It is the leader in renewable energy. That is absolutely right. It has the most wind capacity as well, I believe, as a province, with lots of solar developments and a few other things going on there.
It's worth noting that a couple of days ago, when it was a cold day in Alberta, the total net-to-grid for wind and solar was basically a couple of megawatts, out of the thousands of gigawatts of capacity that they have. Without the reliability and certainty of the grid that you have with natural gas...and even right now with coal, although I recognize that coal is on track to be phased out by 2023. There is an amount of reliability and affordability that you get from coal and natural gas.
Saskatchewan in particular has done a lot to develop natural gas alongside Alberta. If this government is going to transition everybody to powering their grids with wind and solar, it doesn't matter how much capacity you build: If the turbine isn't spinning, the sun isn't shining, and you have next to nothing for total net-to-grid, there will be some huge problems.
We saw the devastation in Texas when they had a little bit of snow and cold weather. They were totally unprepared for it because of their pursuit of trying to run their grid on renewables. I don't say this lightly. People died. This past summer, we had a billet who played with the Swift Current 57's. He was from Texas. We talked with him about what was happening down there. He talked about that particular week when that happened and how crazy it was—the blackouts, the devastation in communities with no power, the pipes that were bursting, the issues from the cleanup after the fact, and the disaster in people's homes, let alone the devastation it brought when people were literally freezing to death.
That was in Texas, where it's usually a lot warmer 12 months of the year than it is in Saskatchewan. That's a shocker, I know, but seven months out of the year we are below zero, on average, below freezing.
I drive to Regina to fly out to Ottawa. I drive down Highway 1. I drive past some of the most recent wind turbines that have been put up in Saskatchewan. Even on days when there is a good wind, and when I have a nice tailwind pushing me into the Queen City, it's amazing how many turbines aren't spinning. To be fair—I don't know—maybe they haven't been fully commissioned yet, but I know I've seen most of them, at very different times, in operation.
The fact is that if they're not spinning, they're not producing. It's usually pretty windy in Saskatchewan, but there are a lot of days when there's not enough wind to generate wind power reliably. There are days when it's cloudy. In the winter, the days are shorter. You only have a couple of hours of peak power-producing sunlight to generate the power you need to keep the lights on and furnaces running. That creates problems.
If you start to think about the amount of capacity it will take, we know we're going to have to increase the grid capacity by two and a half times at least and probably to well over that. You'd have to times it by three at least. That's the route this government wants to go on. How much land is going to be taken out of production to build more and more wind- and solar-chasing capacity? How many tax dollars are going to be spent subsidizing the development of this in the pursuit of an unattainable mandate from this government?
If we're going to be powering mines in Timmins—James Bay, they want reliability. They want certainty. They want affordability as well, because powering these mines is not cheap at the best of times. To massively increase the costs and uncertainty for these companies, which are doing the best they can in the circumstances they find themselves in, wouldn't be fair. It wouldn't be right.
I'll go back to my point about setting the tone. At the very least, the Impact Assessment Act needs to be prioritized and fixed before anything else can proceed. I hope that somewhere in the nation's capital here, whether it's the minister, his staff or all the people who work in those offices, somebody is working on that, because we haven't heard anything since the brief statement about making sure it is compliant. We haven't heard anything, so what's happening? How are we going to provide certainty for people if we're not doing that?
I think our committee has a great chance to be the ones who set the tone for that. However, if we're just going to have a seven-to-four vote on whether or not we do anything with the Impact Assessment Act, this committee will rob itself of the potential to set the tone on this, to make sure we get it right and to make sure we provide certainty, clarity and reduced timelines for proponents who want to develop our resources—develop the goods and things we have in this country and can offer the world. The good folks of Timmins—James Bay would surely appreciate that as well, I would imagine.
I really hope we'll be able to get to a point where that can be the priority for this committee, because we know that there are going to be some problems with Bill C-49 if we don't address it and deal with it. We want the good folks in Atlantic Canada to develop their resources as best they see fit. We know that Bill C-49 is the tool they need to do that, but imagine giving somebody the tool they need to do their job but it's completely disassembled and you took a few components out of it and said, “Here you go. This will work.”
That's basically what's happening here by sending out a bill that has no less than 33 references to the unconstitutional part of the Impact Assessment Act. That's going to be a problem, and it will be a problem for the folks in Atlantic Canada to have the certainty they need to get this done. The last thing they want to see are court challenges arising from a piece of legislation that could end up being deemed unconstitutional because of certain elements in it and because of its affiliation to the Impact Assessment Act.
The government is on a bit of a losing streak with court challenges lately too, which also doesn't set a very good tone. What we are finding out is that—