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.