So V ote

Nov/7/23 1:39:14 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we just had a conversation about tradespeople and how important it is to have enough of them. This is not going to happen in one year; it will happen over a number of years. I would have to do some quick math, but, yes, $4 billion can buy only maybe 400,000 heat pumps. There might be three million households in Canada, so it would take maybe five or 10 years to get through the program, but we have to start it now. This is a very common-sense, easy-to-understand approach with a funding mechanism, a clear goal and clear benefits for all Canadians.

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Nov/7/23 1:37:14 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-241

Mr. Speaker, Bill C-241, as I understand it, was an NDP bill before the member, thankfully, took it up and brought it forward again and it was passed. That is what we should be doing: supporting tradespeople across the country who have to travel. Any other business people can charge their travel expenses. As the member mentioned, we will need more tradespeople to do all of this work. Not only do heat pumps have to be installed, but homes also need to be retrofitted to make sure they are properly insulated. That is one of the first things that need to be done. I just finished doing that in my house, and now I am going to turn my thoughts to the heat pump part. We will need tradespeople for that, and sometimes it is difficult to find enough tradespeople because they are doing a lot of work in this regard. Yes, we should be training tradespeople to do that. There is a program for it at Okanagan College in Penticton. It is one of the leading sustainable building trades programs in the country. We have to support people going into those programs and then once they come out.

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Nov/7/23 1:35:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is kind of obvious. Yes, that is what the New Democrats are proposing. I said in my speech that the GST was never meant to be charged on the necessities of life. We do not pay GST when we go to grocery stores and buy food. However we heat our homes in Canada, and we have to do so, we pay energy bills, whether to electricity companies, natural gas companies or oil companies. We pay GST on that, and we should not. Yes, the NDP is asking that we take the GST off our home heating costs, even in the summer. Maybe in Winnipeg, people have to heat their homes in the summer. I do not usually in British Columbia. That is what we are proposing.

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Mr. Richard Cannings (South Okanagan—West Kootenay, NDP)

Nov/7/23 1:25:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the wonderful MP for Edmonton Griesbach. I am very honoured, and frankly excited, to stand here this afternoon to speak to the NDP motion that sets out a truly fair, common-sense approach to deal with two of the most important issues of our time: the climate catastrophes we are living through every year across this country and the struggle that many Canadians are facing just to get by. In a nutshell, the motion recognizes that Canadians are facing increasing costs, both the financial costs and human costs of the climate crisis. At the same time, they are facing rising fuel costs for gas at the pumps and in their home heating, while the fossil fuel companies that are charging them those costs are reaping record profits. On top of that, both oil and gas heating are contributing to the carbon emissions that are fuelling the climate crisis. The NDP motion proposes three straightforward solutions to that situation: to take the GST off home heating; to provide heat pumps for free to lower- and medium-income families in an easily accessible program; and to fund the program with a windfall tax on the record profits made by fossil fuel companies. Listeners at home may quickly realize that this motion is a reaction to both the Liberals' bungled program to provide relief to some Canadians by taking the carbon tax off home heating oil and the Conservatives' motion to extend that relief to natural gas for home heating as well. Both those ideas fail the fairness test of this Canadian federation. The Liberal program benefits predominantly people in Atlantic Canada, where many homes are heated with oil, while the Conservative motion leaves British Columbians and Québécois out in the cold since families in those provinces do not pay a federal carbon tax. I have yet to hear a single Conservative from B.C. admit that fact in this place. The NDP is proposing to take the GST off home heating bills. The GST is not supposed to be paid on the necessities of life. We do not pay GST on food. I think everyone would agree that home heating is a necessity of life in Canada, but right now, everyone across the country has to pay it. Removing the GST from home heating bills would save everyone across the country money on their energy bills, helping people to get by in a truly fair way. We have had bad years for extreme weather and wildfires for the past eight years or so, but this year was in a different league of catastrophes. It started with a hot, dry spring that sent fires in Nova Scotia, Quebec and Alberta raging through forests and communities. As the season progressed, we had fires explode in British Columbia and the Northwest Territories. Several of those fires in B.C. were in the coastal rainforest where it is usually hard enough to start a campfire, let alone destroy a forest. Then Nova Scotia, which was still recovering from two catastrophic fires, suffered a devastating flood. I live in the dry interior of British Columbia in the South Okanagan Valley. We all held our breath as we saw fires springing up in northeastern B.C., central B.C., then Kamloops and the Shuswap. At the end of July, the fires began in the Okanagan Valley and Similkameen Valley. One came within inches of destroying a large neighbourhood in Osoyoos. In mid-August, the Shuswap fires swept out of the wilderness and burned through Celista, Scotch Creek and Squilax, communities that I used to live in during the summers of the 1970s. A fire in the mountains west of Kelowna roared down to devastate neighbourhoods on the west side of Okanagan Lake and then jumped across the lake two kilometres to terrorize neighbourhoods on the east side. People struggled to breathe across the country this summer. Hundreds of thousands had to leave their homes in hastily planned evacuations, including the entire city of Yellowknife. People lost their homes. Some people unfortunately died. This was a summer that marked another shift in public opinion. It was public awareness that climate change is not a theoretical event somewhere in the future. We are living it today and we have to adapt to it. The climate data back that up. This year has been literally off the charts. Air temperature records were shattered every day around the world. Ocean temperatures were so high that scientists could barely believe what was happening. This year was even worse than 2021. That year British Columbia, there was a heat dome in late June followed by an unprecedented atmospheric river event in November. The Town of Lytton burned down after reporting Canada's record-high temperature three days in a row. The cost of the climate destruction in 2021 in B.C. alone was over $5 billion. However, even as we said that 2021 was the worst year ever, and now people are saying that 2023 is the worst year ever, the projections are saying that these will actually be the best years for the rest of our lives. Extreme weather events will only get worse as we pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. What many people forget, or do not even know, is that 619 people died in Metro Vancouver in one week during the heat dome of 2021, which was the real tragedy of that year. What most of those people had in common was that they lived in the lower-income parts of the city in neighbourhoods with no access to shady, cool, green areas and in apartment complexes with no air conditioning. They died with their windows closed against the stifling heat. We cannot let this happen again. We need to provide people, especially lower-income Canadians, with air conditioning, even in places like Vancouver and Halifax, where maybe they did not need it very often in the past. They will need it in the future. That would save hundreds of lives during future heat events. If we do that with heat pumps, switching out oil and gas heating units, it would not only save lives but would also cut emissions, and people, including landlords, would save significant money on their energy bills all year round. At the same time, we must make it easy for people to properly insulate their homes. We have to make sure we are not building new buildings, new housing, with fossil fuel heating infrastructure. New builds should have electric heat, preferably heat pumps. There is a growing movement in cities across Canada to ban fossil fuel infrastructure to heat new homes and buildings. Montreal and Nanaimo have done that. Vancouver almost did it but then backed off to a partial ban. It is being discussed by communities in my riding. While Canadians are struggling to pay for fuel costs, fossil fuel companies are raking in record profits. The top five companies in Canada posted $38 billion in profits last year alone. Meanwhile, Canadians saw prices at the pump go up almost a dollar a litre over the last three years. The Conservatives' big bogey man, the carbon tax, went up five cents over that time. The fossil fuel companies are not paying any more to make gasoline or natural gas; they are just benefiting big time from a rise in world oil and gas prices. These are windfall profits. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has determined that a windfall tax on these profits would bring in over $4 billion. The NDP has been calling for such a tax for over a year but has gotten no support from either the Liberals or the Conservatives. Therefore, we are proposing today to bring in a windfall tax on the profits of fossil fuel companies and use that money to fund our proposal for an easily accessible program that would install free heat pumps in Canadian homes. The Liberals are handpicking what regions get help with the cost of living, and leaving the rest of Canada behind. The Conservatives have absolutely no climate plan. For over a year, the NDP has called on the government to remove the GST from home heating and help everyone across the country, but the Liberals and Conservatives have ignored those calls. The NDP wants to make eco-energy retrofits and heat pumps free and easy to access for low- to middle-class Canadians, regardless of their initial home heating energy source. We are calling on the government to fund those changes by finally implementing a windfall profits tax on the excess profits of oil and gas companies. These are common-sense, effective ideas that would save all Canadians money and save lives and heartache from climate disasters in an increasingly dangerous future. I am sure all members here will support this motion to help all Canadians from coast to coast to coast.

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Context: House Hansard - 247 - Nov/6/23

Mr. Richard Cannings (South Okanagan—West Kootenay, NDP)

Nov/6/23 1:22:36 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-34

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to rise today to speak to Bill C-34, which would update the Investment Canada Act. This act is designed to do two main things. The first is to ensure that foreign investments in Canada have a net benefit to Canadians. The second is to ensure that foreign investments are not detrimental to our national security. Many Canadians, especially Canadians of my age, might know this act better by its former name, The Foreign Investment Review Act. In its early days in the 1970s, it was brought in to deal with a rash of foreign buyouts, mainly American, of Canadian companies. The Foreign Investment Review Agency approved about 90% of the transactions it dealt with, but was criticized by both Liberals and Conservatives for actually doing its job by blocking some proposals that did not show a benefit to Canadians. Therefore, Brian Mulroney brought in the Investment Canada Act in 1984. He replaced the Foreign Investment Review Agency with Investment Canada, saying that he wanted to welcome foreign investment. True to his word, under his government, Investment Canada did not block a single foreign investment transaction, not one. The Liberal governments that followed Mulroney, under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, had the same record, not one application blocked. The Harper government was a different story. Harper blocked the sale of British Columbia-based Macdonald, Dettwiler to the American company Alliant based on both financial and critical technology arguments. On the other hand, in 2012, the Harper government allowed the $15-billion sale of Canada oil company Nexen to the China National Offshore Oil Company, owned by the Chinese government, and the $6-billion sale of Progress Energy to Malaysia-based Petronas. However, the same day, Harper changed the Investment Canada Act to block state-owned foreign investment in Canadian oil and gas companies, essentially closing the barn door after the horses had left. Therefore, legislation regarding regulating foreign takeovers of Canadian companies has changed from time to time over the past decades. Foreign investment trends have changed as well. The share of U.S. investment in Canada has declined over the past few decades, but it still leads the pack followed by the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Japan, China, Germany, Brazil, France and Bermuda, although, I suspect the high placement of Luxembourg and Bermuda reflects more where Canadian companies are hiding their profits than real sources of investment. However, it is clear that we need to keep up with the times in regulating foreign investment, and Bill C-34 is another example of that. Information and data are the new oil, and earlier versions of the Investment Canada Act were essentially blind to that. The bill before us introduces a pre-implementation filing requirement for certain investments to give earlier visibility to situations where there is a risk that a foreign investor would gain access to sensitive assets or information immediately on closing. I have talked to numerous tech companies over the past few years. One story I hear repeatedly is that small Canadian tech companies work hard to develop a new technology, say in hydrogen energy development or AI advances. However, when it comes to expand their companies to really get their product to market, they need investment. Too often in the Canadian tech ecosystem, these companies simply get bought out by bigger companies from the United States, Europe or China. With those sales go the intellectual property that represents the core of their company's value. The present version of the Investment Canada Act allows companies to report takeovers after the fact. However, if critical intellectual property is involved, it is usually too late to stop the transfer of that information, if we find out about the transaction 30 days later, for instance. It is not like the old days when the main value of a company was in the factories it owned. This new pre-implementation filing could help put a stop to that where necessary. There are several other improvements that provide more flexibility for the minister to act and better manage the entire process. What would make the act even better? First, the act should mandate the review of an acquisition by a state-owned enterprise of a company previously reviewed by the ICA, and I would like to spend some time on a story that illustrates why this is needed. There is a company called Retirement Concepts that owns and operates a number of seniors residences in British Columbia, long-term care homes. One of them is the Summerland Seniors Village just outside the federal riding I represent but within the provincial riding I live in. When I first sought to enter politics 10 years ago, I was involved in a provincial election in that riding. The Summerlands Seniors Village was involved in a tragic story of a local family that lost both its mother and its father in 2012 to poor care and accidents. I met with members of the family and heard the heart-wrenching story of neglect that had taken the lives of their parents. After that incident, the provincial government demanded that Retirement Concepts hire more staff, but managers claimed that no one was applying. I am guessing that a combination of low wages and overworked conditions had a lot to do with that. In 2016, Chinese insurance giant Anbang, then a privately held company, bought Retirement Concepts, a transaction that was reviewed and okayed by the federal government's investment review process. Less than a year after that purchase was okayed, the Chinese government seized the Anbang company and jailed its chairman for fraud. Perhaps it knew something that the Canadian government missed when that review was carried out. Suddenly, we have the Chinese government owning a company that is one of the largest providers of long-term care in Canada and certainly the largest in B.C.. Not only is it one of the largest providers of long-term care, it is known to provide very poor care at times for our seniors. In fact, in 2020, the provincial government in British Columbia had to seize management control of four care homes run by Retirement Concepts because of the continuing problems with poor care. It returned that control just over a year later, but it is an indication of the general lack of priority Retirement Concepts had placed on the care of seniors. At present, there are no provisions in the Investment Canada Act that would allow Investment Canada or the minister to be able to review the subsequent acquisition by a state-owned enterprise of an ICA-approved takeover or merger by a foreign private company. We have to change this. The NDP put forward an amendment that would allow for the review of a takeover by a state-owned enterprise. This can be done by establishing the power to require a mandatory divestment of all Canadian assets by entities in these specific circumstances. As an aside, in the case of long-term care homes, the NDP is very much in favour of a move to a future where seniors' care is given the same respect that all health care gets, a future where no long-term care homes are owned by private companies that put profit ahead of the well-being of our seniors. This is an example of where we could and should take a big step in that direction. Another factor to consider in investment review is to prevent the loss of publicly funded research and development from leaving the country, resulting in the loss of jobs and, basically, the theft of taxpayer dollars. A company called Nemak received $3 million dollars from the government's automotive supplier innovation program. However, in 2020, Nemak closed its plant in Windsor, where those funds had been used to create new products for General Motors, and transferred that technology and those jobs to its operations in Mexico. An NDP amendment, passed in committee, would allow for the review of a foreign takeover to consider the intellectual property whose development was funded by the federal government and to issue remedies to retain the benefits in Canada. Therefore, a situation like that of Nemak would not happen again. I do not have time today to go over all the improvements this bill would bring to the foreign investment space in Canada or to go over all the improvements that we had hoped it would bring but fell short. In this new world, where ideas and data are often more valuable than the natural resources we have so long relied on for our wealth, we need a new regulatory framework to protect our industries, our workers and our companies. Bill C-34 is a step in that direction.

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Context: House Hansard - 237 - Oct/23/23

Context: House Hansard - 227 - Sep/29/23

Oct/23/23 1:41:47 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-57

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Kitchener Centre for taking part in a press conference I held with the member for Timmins—James Bay on that subject last week, where we called both the government and fossil fuel companies to account for the fact the International Energy Agency has said we cannot move forward with any new fossil fuel projects and here we are, as he mentioned, $30 billion into the Trans Mountain pipeline. I could go on and on about other projects. This is something the government and the fossil fuel industry need to face. The fossil fuel industry has known since the 1980s where we are headed. It warned in the 1980s that it could not go down that path, and then it decided that would be too expensive and there was too much money to be made. We need to call both the government and the industry to account on this and make some very important changes very quickly.

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Mr. Richard Cannings (South Okanagan—West Kootenay, NDP)

Sep/29/23 10:58:03 a.m.
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Re: Bill C-50

Madam Speaker, my colleague said she wanted to base her speech on facts, but there is apparently some alternate world out there about facts. She mentioned that the fossil fuel sector has just less than 200,000 employees in Canada. The clean energy sector already has 430 employees, and it is expected to grow by more than 200,000 over the next 10 years. That is where her constituents and workers across Canada are looking. I will close by saying she should read John Vaillant's book Fire Weather, which is about her province, about the world, about climate change and about the industry that she is such a fierce protector of.

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Context: House Hansard - 130 - Nov/18/22

Context: House Hansard - 130 - Nov/18/22

Nov/18/22 10:13:38 a.m.
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Re: Bill C-32

Other countries are doing it.

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Mr. Richard Cannings (South Okanagan—West Kootenay, NDP)

Nov/18/22 10:12:08 a.m.
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Re: Bill C-32

Madam Speaker, one of the things that has really hit Canadians across this country is the high price of gas. It has gone up almost a dollar in my part of the country. The Conservatives seem obsessed with stopping the increase in the carbon tax that comes into effect in April, which would amount to about two cents a litre. They are ignoring the fact that oil and gas companies have had immense windfall profits, billions of dollars, record profits this year because of the high price of world oil. The U.K. has instituted a 35% windfall tax on oil and gas companies. The CEO of Shell has asked the federal government here to tax them more. I am wondering why the Conservatives are so silent on this way of really bringing help to Canadians.

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Context: House Hansard - 109 - Oct/6/22

Mr. Richard Cannings (South Okanagan—West Kootenay, NDP)

Oct/6/22 11:34:25 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I share with the member a lot of his concerns about what farmers are dealing with in this day and age and about the inflation that is putting pressure on all Canadians. However, one thing we are asking for in this motion today is to put a tax on the excess profits of big companies. Big companies like Loblaws and Sobeys have made windfall profits while Canadians are suffering. There are also the big oil and gas companies. They talk forever about the carbon tax on the Conservative side, but they never mention the huge profits that oil and gas companies are making, which cause 10 times the increase in gas prices than the carbon tax. I am wondering if he could comment on the comment the CEO of Shell made yesterday. He is saying to please tax Shell; it made too much money. He wants to help Canadians. When will the Conservatives—

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Context: House Hansard - 109 - Oct/6/22

Mr. Richard Cannings (South Okanagan—West Kootenay, NDP)

Oct/6/22 10:47:40 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, it was good to hear the member for Edmonton Centre go on and on about all the good programs the government is bringing out that the NDP forced it to do. However, it has studiously avoided doing the one thing that has huge support from Canadians and that would make one of the biggest differences, and that is to put a windfall tax on the excess profits of big oil and gas companies and big grocery store chains. Now we have the CEO of Shell saying to tax them because they have made too much money. Canadians are hurting, yet the Liberals just do not want to do this. The Conservatives certainly do not want to do it. Most Canadians want us to tax the companies that have made windfall profits. Why do they not do that? It would take a huge burden off Canadians who are suffering right now.

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Mr. Richard Cannings (South Okanagan—West Kootenay, NDP)

May/17/22 4:33:47 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member's riding includes Windsor, which is where my grandmother was born and raised. As he said, it is not a wealthy riding. I just checked, and the median income there is $31,000, which means more than half of his constituents were too low-income to benefit from the Liberals' much-vaunted tax cut for the middle class. All this is to say, I am just wondering if he could comment on the fact that we have multinational oil companies making billions of dollars in profits while we are spending tax money to support them. We are doing this, in various ways, to the tune of billions of dollars a year. How can he justify that, with where we are in the world today, when we have to move away from the oil and gas sector? Why are we supporting these very profitable companies with tax dollars?

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May/17/22 3:21:58 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I outlined some of that in my speech. I would like to thank the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley for allowing me to go on. We need to spend those monies on reaching this future with a clean economy. I mentioned interprovincial interties in electrical redistribution. That would help us get clean electricity across the country and reduce our emissions tremendously, but it costs a couple of billion dollars for each intertie. Those are the kinds of things we have to be looking at, instead of funding the oil and gas industry, which is very profitable.

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May/17/22 3:19:47 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, obviously, the price of gas is at the top of a lot of Canadians' minds right now. It has gone up a tremendous amount. It has probably gone up $1 a litre since the war in Ukraine has changed the world markets. What I am looking for is a future that we are moving toward and planning for, which will create an energy market that is not so sensitive to world events. I am looking for an energy future where Canada is creating its own energy and not subject to world prices for oil. The Conservatives are always talking about using Canadian oil to fuel Canada, but I can bet that if we had that system right now, Canadian oil companies would not want the Conservatives to say that we will cut the price of oil in half because we control oil in Canada. We need a system that is good for the planet and for consumers, and we have to plan for that.

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May/17/22 3:18:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the answer to the member's question is, of course, “no”. We do not want to put oil and gas workers out of work. The oil and gas industry has been very good to Canada over the past decades. The member for Calgary Centre recounted in great detail how much benefit it has provided Canadians and Canadian workers. However, that is not where we are going. What I am saying is we have to make sure that those workers who have good union jobs now will have good union jobs in the future, but those jobs are disappearing, whether they like it or not. A lot of those workers are rightly concerned about what they see. We have to invest in that future for them and their families.

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Mr. Richard Cannings (South Okanagan—West Kootenay, NDP)

May/17/22 3:13:55 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, when we left off for question period, I was talking about how Canada is uniquely positioned to become a renewable energy superpower. During the natural resources committee's study on critical minerals, we learned that Canada is the only nation in the western hemisphere with all of the minerals and metals needed to produce the advanced batteries, electric motors and wind turbine generators that will be needed in the low-carbon economy. The International Energy Agency's net-zero energy scenario estimates that the global value for select critical minerals will grow substantially over the next two decades, reaching today's level for coal market value of about $400 billion U.S. by 2040. The opportunity is there for Canada to both reach net zero and prosper, but we cannot continue down the path that Liberal and Conservative governments have chosen when it comes to spending money on the oil and gas sector. Canada currently spends more per capita on those subsidies than any other developed country. We cannot keep paying companies to clean up their own pollution. New Democrats know that public funds are best spent supporting the transition to renewable energy and helping Canadians struggling with the high cost of living, rather than on profitable oil and gas companies. Instead of spending billions on new oil pipelines, we should be building hydrogen infrastructure for heavy transportation hubs, stronger provincial interties to distribute clean electricity across Canada, and electric vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing, and we should be training and employing workers now working in the oil and gas sector in these new opportunities. They are opportunities that will last into the future. This is where the puck is going. We need to stop providing those subsidies to oil and gas companies, which delay climate action, and instead spend that money on climate action. Increasingly, we need to spend money on climate adaptation, since the effects of global warming are locked in. We have to talk about the cost of climate inaction, and that cost is rising every year. Right now, Canadian governments, businesses and citizens spend more than $5 billion annually to fix the destruction caused by increased fires and floods. That is predicted to rise to over $40 billion by 2050. At the moment, the federal government puts up just over $300 million of that cost. It is past time that we faced up to the rising costs of climate change. We must realign the disaster mitigation and adaptation fund to spend more on adaptation, so that we protect communities from disaster rather than rebuild them after the fact. Last year, British Columbia communities such as Lytton, Princeton, Merritt and many more, were badly impacted by fire and floods. Small communities such as these do not have the monetary resources to rebuild under present funding formulas. We must have a clear strategy for the future that faces the facts of climate change, both limiting the extent of future changes and dealing with the changes that have already taken place. Canada's future is very bright, but first we must invest in that future, not in the past.

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May/17/22 1:57:14 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, in the latest budget, the Liberal government promises over $2 billion for carbon capture and storage projects for fossil fuel companies. That is more taxpayer dollars to companies that are doing very well. Imperial Oil is making more money than it has for 30 years. Suncor made a profit of almost $3 billion in the last quarter alone. Again, is this an inefficient subsidy? Even if carbon capture projects can be developed that actually work, and there is a lot of evidence that most do not, using them to clean up an industry whose raison d'être is providing oil and gas for the world to burn to create more carbon dioxide is an highly inefficient way to wean the world off of fossil fuels. What do Canadians get for this multi-billion dollar propping-up of oil and gas multinationals? They get record-high prices for gasoline. The oil barons are doing well, but ordinary Canadians are not. What Canadian families need is help during these times of increasing costs. We all need help transitioning to a low-carbon future. Let us imagine a future where our car, truck and home heating costs were not left to the vagaries of world markets and the international price of oil. Canada has committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. We cannot achieve this goal if we continue to pour 14 times the number of taxpayer dollars into the fossil fuel industry than we provide to the development of renewable energy. The latest IPCC report had a stark warning. Either we take action now on mitigation and adaptation for climate change, or we risk suffering even more severe consequences from extreme weather events, wildfires and floods. António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, said some government and businesses have not entirely been truthful in claiming to be on track. In his words, he warned, “Some governments and business leaders are saying one thing but doing another...And the results will be catastrophic.” Greenhouse gas emissions must be cut in half by 2030, and the good news from the IPCC report is that this can be done. The final cost of necessary actions will be minimal, but will require a massive effort by governments around the world. Wayne Gretzky once said that a good hockey player plays where the puck is, but a great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be. For Canada's energy future, the puck is going to be with renewable energy. Canada is uniquely positioned for becoming a renewable energy superpower. Our nation is rich in hydro, wind, solar power and the rare earth minerals that are needed for that low-carbon future.

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