The Green Energy Act has been awesome. It has pushed hundreds of thousands of people into poverty and it has created an environment where business is fleeing. The only businesses that are surviving are those that are in solar and wind and are making big donations to your provincial counterparts. This is the reality.
If we want to influence the process as a committee—and I believe that's our job—we can either do studies on what happened in the past or we can do a study and propose solutions and opportunities to the government, which they can then institute and speak to the provinces about. Then we can hopefully come up with a system that is better tomorrow than what we've seen happen in the past. That's the opportunity we have. We have the opportunity to influence, through good policies and the use of good data, what the government will actually do. We can do that or we can wait for this thing to blow up again, just as the Green Energy Act did in Ontario, and for the next 15 years talk about how we wish we had thought this through.
There are places and jurisdictions in Canada that have done it well. Let's study what they are doing. There are jurisdictions that will come online and provinces like Ontario that will come online next year.
If we have the opportunity to help provide feedback and ideas, let's do that. I don't think it's a good process to put ourselves on the sidelines until after someone somewhere has made the decision without any data backing up what they're doing. You wouldn't see that in the private sector; that's for darned sure.