I imagine it is being primarily driven by the recent vast decline in the Canadian dollar. Just about all of the costs involved are going to be about 30% cheaper compared to a couple of years ago.

I doubt long term infrastructure investments are affected much by short term currency fluctuations.

Quebec has cheap hydro power and a cool climate which are probably more important factors.

Not to mention that hydro quebec has some of the lowest electrical rates around and as a crown corporation (owned by provincial gov.), political considerations can bring the cost down substantially.

OVH is also near Montreal, in Beauharnois next to a large (1900 MW) run-of-the-river hydro plant.

Especially energy, and if you host a server in Edmonton (where I live) you could also save money on cooling, it was -27C a few days ago...

Probably unrelated. Many companies that work with Canadian data are required to keep it within Canada as mandated by the Canadian government, as has been for a fairly long while.

This allows those companies to use AWS rather than moving over to local hosting/compute/etc providers, and personally I have found the domestic hosting environment to be quite poor.

This is a great day for Canadian developers.

It is related. Even though you are hosting data in Canada, the US government may still have access to the data via Amazon (because it is a U.S. based company) depending on the outcome of that case.

Canadian companies are not required to keep data in Canada - http://blog.privacylawyer.ca/2011/04/cloud-computing-and-pri...