Speaker, the member opposite knows exactly what we’re doing because he’s a huge champion of the investments that we’re making in our nuclear sector, coming from the Durham region, Canada’s clean energy capital—the refurbishments that are going on at places like Darlington and soon will be going on at the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station; also the new development of small modular reactors.

Mr. Speaker, we know we don’t need a punitive carbon tax in Canada or in Ontario. It’s simply not working. But the queen of the carbon tax, Bonnie Crombie, and the king of the carbon tax, Justin Trudeau, are continuing to make people pay more. They’re making them pay more on their home heating bills. They’re making them pay more on their gasoline fuel-ups. They’re making them pay more on their groceries.

My parliamentary assistant and I were even saying this morning that the Queen’s Park media gallery spring fling next week has even doubled in price, up to $80 next week, Mr. Speaker. Now, I don’t know if we can blame Bonnie Crombie and Justin Trudeau for that, but it’s 80 bucks this year.

So we can do this without increasing the carbon tax—

Interjection.

Interjections.

There’s no bones about it. It’s costing everybody more to live in our province and the carbon tax is driving that, not just in Ontario but right across the country.

But our plan is working here in Ontario. Our energy plan is called Powering Ontario’s Growth, investing in new and refurbishing our nuclear reactors, investing in multi-billion dollar refurbishments of our hydroelectric facilities, building the country’s largest energy storage in a competitive process and other non-emitting renewables that are coming onto the grid in the future that are going to continue to ensure that we are the economic powerhouse in North America.

We’re landing deals like $15-billion Honda deal—

Interjection.

Mr. Speaker, I just answered a question about all of the things that our government is doing to ensure that we have clean, reliable, safe, affordable energy for our province going forward. That includes multi-billion-dollar refurbishments that are happening at Bruce and OPG’s Darlington station and multi-billion-dollar investments at Pickering, something that that member is opposed to. He’s opposed to the 76,000 jobs in our nuclear sector and the baseload power that comes from those facilities, providing up to 60% of our power every day.

We rely on natural gas in our province, Mr. Speaker. Over 70% of homes—do you know what they’re heated by? Natural gas, something that member would pull out of people’s homes tomorrow if he had the chance. We’re going to ensure, through Bill 165, that we keep energy costs affordable, and we’re going to keep all of the new homes that we’re building in Ontario affordable as well, something that the NDP is opposed to.

They supported the Green Energy Act that the previous provincial Liberals brought forward, and we know how the current Liberal leader, the queen of the carbon tax, Bonnie Crombie, feels about the federal carbon tax. It’s driving people into energy poverty as well.

Our Powering Ontario’s Growth plan will ensure that we have non-emitting baseload power going forward that our province can count on, to see the type of investments that we have been seeing under the leadership of Premier Ford and our Minister of Economic Development, Minister Fedeli, out there beating the bushes and bringing back billions of dollars of investments into our EV, EV battery and manufacturing jobs, back to this province.

Mr. Speaker, what happened in Kanata last week was a distribution-level temporary issue with Ottawa hydro. The utility there, the LDC, has indicated that they’re going to repair the piece of equipment that was faulty that day so that this type of outage doesn’t happen again. But I can assure my ambulance-chasing friend over there that the provincial grid had more than enough power to meet the needs of the province on that very, very hot day. It was a record-setting day in Ottawa, to be sure, but we had a lot of excess energy that day.

I can assure all the members of the Legislature of one thing: If that member were in charge of our power grid, we wouldn’t have our nuclear supply—8,500 megawatts on that day that was there, at almost 100% of its capacity—and we wouldn’t have the natural gas fleet, which is our insurance policy, because not only is he against nuclear, he’s against natural gas as well.

While the member opposite clutches his pearls and pretends that the world is coming to an end, I can assure him that because of our consistent support for our nuclear grid, the refurbishments that are under way, on time and ahead of schedule, on budget—this member would not have those workhorses, those dependable baseload emissions-free power suppliers that we have in our province every single day.

At the same time we’re investing in new technology, a small modular reactor, that isn’t going to just power our grid; this is an SMR that’s going to be adopted by jurisdictions around the world to help them do what we’ve done in Ontario, and that is, reduce emissions and provide baseload power on a daily basis, 24/7, that the world can rely on. This is a great Ontario nuclear—