I guess it was Robert Kennedy who said the economy is a subset of the environment. You can't have a functioning economy if there's big trouble in the environment.
My dad, who was a Conservative member of this Parliament many years ago, put up solar systems in the late sixties. He was involved in putting up some of the first wind turbines in P.E.I. and the Gaspé. He and my brother invented a hybrid car, imagine that, something he tried to convince Ford to pick up on in the seventies after the big oil crisis. Unfortunately, the price of gas had fallen back, and nobody was interested any more. Instead, the Japanese got the idea, and now everybody is buying their cars.
If we'd been out ahead of it.... We've got the Canadian minds that can be in front. There's a company now in Ontario that has one of the best solar photovoltaic-cell-producing technologies in the world. Guess where they're going to build their first big plant? They're going to build it in East Germany. Why? Because the Germans have a policy to purchase solar electricity and to have it installed on buildings and to have utilities be required, in renewable portfolio standard regulations, to purchase it, and that creates a sufficient market. They decided to put it in a high unemployment area in East Germany because they thought they could help a struggling economy.
To me, that's an example of how, if we took a different view of the economy and the new energy futures that are in front of us that we could build together, we could build a much stronger economy.
I'll close with one example. For six years I had the privilege of being the vice-chair of the fourth or fifth largest utility business in Canada. Our most profitable sector per dollar of capital invested was helping people buy less of our electricity. We made far more money helping them renovate their homes and their buildings through the Better Buildings Partnership my firm helped design. We made far more money doing that and created a lot more work in Toronto than we did by selling electrons.
I think the possibilities are enormous. Why is it that all our kids and our technical workers are having to get on planes and fly out to Fort McMurray to work in the energy sector? So much so that there aren't enough of them and we're having to fly them in from all around the world. Why not work on energy down at Mrs. Smith's house by helping her renovate her home so she doesn't have to pay the heating bills and create some construction work and create a revolving fund like we had the opportunity to be involved in at the FCM and other places? There are solutions. This is something that can help the economy.
The last fundamental principle: inefficiency is bad for business. What we're doing right now with energy is unbelievably inefficient.