Thank you for that.
I wanted to establish the approach, certainly, and I would agree with you that you don't want to put too much on this: it is to design to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not to provide you with all of your social policy instruments, etc. I agree with that.
In fact, I think of a provincial experience, and it is from Manitoba—I happen to have a brother who lives there and knows a bit about it. They used conservation as the way to go and provided very low-interest loans for retrofits. They then allowed people to pay those off through savings in their energy bills, and of course that reduced the amount of energy that consumers and businesses were using. For Manitoba that was good news because it meant they had more excess energy to sell.
I want to go to this point, because what they've done is successfully reduce up to 40% of their consumption in energy, which they then are able to sell. The sad part is—not sad for Manitoba but for Canada in some respects—that they seem to have only buyers as of late, though it's changed a bit, from the northern States. Quebec has the same phenomenon.
The direction I want to go in with this is that we heard that the President and the Prime Minister were discussing investment in a smart grid. We applaud that. One of the things we'd been pushing for in the last two elections was to have an east-west grid built.
How do you—and anyone else can please chime in on this—see the conversations that have taken place to date on energy policy and infrastructure? In other words, where should we be putting our investment dollars when it comes to the grid? The east-west grid seems to need some work, if we're going to go that route. But some might say, just do it north-south; that makes more sense. It seems the Americans are going to be going there. They've certainly announced a lot of money for this, and it's been front and centre in their energy policy.
Where should Canada be when it comes to that particular file? Should we be doing just east-west? Should we do a bit of both? How should it work?