Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I may be sharing some of my time with some of my colleagues.
I guess I'm having a little bit of a problem reconciling a couple of things here. I'm hearing from some places that there's payback, that it's cost comparable with various projects. And then I'm also I'm hearing about a 12- to 13-year length of time for cost recovery. I'm sort of doing back-of-the-envelope calculations and coming back with about 6%--based on the rule of 72--rates of return, which is not going to motivate a lot of businessmen to do that. And then I hear $136,000 per unit extra charge.
I know my own electricity bill is, even with the monthly fees and so forth, under $40 a month. And so what I actually pay for electricity, excluding the actual service charge--and I know I'm a fairly low user--is really in the neighbourhood of $20 a month, in Saskatchewan. In Ontario, the rates are crazy. So I'm having a hard time figuring out where this actually gives the best payback and where it doesn't.
I have a general question for everyone: if you didn't have extra government financing, if we just concentrated on helping you at the federal level by making regulations that made it simpler for you and cleaning up other programs that would be out there irrespective, etc., could these projects go without an extra dime of federal financing? You seem to have all taken initiative without a massive federal government program. So that's my core question. Without extra federal dollars, do these projects go?