Mr. Chairman and honourable members, thank you very much for taking the time to hear me.
My name is Johan van't Hof, and I am the chief executive officer of a publicly traded company on the Toronto Stock Exchange called Tonbridge Power Inc. My role here as a CEO is to talk to you briefly about my experiences in getting permitted a 214-mile power line that connects Lethbridge to the United States. It may come as a surprise to you that Alberta is not connected at all to the United States from an electricity perspective, which is a bit of a paradox, given that it is the energy province of our country.
I also speak to you as someone who has worked for 10 years in about 23 countries doing infrastructure finance, where many of those countries became failed countries. I pondered long and hard as I was going through this why that was, because it's very relevant to our conversation today.
I noticed that the countries that accelerate and create wealth so they can do the right things for their citizens have a stable currency, an independent judiciary, proper infrastructure that works and can be relied on, education, and a lack of corruption. Most importantly, they have a rule of law, you know what it is, and you can count on it to be enforced, so you make decisions on a risk profile that is known. In several of the countries I worked in, those factors were no longer the case. That is the case in our country, and that is one of the challenges I have with this particular bill, because it would make the test that people like me have to meet terribly opaque.
Our project is a 214-mile power line that will connect 600 megawatts of wind power to the grids in both the United States and Alberta. It is funded under the Obama stimulus bill--$161 million--and it is creating 400 jobs on both sides of the border. We are in construction now, but in order to do so we had to meet the tests of six permits, including from the National Energy Board, the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board, and the Western Electricity Coordinating Council. We had to get a presidential permit from the Department of Energy. We had to meet the NEPA and EPA standards. We met with the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, the State Historic Preservation Office, and on and on. There were over 16 agencies we had to meet.
On the environmental impact statement we had to do--and this is in an area of our country and of the United States--we do not cut down one tree. It is the plains. The spans for our poles are 1,200 feet, and the poles are only four feet in diameter, so the impact is almost minimal. The environmental impact statement was 1,100 pages. We had several dozen open houses, and we received all of our permits in 2008. We did not receive certainty on this point until the matter was resolved by the Supreme Court of Canada, because our opponents literally tried to litigate us into the ground. That is essentially where I have this issue.
It's not that we don't need environmental laws; we do. I am a proud Canadian, and I want to have a society and a country of which I'm proud when I go global. The issue is that when we look at economic growth, that means impacts. The more growth we have, the more electricity we need; the more electricity we need, the more power lines people like me have to put in. We don't put them in because we want to; we put them in because they're demanded, because people buy more televisions.
But here's the point, honourable members. Without knowing what the rule of law is, unless people like me know what the tests are--I'm happy to meet them and I'll put the capital in to meet them fully and exceed them--where the sidelines are, that they will be enforced, and I can count on them to be enforced, we're not going to go into it.
So to conclude, my concern with this bill is that it would facilitate and enable 20 years of litigation glue. Merely the threat of that litigation glue will mean that nothing gets done or proposed, because precisely the lack of legal clarity will chill any investment consideration.
A fundamental precondition of commercial development, wealth creation, and economic acceleration is that there is a rule of law that can be enforced and counted on so participants know what they have to meet, and that if they meet it they are acceptable. That is what we're asking for. We just want to know reliably what tests we need to meet. In my judgment, this bill fails that test completely.
Thank you.