If that is the case and if the US does not rewire, then it does not matter we can all go to hell in a hand basket together. If the US rewires and Canada does not then the US will need to be seperate from the Canadian grid.
Why do you think it has taken so much longer to get the power back on in Canada? The most likely explanation is that we have fewer resources to solve the problem.
As for setting up barriers to purchasing power. Where do you think Hydro Quebec will sell that power if the US does not buy it? The Great Whale project was stopped because the Cree and environmentalists in the US convinced American utilities not to buy the power.
Lets assume that it is the fault of a US power company. Why did it take out power in Ontario? We still don't know why power in Ontario was effected. What are Canadian leaders doing to solve the problem? So far Canadian leaders have done nothing but ask people not to use electicity. What did our respective leaders say? The US pres. said that they would find the cause and solve the problems that caused it. The Canadian PM could not take time out from his vacation to speak to the press. His subordinates gave conflicting causes for the outages, a burning nuclear power plant in Penn. was my favorite. When the PM finally spoke, he said that is was an American problem end of story.
The US position is that they will find the problem and solve it, the Canadian position is that their is no problem and if their is it is an American problem. Doesn't exactly read like Canadians are thinking about solving the problems in their grids.