Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
It's nice to see you again, Mr. Bradley. We've spoken at several committees about electric generation. I want to talk a little about that. As you mentioned, as we're doing this transition we're going to decarbonize the electric grid, but we also have to expand the electric grid at the same time. We probably have to double or triple that if we're going to get to the zero-emission vehicle standards.
On that, at this committee Mr. Kingston said that we're quite behind on the charging infrastructure and the actual number of chargers.
When we talked at the last committee about the expansion of the electric grid and how we're going to expand it, Mr. Gorman said, ”This question keeps me up at night.”
I have asked you about this, and you said it's not really the federal government's responsibility to build out the electric grid. But when the federal government is mandating zero-emission vehicles, the electric grid is going to have to be expanded.
This is going to cost a lot of money. For example, in Ontario, OPG is already $15.1 billion in debt, so if one were to just say to OPG that it needs to double its electric grid, where will the money come from? It is the same thing all across the country.
Do you agree that the federal government is going to have to take a role in this? This is a national project of mandating zero-emission vehicles, and the government says we're going to have all this electric battery capacity here, it's going to be wonderful, but we probably need to be able to plug the cars in somewhere and generate the electricity.
What are your thoughts on that?