Thank you, Catherine.
Good morning, everybody. My name is Mr. Norm Fraser. I'm the vice-president of operations at Hydro Ottawa. This is the local distribution company that supplies the city of Ottawa. In simpler terms, I'm the guy you call when the lights go out.
I'm here to talk about what electricity means to us in the industry and to the public.
If you think about your electricity bill, it arrives once every two months or so, or every month. You pay it and you don't think about it too much. You flick the switch on your wall and things happen.
You're not asking for more electricity, you're asking for the services that electricity provides: your washing machine, lighting, electronics, telephones, furnace, air conditioning, security systems--practically everything we can see.
The job of my business, the electricity business, is straightforward: generate and deliver the product reliably and cost-effectively. In Canada, we are world leaders. All Canadians enjoy the comforts and economic benefits associated with one of the most reliable and cost-effective electricity networks in the world. The measure of my success in our industry is when people don't think about it. They take it for granted; iIt's always there and it's a reasonable cost.
Now try to imagine a world in which the electricity production and delivery system isn't as reliable, or is maybe unavailable for long periods of time. Remember August 2003, and then think about the debate in Ontario in the last few years over the security of the electricity supply.
Simply, without electricity our society, as we have built it over the last four generations, would come to a halt. All our industries rely heavily on safe, secure, and affordable electricity: telecommunications, manufacturing, agriculture, banking, petrochemicals, transportation, etc. This is why we have this council.
There are thousands of highly skilled Canadians running your electricity business. They are engineers, line maintainers, transmission operators, electricians, etc. They work in generating stations, transmission companies, and distribution utilities.
They will be retiring en masse in very short order, and we have to move quickly to sustain this talent pool.
In closing, I would ask you to remember that almost all sectors in Canada are facing a similar demographic challenge, but unless we deal with electricity as a fundamental underpinning of our economy, we might as well not bother to address the others. They will not thrive in a global economy with a floundering electricity network, regardless of how robust their workforce is or how competitive they try to be.
This is why I eagerly agreed to sit on this board. I've worked in this business my whole adult life; my demographic may be part of the problem, but I'm going to work hard to make sure that I'm part of the solution.
Thank you very much.