The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission issued nuclear power reactor construction licence PRCL 32.00/2035 to Ontario Power Generation on April 4, 2025, authorising construction of one BWRX-300 small modular reactor at the Darlington New Nuclear Project site. The licence is the primary regulatory gate for physical construction and its issuance by the CNSC moves the project from the licenced-to-prepare-site phase into full construction authority.

The financing architecture supporting that licence has been assembled in layers. Ontario committed $1 billion in provincial funding to the Darlington SMR build, announced in October 2025. That same month, the Canada Growth Fund Inc. and the Building Ontario Fund announced an equity commitment agreement structured around the OPG project — a pairing of a federal Crown finance corporation with a provincial vehicle that is relatively uncommon in major energy infrastructure deals. The Canada Infrastructure Bank had earlier committed $970 million in low-interest debt financing. Federal investments in the Darlington project and in SMR development in Alberta were confirmed through Natural Resources Canada in March 2025.

OPG's own first-quarter 2025 financial results disclosed that the corporation had completed a $1 billion capital deployment into the Darlington project, confirming that the provincial commitment has moved beyond announcement into expenditure.

Indigenous Equity and the Emerging Ownership Question

The province's Environmental Registry notice from January 2026 explicitly identifies partnerships with Indigenous communities as a policy priority for the Darlington New Nuclear Project. Ontario's Indigenous Opportunities Financing Program — which provides loan guarantees enabling First Nations to take equity positions in energy infrastructure — is the existing vehicle for that participation. The Globe and Mail has reported that Ottawa and Ontario are expected to announce a joint Indigenous loan guarantee specifically for the new nuclear project, which would extend the IOFP model into the nuclear sector and bring federal co-guarantee capacity alongside provincial support.

That structure matters procedurally. A loan guarantee does not transfer risk to a First Nation at the point of borrowing; instead, it lowers the cost of capital to near-sovereign rates, making equity participation commercially viable for communities that would otherwise face prohibitive financing costs on a project of this scale and duration. The federal-provincial co-guarantee model, if confirmed, would distribute contingent liability across two balance sheets rather than one.

OPG's Q1 2025 results also disclosed that the corporation is separately exploring Indigenous community-led hydro opportunities in Northern Ontario — a signal that the broader OPG-Indigenous equity framework extends beyond the Darlington nuclear file.

What the Licence Means in Practice

PRCL 32.00/2035 carries a term to 2035, consistent with the projected construction timeline for a first BWRX-300 unit. The BWRX-300 is GE-Vernova's 300 MWe boiling-water SMR design, which draws on the established GE ESBWR lineage but incorporates passive safety systems and a dramatically reduced civil works footprint relative to conventional large reactors. Darlington would be the first grid-scale deployment of the design anywhere in the world.

Ontario has projected the project will create thousands of high-paying jobs and supply clean power to thousands of homes. Those figures are government projections rather than independently modelled outputs, but the order-of-magnitude employment impact is consistent with comparable nuclear construction projects.

The financing stack — provincial equity, federal equity through CGF, CIB debt, and a prospective joint loan guarantee for Indigenous equity — is structured to distribute both capital and political ownership of the project across multiple governments and communities. That distribution also spreads the schedule and cost risk that has historically made nuclear construction politically difficult to sustain across election cycles. Whether that structure holds as the project moves into active construction will depend partly on how cost-to-complete estimates evolve as detailed engineering progresses.