Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen members of the committee, good afternoon. I want to thank Mr. Bigelow, the clerk of the committee, for his excellent work in facilitating our appearance today.
I first want to thank you for inviting us to testify today on behalf of the Canadian Council on Renewable Energy—also known as CanCORE—on Canada's international leadership in clean growth and climate change.
CanCORE is a collaboration of the four main national professional associations for renewable energy: solar, wind, marine and hydroelectric energy. Together, our members represent more than 65% of all energy production in Canada today.
Canada has one of the cleanest electricity systems in the world, thanks to its plentiful hydro power and, increasingly, other renewables such as wind, solar and marine. Canada is really a global leader in renewable electricity. As such, renewable electricity is our competitive advantage in climate action.
CanCORE's overarching goal is to ensure that Canada moves toward achieving our national non-emitting electricity target of 90% by 2030 and has close to a 100% non-emitting electricity grid by 2050. This is in support of our national climate action and clean growth objectives and international obligations under the Paris Agreement, including a national emissions reduction of 30% below 2005 levels by 2030.
Toward this goal CanCORE has three key messages for the committee on the topic of Canadian international leadership on clean growth and climate change.
First, international leadership requires that ambitious national targets and goals are both set and met. By 2020 Canada will not have met our international climate change greenhouse gas mitigation commitments on a number of occasions. For this reason we view the pan-Canadian framework and the pathway it places Canada on as a monumental first step.
Second, the pan-Canadian framework follows a formula that makes our energy use as efficient and our electricity generation as non-emitting as possible, and switches as many energy uses to non-emitting electricity as possible, such as transportation, buildings and industry. For this reason we view the national targets set by the government to strive to have 90% of our electricity from non-emitting sources by 2030 as one of our most critical factors for success. The cleaner our grid, the deeper our decarbonization across all sectors of the economy. Enhancing our leadership position in non-emitting electricity can also assist our neighbours to the south to decarbonize their economy through exports.
Third and last, with the pan-Canadian framework we now have a national climate strategy for the first time. We have all the targets and goals we need. The pathway to fulfilling this strategy will create significant economic development and job creation opportunities domestically. Our national leadership will translate to huge opportunities globally in the clean energy economy.
Now we need to move from climate planning to climate action, though. It's time to focus on getting implementation of the pan-Canadian framework right.
My colleague Mr. Bateman will now talk about specific policies and regulations that could considerably influence our capacity to reach 90% non-emitting electricity by 2030.