No, not me. But when you have new subdivisions and you say, “Oh, and everyone else has got to pay for the gas hookups”—everyone else has to pay for the gas hookups so a company can have an advantage, so you’re incentivized to go with one company. Man, that’s like socialist capitalism. That’s like, you know, you’re forcing everyone or very incentivizing them, because why wouldn’t you put a natural gas furnace in when the pipe is sitting there and everyone else is forced to pay for it, even though it may not be the right decision in the long run for you, for the economy, for your costs and for the environment, right? So that’s why we’re opposed to this bill.

If the OEB made the wrong decision, then we should go back and look at that and strengthen the OEB. I don’t know if it needs to be. But to simply overrule it—I don’t think anybody in the province is going to say, “You know what? We’ve got an independent regulator and they’ve kept our gas prices fair and even, but we’d rather go with the decision of the minister because this government has been very good at making long-term planning decisions.” They’ve been excellent, except for the times where they have to backtrack and pretend that they never did these things; you know, the Men in Black bills: “Oh, we have to rescind this.” Maybe they should actually think this through.

Now, I’m going to go in a place where many others haven’t gone. Sometimes I pay the price for this. There are uses for natural gas, for propane in agriculture specifically, where we can’t transition yet: grain drying, heating. Some places, we need to look at how to get natural gas or some—like, right now, it’s natural gas. If some day we can figure out how to dry grain quickly electrically, that would change that, too. So it’s not that we’re opposed to natural gas installations where they’re necessary and where they make sense. This isn’t about being anti-natural gas. There are places specifically—I’m from a farm background—where natural gas makes sense, is needed, but not necessarily in new subdivisions where people have a choice or should have a choice. And when you subsidize one but not the other, then you’re not giving people choice.

And when you’re saying—every time I hear, “This makes sense because it will take 40 years to pay for it”—you know what? It’s one thing to take a 40-year mortgage on something you know—I would have no problem taking a 40-year mortgage—I’m a farmer—on farmland because I know in 40 years that farmland is going to be worth as much or more. But man, I wouldn’t want to be taking a 40-year mortgage on a car because a car is, at most, 10. But that’s what the government is asking people—

That car that I put on 250,000 kilometres, I do that in just over two years. So I’m telling you, I don’t take the payments on that car over eight years because after three years, it’s toast. But the government has no problem telling people, “Do you know what? You need to hook up these new natural gas lines, and no problem; you can pay them off”—or, actually, everybody else can pay them off, $600 per customer across the province—“over 40 years, even though you won’t be using them in 10.” That doesn’t make sense. It really doesn’t, Speaker. It doesn’t, and that’s why we’re opposed to this bill.

I get along great with the Minister of Energy, but you really have to start wondering if he’s actually the minister of Enbridge, because this bill is so tilted. It is so tilted. The OEB is the independent regulator and, all of a sudden, the government doesn’t like the ruling of an independent regulator and just—

So it’s not that you can’t be careful and say, “Okay, we had better look at this. We had better look at how this decision was made. If there wasn’t enough testimony, then we should maybe look back and ask if they can relook at this.” It’s not that it had to be done immediately. It was almost like they were more worried about the shareholder price of Enbridge than they were worried about the long-term energy sustainability not just of the province, but of the people who were buying those houses—or trying to buy those houses; it’s certainly not an easy task in Ontario right now for people not just to buy, but to live.

Living in Ontario right now is very expensive, and I don’t blame anyone who is trying, who has scraped together the funds to buy a house: “Oh, we’ll buy a gas furnace, because it’ll save us money in the short term.” But it won’t save money, or it very well might not, in the long term. So we would be much better off giving people the choice and focusing on the sectors that actually depend on the natural gas.

I’m going to close by—people say we don’t understand. The difference with grain drying is that you harvest your thousands of acres of crops in a few short weeks, and those crops need to be dried as quickly as possible. That doesn’t work with electricity. You need a lot of heat. In practical terms—we’ve got a big grain-drying facility next to my hometown, and the natural gas pipe going into my hometown is a couple of inches, but the pipe going into that grain-drying facility is three times as big—but it’s only used for a short time, because you need a blast of energy. That is something that natural gas is good at, is good for. That’s why most grain-drying facilities want natural gas over propane. It’s cheaper. We get that.

But we really don’t get why you’re trying to force people to pay for something over 40 years that actually might only be feasible for a much shorter length of time.