Natural Resources Committee on June 2nd, 2026

[The Chair, Liberal, Terry Duguid]

Colleagues, I call this meeting to order.

I will start, as we always do, by acknowledging that we are meeting on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe nation.

Welcome to meeting number 40 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Natural Resources. Today's meeting is taking place in hybrid format.

I would remind participants of the following points. Before speaking, wait until I recognize you. For those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to active your mic, and please mute yourself when you are not speaking.

I would like to remind witnesses that committee members may ask questions in either English or French. If you will need interpretation, please take a moment now to prepare your earpiece and select the listening channel you need in advance, in order to take full advantage of the time allotted for questions and answers.

For members participating in person or via Zoom, please raise your hand if you wish to speak. The committee clerk and I will do the best we can to maintain a consolidated speaking order. As a reminder, all comments should be addressed through the chair.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted on Thursday, April 23, the committee shall resume its study of Canada's electrification, energy self-sufficiency and domestic energy security.

I would like to welcome our witness. We have one for this first hour and two for the second hour, colleagues. From the Pembina Institute, we have Kevin Lockhart, director of buildings. He's joining us, of course, by video conference. He has conducted the mandatory onboarding test for witnesses.

Mr. Lockhart, you will have five minutes for your opening remarks, after which we will open the floor to questions and comments.

Welcome.

[Kevin Lockhart, Director, Buildings, Pembina Institute]

Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to share the Pembina Institute's perspective on Canada's electrification, energy self-sufficiency and domestic energy future.

In 2026, with increasingly turbulent global energy markets and politics, becoming an energy superpower means delivering the cleanest and most cost-effective power to attract investment and drive economic growth and competitiveness. There is an increasingly strong business case for investing in Canada's energy systems through demand-side management and efficiency, grid modernization and expansion, and the continued development of distributed and utility-scale clean electricity.

Canada has a long history of clean electricity generation and a competitive starting point compared to other countries. We can use this as a foundation for growth. Electricity is central to the transformation of our national economy and a sustainable environment. It will help boost affordability, advance economic resilience and address climate change. Today, Canada's energy system consists of energy supply, energy demand and the flow of electrons from production to end use.

Going forward, Canada's ambition as an energy superpower means we must optimize the use of existing system infrastructure but also take advantage of energy efficiency, distributed energy resources, local energy storage and demand-response technologies, all of which help balance load growth requirements and cost-effective system expansion.

It is the federal government that's best suited to creating the market conditions that will encourage investment in an integrated marketplace for energy-efficient buildings, electric vehicles and industrial processes.

The Pembina Institute would like to encourage the Government of Canada to ensure that its electricity strategy recognizes the full scope of Canada's energy system. This starts with a focus on energy efficiency and the effective use of energy resources. Investments in housing, through programs such as Build Canada Homes, the build communities strong fund and the housing design catalogue, can be leveraged to advance ambitious building codes and high levels of energy efficiency that will help cut energy waste and emissions and ensure stable utility costs while providing safer, healthy and more resilient living conditions.

As stated in one of the Canada electricity advisory council's recommendations:

Link federal investments in housing to the highest energy-saving standards...Both are essential for ensuring that solutions to the housing crisis do not spill over, directly or through power rates, into unaffordable energy bills for new and existing households.

The government can also help build markets through the electrification of core sectors. An electrified Canadian economy can leverage buildings, transportation and industrial processes as a nation-building opportunity for economic growth, affordability and climate action. Doing so will help maintain energy costs while doubling the country's electricity grids to meet rising demand. Together, these sectors can support a made-in-Canada industrial strategy and create supply chain and export opportunities for the building and auto sectors as well as grid technologies and critical minerals.

There is a need to provide stability and flexibility with integrated resources. Programs such as the smart renewables and electrification pathways program, the utility support stream and the green industrial facilities and manufacturing program have already helped identify opportunities to integrate emerging technologies, such as vehicle to grid services in both building and industrial spaces.

Continuing to support these programs can drive similar technology adoptions that can help improve system resilience and provide stability and a flexible bulwark against weather or cyber-related disruptions, allowing utilities to tap into resilient resources when critically needed.

We need to continue to build and support our workforce. Achieving a clean energy system by 2050 could generate up to 10 million job years of construction employment. At the same time, Canada is facing persistent labour shortages. By putting workers at the centre of these plans, we can ensure that the jobs created are high quality, accessible and capable of supporting workers and communities through a period of significant economic change.

Lastly, but importantly, we need to reinforce indigenous leadership. Canada has made great progress in delivering energy stability in remote Canadian communities. Long-term predictable support can ensure that these communities continue to pursue their clean energy futures. We hope to see the federal government continue to advance and accelerate indigenous leadership in clean electricity projects, partnerships and equity opportunities.

With that, thank you for this opportunity. I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Terry Duguid]

Thank you, Mr. Lockhart, particularly for staying on time. You were right on the money.

Colleagues, we're going to start our first round of questions and comments.

We're going to start with Mr. Malette for six minutes.

[Gaétan Malette, Conservative, Kapuskasing—Timmins—Mushkegowuk, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Lockhart, you mention here that one of your interests is working with existing buildings and new buildings with low energy and low emissions. You've also mentioned that, by 2050, with clean energy, if I heard you correctly, 10 million jobs could be created.

[Kevin Lockhart]

They would be created between now and 2050, 10 million job years. That's correct.

[Gaétan Malette, Conservative, Kapuskasing—Timmins—Mushkegowuk, ON]

Would you expand a little bit on what would be the phases of that? Would these be good-paying jobs?

[Kevin Lockhart]

Absolutely.

As we see—and I'll use buildings as an example, as that's my area of knowledge—in creating this integrated system and having energy resources as part of that system, which is made up of buildings, transportation and industrial processes, the building can act as a host for electrification and as a host for electrification resources. To do so, the first step is to improve the energy efficiency of a building and lower the energy demand, which involves either high-performance new construction or retrofitting buildings. With the state of our buildings—many of the buildings we have in place today will still be standing in 2050—that retrofit work is significant.

We also have the development and implementation of energy resources. That could be a combination of, say, solar or other renewables paired with battery storage. In addition to providing good flexibility and stability, there are jobs associated with that but also with the innovation of those technologies, things like smart controls.

Through our work, we've seen that Canada is well suited to developing innovation pathways and export opportunities.

[Gaétan Malette, Conservative, Kapuskasing—Timmins—Mushkegowuk, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Lockhart, the future of this country depends on a very strong economy. You've mentioned that electricity is central to our development. In your experience, what needs to be done to encourage the government to supply—and I put emphasis on this—affordable energy for our future?

[Kevin Lockhart]

One of the primary roles the government can play in that is in the development of our future electricity system, which is integrated. It's not necessarily just transmission, but it goes beyond to consider the distribution system and the resources or assets within that system, which are, again, buildings, transportation and industrial processes. How can each provide opportunities to balance the energy demands or use the energy excesses of those resources? For example, industrial processes generating heat can help heat buildings, which then takes some of the load off the electrical system. Likewise, distributed energy resources can take advantage of renewables during the day to then be paired with battery storage to help offset or mitigate peak loads in the evening.

The Canadian government can really drive affordability for households and businesses by helping to maintain stable energy rates and then providing new opportunities for revenues for businesses through distributed resources or households through, for example, load management smart controls.

[Gaétan Malette, Conservative, Kapuskasing—Timmins—Mushkegowuk, ON]

Thank you.

In clean energy, after hydroelectricity, what is the most affordable and which is the least affordable? Which ones should we concentrate on? Another question is this. Do you classify nuclear as clean energy?

[Kevin Lockhart]

In terms of affordability, if we look at first costs, we see it's typically in renewables. The point that I would really like to make is that the integration of these different systems is how we achieve greater affordability. Nuclear, I think, plays a role, particularly existing resources, in that it provides the base load needed for our economy where, in the future, we can look at renewables paired with storage, with distributed resources to then also play a similar role, as the batteries help distribute that energy output.

In terms of the most affordable, it's also where the assets are. We can look at, say, mega projects or at how the energy resources are distributed across the community. It could be large building owners with, say, commercial buildings with large rooftops, or community-led projects or individual households that can then play a role in our energy future. We can distribute those savings and those revenue opportunities across communities.

[The Chair, Liberal, Terry Duguid]

Thank you, both.

Mr. Hogan, you have six minutes.

[Corey Hogan, Liberal, Calgary Confederation, AB]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to our witness for being here.

This study is looking both at energy security and at opportunities in electricity, specifically. We know our energy future is an electric future. Electrification is an important part of energy self-sufficiency. In that vein, we also want it to be an affordable future. I appreciated Mr. Malette's comments in that regard. I think it's something that as a committee we have to keep our eyes on at all times, lest we find ourselves offside of people and people's lives.

You've talked about an integrated system, and you've talked about it being not just about transmission but also distribution and the resources and assets. You mentioned specifically distributed batteries, and those are words that caught my ear. I wonder if you can expand on battery technology, its current state and how you see that distributed future looking.

[Kevin Lockhart]

You started your question highlighting energy security, and I think that's one role that the distributed system could play, in that it creates local energy security and greater use of domestic resources as a national priority. It also creates resilience in terms of the fact that they tend to be local systems and provide some benefits during power outages or extreme weather events. There is a higher potential for the grid to continue to operate.

In the battery space, looking at the greater systems, we have electrified vehicle batteries, but we also need to collect and store energy within our buildings. The first point I would make is that we have the vehicle-to-grid interconnection, but we also, on a larger scale, can then use our buildings to also provide those services and really take advantage of supply chain opportunities. It's looking beyond just vehicles—the same or similar technologies for those large building batteries or residential-sized batteries. We can broaden our supply chain opportunities and our supply chain resilience, really, by looking at batteries, not just in one aspect of the sector, the auto sector, but going beyond into buildings as well.

[Corey Hogan, Liberal, Calgary Confederation, AB]

I want to pull on the resilience thread a bit, because one of the things that come up often when we talk about electricity, of course, and our ambitions to be more self-reliant as a country, is interties. One of the reasons that we don't use the intertie between B.C. and Alberta at its rated capacity, even, is anxiety about resilience. If one intertie goes down, that can create enormous strain on a system operator.

I wonder if I can have your comments on that broadly, but also maybe on the opportunity for the type of resilience you've talked about to be part of a solution that de-risks some of these larger projects you were talking about.

[Kevin Lockhart]

I think in terms of the two provincial systems, each plays a role in supporting each other and, with progress, can really drive that resilience.

If we look at distributed resources, we see that we're really broadening those nodes from, say, two into the thousands. We create those more local systems that, with the appropriate technology, can continue to operate in isolation while the larger grid is maybe experiencing outages. Really, the resilience comes in the aspect of outages, but it also comes in terms of our security and where we're developing those resources. It's community resilience and national resilience as well.

[Corey Hogan, Liberal, Calgary Confederation, AB]

Tying back to Mr. Malette's comments about affordability here, are there opportunities for consumers in this space, too? We've heard often that electricity grids are built for those peaks, and it's expensive to maintain those peaks, so that next megawatt hour is going to be a challenge, occasionally.

Increasingly, people have, in their garages—as you've already alluded to—an EV with a battery. An average EV battery could power my house for three days at this point.

I'm just wondering what opportunities there might be for consumers with these technologies to maybe profit from that and sell back to the grid at peaks. I think in particular about my home province of Alberta, of course, where you can have peak pricing that is pretty alluring.

[Kevin Lockhart]

At Pembina, we work with our Reframed initiative, which retrofits sick social-housing and affordable-housing buildings. Through that, one part of that work is to look at opportunities to integrate distributed resources into those buildings to then enable the retrofit, which ultimately leads to safer, healthier and more resilient homes for those most in need. Scaling that up, those same opportunities would be available to different aspects of home ownership and businesses as well.

We also look at how we can leverage time-of-use pricing, which isn't necessarily in place in all provinces, to then have homeowners and tenants participate in those load-management programs and see some contribution to affordability come back to the household.

[The Chair, Liberal, Terry Duguid]

Thank you both.

Mr. Simard, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Before I begin my speaking time, I want to make sure that the interpretation is clear.

Mr. Lockhart, can you hear me? Is it working?

[Kevin Lockhart]

I can hear.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

I hadn't planned on asking any questions on this topic. That said, I would like to briefly address the question asked by my colleague, Mr. Hogan.

During a discussion with Hydro‑Québec representatives, I learned that industrial clients can feed excess unused energy back into the grid when they reduce their consumption for their activities. However, residential clients are unable to do so owing to technical and safety considerations.

I don't know whether you have this type of information. I would like you to share your point of view, just to shed a different light on the matter.

[Kevin Lockhart]

I think that is a reflection of the maturity of the market. Large power consumers can achieve the greatest systems, or the utility can achieve the greatest energy savings through programs like that, whereas distribution to many different households can present a challenge in applying those same programs. However, as we look toward this energy future that we're discussing today, the expansion of the programs and policies that would help consumers participate in those and make contributions to the electrical system, and then also achieve either savings or some monetary or financial contribution.... I think those are in place, and they should be part of what we discuss when we talk about an electricity future.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

I agree with you. In my opinion, from a technical standpoint, a distinction must be made with regard to the possibility of feeding energy back into the grid. I think that, when it comes to houses and households, we need to look more at forms of energy efficiency.

Hydro‑Québec has a fairly well‑developed plan to this end. By 2035—this date surprised me, so I asked whether it was really 2035 and received confirmation—the plan is to recover 1,600 to 1,800 megawatts through energy efficiency and peak management programs. This constitutes enormous potential. This potential could be unlocked with the help of more effective equipment and investments in heat pumps to increase efficiency.

I know that the Quebec government already has this plan in place. I know that electrification isn't developing in the same way across the country. Quebec already has a plan, which will be completed by 2035. For your part, you may have a more pan‑Canadian vision.

Have other provinces already made projections?

There will be federal legislation on energy efficiency, which I hope won't encroach on the jurisdictions.

Are the other provinces already ready to implement this type of energy efficiency solution?

If you have any data on this topic, it would be useful for the committee.

[Kevin Lockhart]

I don't have specific information on hand with me today, but I would be happy to provide that in a follow-up.

I think when we look at the various provinces, we see leaders and tomorrow's leaders in place really driving through the different energy fuels. Quebec, as a relatively clean electricity jurisdiction, has been able to leverage different components of the energy system to mitigate some of that system expansion. As we move towards Canada's energy future and look out into the coming decades at the best of those provinces or those provincial programs and policies, we should be looking to those leaders, in Quebec amongst other provinces, for how we can help provinces that haven't moved as quickly leapfrog the various challenges experienced in their journey.