Energy policy now operates as economic and industrial policy, not a narrow technical niche, says Carolyn Calwell. For the chief executive officer of the Ontario Energy Board, the energy transition is a series of hard choices about who pays, what gets built and how fast the system moves.
She left private practice early in her career for roles where legal advice ties to public impact. When she joined the Regional Municipality of Halton as in-house counsel after practising litigation, she says it “reignited my passion and interest in law, and my sense that you can use law to serve the public good.”
Once she moved into the Ontario Public Service, energy work drew her in because the legal advice she provided had tangible results. “What's so exciting about it is that so much of legal work is about ideas and words, but at the end of the day, infrastructure and energy translate into real physical things,” she says. The appeal is the mix of technical complexity and social consequence, because there are “also so many intersections with economic, social, and environmental issues. It leads to some really intriguing and wicked problems that need to be solved.”
Her route to the top job ran through the province’s infrastructure and social policy machinery. After Halton, she joined what was then the Ministry of Public Infrastructure Renewal, working on files that ranged from infrastructure to First Nations revenue sharing. When that ministry merged with the Ministry of Energy, “the energy file was hot and demanding at the time, and so I was pulled more and more into energy work, and I just got the bug… and never looked back from that,” she says.
A temporary move to the Family Responsibility Office brought the scale of public decisions into sharp focus. As legal director, she went “from talking about billion-dollar deals and the electricity system broadly, the energy system broadly, to getting calls from parents who were looking for their $200 support payment so they could buy winter boots for their kids.”
By the time she became assistant deputy minister at the Ontario Ministry of Energy, Northern Development and Mines, Calwell was no longer thinking only in terms of legal tools. In that role, she says, she “got to think about the broader toolkit available to make policy changes,” weighing stakeholder implications and “different levers to try to help the government deliver its policy objectives.” That experience now shapes how she sees the Ontario Energy Board’s job as an agency that works closely with government but is independent, and as a place to “think differently about regulation of the sector.”
As CEO, she frames the mandate plainly: hold the line on electricity and natural gas rates while enabling investment in a more electrified economy. “It's all about finding that balance in affordability, clean energy supply, ensuring that the utilities can make the investments that they need,” she says, while also “making sure that we've got a secure system in light of the geopolitics that are so prevalent today.” That means pushing utilities toward distributed energy resources and non-wire solutions, expecting them to be “cyber ready” and protected from cyber criminals, and making sure the Board’s own processes are “fit for purpose” rather than stuck in how regulation worked two decades ago.
Ontario’s growth plans make that balancing act more important. The Independent Electricity System Operator is expecting electricity need to grow by 65 percent between 2027 and 2050, partly to respond to “things like EVs or heat pumps, other sorts of electrification initiatives,” she says. Calwell calls that “just mind-boggling,” and says, “our collective ability to deliver it means we all have to think about doing our jobs a little bit differently.” Data centres are already on her agenda. “We're talking about data centers all the time,” she says, tying their growth to “data security and sovereignty” and to the grid upgrades needed to host them.
She is clear that no single institution can engineer this transition. “No one entity or person in the energy sector has the answer to everything that needs to be done,” she says. The Ontario Energy Board stays in “regular communication” with the Independent Electricity System Operator so that both institutions align, for example, on distributed energy resources rather than “working at cross purposes.”
That insistence on realism carries through to how she wants external counsel to operate. The private sector, she says, is “a really important stakeholder,” but law firms that show up with generic arguments should not expect to be persuasive. She challenges lawyers “to think about how to make the case for the investments their clients want to make. Not as they did yesterday, but for the future,” including by bringing “new types of evidence, for instance, around economic opportunities, which fits with our mandate around economic growth.” Above all, she warns that “advice that we just can't implement has very little value for us. In the desire for legal purity, people sometimes lose that practicality.”
General counsel who want to follow her path into broader leadership roles, she argues, need to lean into that practical mindset and stop treating themselves as backroom technicians. “I think it's always helpful for general counsels to understand the nature of the business deeply, the challenges that the business faced and faces, and try to come up with real solutions,” she says. From the general counsel’s chair, lawyers see how the whole organization fits together and “can really bring a tremendous degree of insight to the executive table,” which in her case helped her move from legal director to ADM, from general counsel to CEO.
For younger lawyers weighing a move into government, she sees a payoff that private practice cannot match, because every decision carries legal risk, policy implications, and political consequences. “Somebody once said to me, there aren't very many jobs where you can wake up and say, I think we should fix it, and then you can actually go and do that,” she says. “And so that's pretty fun. You can bring the answer.”