Thank you, and greetings to the chair and to the members of the committee.
Ontario Power Generation appreciates the opportunity to make a delegation to the standing committee today. I'm also here today in my capacity as chair of the fisheries working group for WaterPower Canada.
OPG, Ontario's largest green energy generator, is focused on safe, reliable and sustainable electricity generation. The company's electricity generation portfolio has an in-service capacity of over 17,000 megawatts and operates two nuclear generating stations, one biomass-fuelled thermal generating station, one oil/gas-fuelled thermal station, a solar facility and 66 hydroelectric generating stations. As Ontario's largest clean energy provider, we maintain a critical role in Canada's greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets.
OPG has been actively involved in all aspects of the federal government's review of the Fisheries Act and in Bill C-68 since 2016. We welcome this opportunity to present today on the feasibility of implementing a third party habitat banking framework for Canada.
Similarly, WaterPower Canada, formerly known as the Canadian Hydropower Association, represents both the producers of hydroelectricity as well as the service and supply businesses that support the industry. As you've heard in past delegations, and it's important to restate it, hydro power supplies over 60% of Canada's electricity and is our largest generation source by far. The result is an electricity system that is one of the cleanest, most renewable and most reliable in the world. The generation of hydroelectricity produces virtually no greenhouse gas emissions. It can and must play a central role in achieving Canada's climate change targets.
From the outset, OPG wishes to acknowledge our support for the submissions from WaterPower Canada, as well as the Canadian Electricity Association, the Canadian Nuclear Association, and the Ontario Waterpower Association.
OPG continues to support this government's efforts to implement modern safeguards into the act. Today we are here to talk specifically about that under habitat banking.
In our previous submissions to this committee and through discussions with DFO, OPG has advocated including provisions in Bill C-68 for a habitat banking system that advances the effective and efficient management of Canadian fisheries. We have advocated added flexibility for the creation and use of credits by project proponents and third party groups in a manner that advances both fish habitat conservation objectives and economic objectives. We are encouraged to see the interest expressed by this committee to study this issue of third party banking in greater detail and the inclusion of enabling amendments to Bill C-68 during the Senate review of the bill.
We understand that the proposed provisions of Bill C-68 would allow for some capacity for the Governor in Council to regulate not only the creation, allocation and management of credits and offsets but also their potential exchange and trade. These enabling provisions represent a significant opportunity towards making another tool available for achieving net benefits for fish and fish habitat conservation in Canada.
A well-designed habitat banking system could allow for the ability to aggregate projects for the greatest benefit, large proponent-led initiatives, third party-led initiatives that proponents could support and buy into, and opportunities with well-defined cumulative benefits for multiple species, including species at risk, as Mr. Norris has alluded to. Allowing broader participation in habitat banking can support business and create economic and knowledge-building opportunities as well.
The implementation costs for habitat banking may be reduced for proponents who may not see this as their core business, while the expectation of financial incentives can expand economic and business opportunities for qualified third parties to properly manage and monitor habitat offsets. These third parties may be better equipped to aggregate regional offsetting actions on a larger scale than might be otherwise done for individual proponents.
Because they are longer-term, habitat banks can also encourage broader partnership and knowledge-building opportunities. OPG's example in this regard is the habitat bank developed through a partnership with Quinte Conservation, consultants and a local contractor to design and build the Big Island wetland near Belleville, Ontario. The investment in this habitat bank was carried out as an offset requirement under the environmental assessment for OPG's Darlington new nuclear project, well in advance of the project's being approved.
The Big Island project is a perfect example of an offsetting project that went beyond the standard like-for-like offsetting model and sought first to consider the fisheries management objectives for the water body where we were working. What was determined was that a limiting factor for fisheries productivity in Lake Ontario was not necessarily the loss of alewife, which is the species most commonly interacting with our nuclear power facilities, but rather the loss of coastal wetlands along Lake Ontario's north shore.
Equipped with this knowledge, OPG and the project partners were able to develop a project based on perpetual habitat credits to offset the potential annual loss of fish as a measure of productivity for the future Darlington nuclear facility.
When the Darlington new build was temporarily suspended, OPG was fortunate enough to utilize portions of our Big Island wetland bank to offset measures for our existing Darlington and Pickering nuclear generating stations as part of our Fisheries Act authorizations. That said, if we had not had that opportunity to reinvest those credits into our Fisheries Act authorizations, the prior investments in the Big Island wetland may have been in jeopardy.
While creating the expanded wetland would have been a good outcome from a sustainability point of view and for its habitat offset, there are few organizations that can afford to spend money up front on an offset project when there remains overall uncertainty as to whether or not the project would be approved. From this perspective, enabling a formalized third party banking regime presents an opportunity to bring practitioners together as part of a community to report on and share experiences, research efforts and knowledge of what works. OPG and other industry partners have investigated and commissioned research on habitat banking prior to embarking on the Big Island wetland project. We'd be happy to share that as written submissions to the committee if the committee so chooses.
Overall, OPG believes that enabling third party banking would not only bring increased collaboration and opportunity for aligning biodiversity offsets for fisheries, but would also enhance broader ecosystem function and restoration goals, such as wetland creation, species at risk and land conservation. I'm not the first person to mention that in our testimonies.
In closing, I'd like to thank the committee for this opportunity to provide our views on habitat banking under the Fisheries Act. OPG, as well as WaterPower Canada, would welcome the opportunity to work with DFO to help build a habitat banking system that works in the Canadian context, where resource management is a shared responsibility.
OPG looks forward to continued participation through our industry associations to assist the committee's efforts. We would also be more than happy to meet with you to review our comments and happy to take any of your questions now.
Thank you.