To the member: I noticed in her presentation the member repeated something that the Minister of Energy said as well. The claim was made that the Independent Electricity System Operator was not a participant in the OEB’s decision. I just want to direct the member to page 5 of the decision and order December 21, 2023. When you look at the list of, let’s see, 33 different names of people who applied for intervenor status, right there, item number 17, is, in fact, the Independent Electricity System Operator.

So the question I then have for the member is, was she aware of this factual inaccuracy in her presentation? Secondly, if the IESO sought intervenor status and didn’t actually follow through and participate, what’s the bigger issue here?

He’s right; the member from Whitby is right. We do care about affordability all over the province. Ottawa Centre, Whitby—people are having a really, really hard time out there. But we’re not going to make it better, Speaker, by embracing a technology that will be obsolete in 20 or 30 years. If somebody is investing into a natural gas-powered community now or in five years and is later reckoning with the fact that they may not even get that service anymore because the entire sector is moving towards electrification but it didn’t 10 or 15 years prior—we don’t want to put anybody in that situation, not a renter, not a property owner, not a homeowner.

If you look at the province, a third of our emissions are coming from energy. We have to make the right choices to make sure that we can make people’s lives more affordable right now but also going forward.

There’s a few things happening now, and the member knows it well. If we embrace gas-fired heating and cooling and we continue the Enbridge subsidy, we create a preference for that in new home construction. That will have a huge climate impact. But in addition to that, we’re embracing gas-fired electricity too. There are climate costs to every single one of these decisions, and the wildfires that are going to be happening this summer are not abstract from this; they contribute to this. It’s the environment in which we live. And the people we put in harm’s way, the woodland firefighters, that deal with the moment, these are the people we push into the emergency when we could be making the decisions to reduce emissions. But that’s not what’s going to happen with this bill.

In Thunder Bay, if the electrical capacity is a question, geothermal, if there is space, could potentially be an option. And the drilling technology is getting even more effective in smaller urban areas. So, we do have choices, but one of the choices I would hope we don’t make is doing Enbridge a favour and continuing a multi-billion dollar subsidy for them, when we could be helping people out on energy affordability by making the right investments.

So I’m very glad, and I hear we’re getting good news today on the industrial policy front. But we need to make sure that the housing that we put in the ground works, and that it’s good for the planet, too.

I guess to properly answer the member’s question I’d ask, through a head nod, are those electrical systems electrical baseboards or heat pumps?

Interjection.

Buying into this market right now, the electrification of heating and cooling right now, is getting more and more affordable, and what will cost us a lot is stranded assets of natural gas-heated communities that may not even be relevant 20 or 30 years from now.

Sorry, billion.

It’s 12 years.

I have to say to my friend opposite, I don’t think she’s giving herself enough credit. What I heard in the 20 minutes was that she didn’t feel like she was in a position confident enough to render an informed opinion, but because of other opinions she’s heard, she was going to do so anyway.

This is someone who is a member of the King’s Counsel—a nice honorific created by this government. This is a former crown prosecutor. In fact, we may need a lot more crown prosecutors because the person sitting and leading this government may be on an RCMP perp walk before long. We may be needing your expertise. But the fact of the matter remains, I didn’t hear a shred of evidence in that presentation—

Interjections.

The building owners and manufacturers’ association, Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, the Federation of Rental-housing Providers of Ontario—these are all, if I’m not mistaken, people involved in the development and property-owning industries. They all deputed to this OEB hearing. The member had alleged that the OEB didn’t hear them. Can she clarify for this House that she’s mistaken and perhaps didn’t read the 140-page decision before coming into this House?

I think the only way I can answer my friend from Hamilton is to say that this is a case of regulatory capture. I mean, it’s not only here in the province of Ontario. This Greener Homes Grant I was talking about before: The federal government embarked upon this piddling $2.6-million experiment. Guess who was the co-sponsor of this initiative, who you have to work with to get that into your home? Enbridge. Enbridge helps vet the applications for the Greener Homes Grant. What sense does that make?

Yes, we have to work with Enbridge, because they are the agents for those ratepayers, but there has to be a regulator. It’s a private company. It has a private interest. Some 90% of the situations in our city where people replace their home heating and cooling situation are when they break down in the wintertime. What do we think the rep says at the door? “Welcome to your new gas heat pump.” We need something that’s independent, that gives people good choices that are affordable; and this government is not doing that.

The fact of the matter is that the profitable places for Enbridge to expand to are the ones near major urban centres: the plans they have for Windsor; the plans, I’m sure, they have for suburbs around Toronto and Ottawa. That’s who they care about. We’re not surprised by the fact that Enbridge’s priorities line up for their bottom line.

Where we do get surprised and a little uppity is when we start making decisions in this House for a company that made $46 billion last year, whose CEO makes $19 million a year, while people are starving and having a hard time feeding their kids. We should be standing up for them, not for Enbridge. This bill is a disgrace for the province of Ontario.

The good news is that it’s not too late for us to chart a different course. We could actually promote some of the programs we already have, which I talked about. We could tell Enbridge, “No, you’re not going to get your handout. We’re not going to sign up on your corporate welfare. We’re actually going to make sure that when we give assistance, it is to the hard-working people of Ontario who make this province the great place that it is.” That isn’t Enbridge. Enbridge has a contract with the province of Ontario that they’re required to fulfill. It’s not even clear to me that they are fulfilling it, when I hear about issues of compromises in the pipeline, people getting sick in communities around pipelines where there are leaks. The fact that I haven’t heard anything from this government about those health and safety concerns bothers me.

We are going to pass this specific bill to make Enbridge richer. I think it’s wrong.

We don’t require Enbridge to tell us if there are any problems in the pipelines. And by doing that, we’re not protecting the workers responsible for maintaining those pipelines; we’re not protecting the community around the pipelines. Those pipelines aren’t going to go anywhere. We need them to be safe.

I’ll end on a positive note. The people of Ontario, who work hard, deserve nice things. They deserve a heat pump in their building and home. They deserve access to good public transit. They deserve the opportunity to have clean air, clean water and healthy communities. But this bill does a favour for Enbridge, and it doesn’t do a favour for them.

We should rewrite the bill. We should make sure Enbridge pays for its mistakes. End of story.

What I’d say to the member opposite is the main reason he can cite that first figure is because Ontario as a province decided to phase out coal in our electrical system. It had absolutely nothing to do with the actions of this particular government—absolutely nothing.

Now, the innovations in the private sector he talks about in steel, those are real as well. But again, that has nothing to do with these guys. These guys have a job; their job is to set targets and to encourage us to assemble the facts to get there. They can’t just wait and wait for the market to solve problems. They can’t just hope that previous decisions will make their current numbers look good. They need to stand with the policy and the resources that we have in the province of Ontario and give people a way to make their homes cleaner, their cars cleaner and their businesses cleaner; and they’re failing.

I hear the member opposite talk about heating. Well, if you look at gas-fired electrical, if you look at heating, we are talking about effectively the same thing. Methane emissions are 80 times the potency of normal CO₂. It is difficult to dissipate from the atmosphere. At some point, you have to reckon with the evidence. Maybe read the 147-page report, instead of just criticizing it.

The point of the matter is this: If we give Enbridge what it wants—if we allow the baby to cry and scream, and we give the baby whatever it wants; if we work for Enbridge, and not for the people of Ontario—and if we say to the people of Ontario, who many people in this House have said are struggling and hurting, “The 300 bucks is on you and not the company whose parent organization made $46 billion in aggregate sales last year,” who do we work for? Who do we work for? What do the seats in this House matter? Because the real decisions, as people have said in this debate already—the member for Toronto–Danforth said it already—are not made in this chamber. They’re made in the antechambers. They’re made in the hallways when the chief of staff for the Minister of Energy, who used to work for Enbridge, gives that gentleman advice.

So I’ve got to tell you, Speaker: It’s hard for me to sit and listen to this, because I want to believe that we want to drive an evidence-based approach to policy in this province. I want to believe that we want to actually make every single person better off by the decisions we make here, and that, frankly, is not what Enbridge is asking us to do.

Enbridge just wrote the city of Hamilton a letter—I’m sure my colleagues from Hamilton will be talking about that this afternoon—claiming that they receive no public subsidy, claiming that they get no beneficial arrangement like electricity and that those of us who are scrutinizing this bill are not representing the facts. So let me say this, Speaker: When you sign a contract with the province of Ontario to have a monopoly on the transmission of gas in this province and the Ontario Energy Board signs off on your return-on-investment target—which is 10%; 10% is what Enbridge is allowed to shoot for every single year—you have the support of the province, you have the backing of the province and you have, as the member from Glengarry–Prescott–Russell said, 70% of homes heated by gas at your disposal that you can raise rates on, provided the OEB lets you do it.

But this time they didn’t. This time they didn’t. After a year of listening to experts that included home builders, owners of rental properties, environmental organizations and subject matter experts, they came to the decision that was delivered on December 21, 2023. There were 10,000 pages of evidence, and a day later, the Minister of Energy stands up and says, “Well, this is the wrong decision. I’m reversing it.” I wonder how much research went into that. Was it a year of deputations, pouring over documents and science, or was it a couple of phone calls from a lobbyist that influenced that situation?

Particularly, it’s so frustrating hearing in debate today that the minister himself enjoys the benefit of this technology in his own home. Give me a break. If it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for all the people we work for. That should be the goal of the province of Ontario.

I want to salute, actually, while I’m here, the IESO, for their work in trying to follow upon the example of the province of Prince Edward Island. In Prince Edward Island, if your household income is $72,000 or less and if the value of your home is $320,000 or less, the province of Prince Edward Island will buy you a heat pump, because they’re trying to encourage people to get off of very expensive home heating fuel.

We’ve heard a lot of that in our country. The Prime Minister, who I’ll talk about in a moment, got into some hot water over the heating carve-out and created a huge debate in the country. But the province of Prince Edward Island actually did something about it. They did something about it. They actually helped homeowners get access to the technology that the minister enjoys, that the parliamentary assistant enjoys, to help them defray their costs.

And I want to think that is a very fascinating thing, Speaker, because guess what political party is in power in Prince Edward Island? It’s the Conservative Party. And guess who the next most powerful presence is in the province of Prince Edward Island? Let me give credit where it’s due: It’s the Green Party. And maybe, just maybe, there were some discussions in that august House that led to evidence-based decisions.

The IESO is starting to do the same thing. Right now, through its program entitled the Energy Affordability Program, they are announcing to the province of Ontario that you can apply to have access to a heat pump. If the number of people in the home is one or less, we’re talking about $67,000 a year; two or less, $95,000 a year. They’re starting to roll out this technology.

But, Speaker and members of this House, has anybody seen an advertisement about this? Have you seen an ad about this program anywhere in the province of Ontario? Because I understand that if you go to the Los Angeles airport, you’ll see ads promoting how wonderful this government is, but I haven’t seen a single ad promoting this terrific program; this very reasoned, smart public policy program that would give renters and homeowners relief from their energy costs—not a single ad. Why? I think it’s because Enbridge is driving the energy policy at the moment.

I hope members of this caucus show up to their next meeting and ask the Premier and the advisers, “Why aren’t we promoting the energy assistance program? Why aren’t we getting heat pumps into buildings?” It would be interesting to see if we see new ads in a couple of weeks; I’m not going to hold my breath, Speaker.

I know this from the target set by our local officials in the city of Ottawa: They have said that if Ottawa wants to move seriously on its climate emissions for the heating of buildings, we should set a goal of 20,000 conversions a year moving to heat pumps or geothermal heating/cooling systems. Right now, we’re at 600, so we need a huge ramp-up of capacity in the very occupations so many of us in this building talk about all the time, because we love them: the skilled trades. We need those folks dispatched to not only retrofit existing buildings, but when new buildings are built, that we build them with the right tech that will make sure that we have clean air.

Some 45% of my city’s emissions come from buildings, so we have set that target, and we’re nowhere near meeting that target. We need a province that will do in Ontario what is being done in PEI, what is being encouraged elsewhere. Other provincial grids are very different. British Columbia’s grid is 88% hydro, 4% gas; Manitoba’s grid, 97% hydro, less than 1% gas. Here in Ontario, it’s 27% gas, and likely to increase, given what I’m hearing from the members opposite, as we refurbish the nuclear stock.

Is that actually the plan? I ask that question not only from an environmental perspective; I ask that question from the perspective of the women and men responsible for maintaining Enbridge’s pipeline infrastructure. Do you know that there’s no requirement right now, under existing regulations, for Enbridge to disclose any compromises in its pipeline infrastructure, underground or above ground? Nothing compels them to report to the province that there are leaks in the system. I think that should be a massive concern.

Do you know who raised that with me, Speaker? Not environmental groups; Unifor, the union whose members work for Enbridge, maintain the pipeline infrastructure and have told me directly they have significant concerns about the lack of money Enbridge puts into maintaining the existing pipeline. It’s their members who breathe in the gas, it’s their members who are directly exposed, so they have an interest in doing what I think is climate work: maintaining the integrity of the gas pipeline systems that we have, instead of telling Enbridge, “Yes, you can soak ratepayers more. You can soak them more to build more pipeline.”

Because that is how Enbridge makes money. Under their arrangement with the province of Ontario, with the monopoly they have, they don’t make money if gas costs more or if there’s a higher volume of gas in the pipe. Enbridge makes money when there is more pipeline built. But this House needs to make sure that the pipeline that is built works well and functions and doesn’t make people sick. But if we get all of these pieces right, Speaker—if we promote the programs the province of Ontario already has operating; if we follow the example of even other Conservative governments, like Prince Edward Island—we could be part of a global energy paradigm revolution that’s going on.

The member for Toronto–Danforth talked about Finland. We could also talk about Poland, which of all the EU countries has gone through the biggest transformation in embracing heat pumps. And why? So they can get out of the clasp of Gazprom and Russia. They want energy independence. It makes a lot of sense.

I look at the EU as a whole as a model for the rest of us. In the last year alone, there were three million heat pump units installed in the EU—three million. That has reduced over four billion cubic metres of natural gas. That is eight million tons of CO₂, which is equivalent to the yearly emissions of Greece as a country. That is progress.

But that’s not what we’re debating in this place. We’re not debating progress. We’re debating whether or not we want to do Enbridge a favour. We’re debating whether or not we want to make sure that they can keep soaking ratepayers, and nobody in this House says otherwise. We’re debating whether or not we can overturn an independent body whose job it is to give this province, and this government in particular, advice on the right decisions.

I get that the Minister of Energy does not like Mr. Patrick Moran and the decision that he mediated as chair in the recent OEB decision. We’re all entitled to our opinions. But as I’ve said already, we are not entitled to our own facts. The facts are leading us in one direction: warmer weather, more forest fires.

I hear from the latest information I get from the province of Alberta that wildfire season has actually already started to begin in parts of Alberta. I haven’t seen my family in interior BC in a long time; we have plans to see them. My wife and I were wondering over the weekend as we got ready, are we even going to go? Is the air going to be choked with smoke, as friends from up north will say?

What is the legacy we’re leaving for our children in handing Enbridge a gift with this legislation? It’s not a very progressive one. There have been Progressive Conservative governments in this province that have built hospitals, that have built schools, that have built positive things that have helped people. I think about the legacy of William Davis. But all this bill does is overturn independent advice and do a solid to Enbridge. I actually think not only being bad legislation, it’s a terrible stain on the record of the Conservative Party too, given that other Conservative governments in our very country are taking a different direction.

There is still time for this bill to be pulled from the House. There is still time for the government to declare actual action on climate emissions. There is still time to do what the federal government frankly isn’t doing. I haven’t had a chance to talk enough about them; maybe I will in questions. The federal government introduced legislation called the greener homes act. They had to cancel it a year early because of how popular the program was. They created a Hunger Games in Canada for people wanting to make their farms, their businesses, their homes more efficient. A $2.6-million program on a budget of $497 billion—woefully inadequate.

The province of Ontario can do better. We must do better. We have to follow the evidence. We have to stand by the facts. The facts in this case say we have to say no to Enbridge.

It’s a pleasure to rise today to speak to this bill, the protecting profits for Enbridge act. I’m beginning on a note of humour because we’re getting to that point in the afternoon where it can become difficult to listen to debate, particularly debate that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

I heard it from the parliamentary assistant just now, who’s my neighbour in eastern Ontario from a riding I love and grew up in, that the member himself, like the minister, enjoys the use of a heat pump. My question is, if it isn’t not great for the member and the minister, what is stopping the province from giving that option to every single apartment building, every single home, every single business, every single farm in the province of Ontario?

Let me tell you something, Speaker: I am a proud New Democrat, and one of the founders of the New Democratic Party, one of the modern exemplars of the values I’m very proud to stand behind here in this part of the House, was J.S. Woodsworth. What Woodsworth used to say at the House of Commons is, “What we desire for ourselves, we desire for all.” We’re not happy when we’re doing okay, because we’re aware of the fact that we all do well when we all do well. We all do well when everybody is given an opportunity to be their best self.

What this bill does brazenly—and I’ve had occasion in the last six years to see a lot of brazen pieces of legislation—is say, “I don’t care about evidence. I don’t care about independent regulators. I don’t care about what the rest of the world is doing in the energy sector. I am going to listen to Enbridge’s consultants, Enbridge’s lobbyists and the chief of staff to the minister” who, as I understand, used to be a lobbyist for Enbridge. “I’m going to listen to that advice and not the advice that could make Ontario a cleaner, greener, more prosperous place for generations to come.”

You know, Speaker, when I hear the disconnect from reality over there, it makes me think of the great playwright Bertolt Brecht, who wrote a reflection on authoritarianism—authoritarian logic like I’m hearing over there. He once wrote in a poem called The Answer:

... that the people

Had forfeited the confidence of the government

And could win it back only

By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier

In that case for the government

To dissolve the people

And elect another?

That’s what we’re dealing with here. It’s not the first time we’ve seen this government say “meh” in the face of evidence. There’s a big graveyard of former regulators and people entrusted to give advice to this particular government. What about the Ontario child advocate? What about the Ontario Environmental Commissioner? What about the French Language Services Commissioner? What the former member from Lambton–Kent–Middlesex; what about Mr. McNaughton? Do they listen to anybody over there when controversy broaches itself in their caucus, or are they only interested in what Enbridge is trying to tell the province of Ontario in this moment? And that is that the monopoly they have, the agreement they have signed with the province of Ontario and the profits they generate from it matter more than making the energy transition which is right in front of us.

I’ll be charitable to the government too, because there are elements of the province that can see it that work for this government, and they’re doing it. I’m thinking about the IESO, the Independent Electricity Systems Operator, which I’ve heard both the parliamentary assistant and the minister say were not involved in the OEB decision. Incorrect. Page 5 of the 147-page report says very clearly the IESO deputed. Their evidence was gathered toward it. Their opinion was not the one accepted by two thirds of the OEB. So, we can make up our own arguments, but we can’t make up our own facts, all right? The fact of the matter is, the IESO deputed to this process. The advice they gave the OEB was not persuasive.

But the question here, Speaker, is this: When the OEB, which is an independent body of this Legislature, gives a 147-page decision and tells us, as legislators in this place, that we are at risk if we give Enbridge the right to bilk ratepayers $300, that we will be designing, in their words, “an overbuilt, underutilized gas system”—now, that is not to say that this is a system that can change overnight. When I hear members opposite saying that, they’re technically correct. But that’s not the debate we’re having. That’s not the debate we’re having.

The debate we’re having is, what is the future? The 1.5 million homes I hear the members opposite talking about all the time. Well, let’s do a thought experiment. One expert who did actually contribute to the OEB’s study said that if we decided to build those 1.5 million new homes and we decided to heat them with methane gas, that would result in over 100 megatons of carbon pollution over the lifetime of that new infrastructure. Just for reference, Speaker, that is two thirds of Ontario’s total emissions every year. It’s the equivalent of driving 22 million cars. Ontario at the moment has just over nine million cars.

So if the government wants to please Enbridge and allow them to increase the gas bills of Ontarians to fund their infrastructure plans, which are not borne out by evidence, that has a consequence. In my community right now, people in Ottawa Centre are faced with the—I mean, you have to laugh, Speaker, because you don’t want to cry all the time. But we in Ottawa are really proud of our festival called Winterlude. We’re proud of the great canal skateway that we have, biggest in the world. Well, it was biggest in the world. It didn’t open at all last year. Didn’t open at all last year; we’ve had five days of skating this year. And who is one of the principal sponsors of Winterlude back home? Enbridge.

Many of us have asked the National Capital Commission, “Why are we doing this? Why are we working with a company that is pressuring this government, that is pressuring other governments to embrace forms of electrical generation that are counterproductive to our climate goals?”

I want to thank the member for Toronto–Danforth, not Davenport, for that great presentation. I also just want to note, you mentioned that the minister enjoys the benefits of a heat pump for a home that is not serviced by gas.

I was surprised—because I’ve read the 147-page report that you referenced in your remarks—when the minister said that the Independent Electricity System Operator was not consulted, was not involved, because if you refer to page 5 of the report, what the OEB says is that, in fact, the IESO was one of the people who contributed to the years’ worth of research, the over 10,000 pages of evidence that the OEB came to a decision.

I guess I’m asking the member to reflect upon the conflicting position of the minister. Is he the minister for energy or is he the minister for Enbridge?