I think this is just confirmation bias. We have plenty of power outages, some that last longer than this (the 1998 ice storm in Quebec took down the power for weeks). Last year we were out of power for 4 days, again right in the middle of Montreal. It just seems like HN likes to see stories about the Texas power grid, since I don't even remember a story about Montreal's outage last year hitting the front page for long.

I don't think anyone could argue that Quebec has a deregulated power grid, it's the complete opposite in fact. Power generation, distribution, and last mile connections are all nationalized.