Thank you for your question.
You are correct. For a while now, ever since the Conference Board of Canada report, the amount needed to cover the next 20 years has been pegged at $350 billion.
While that may sound like a large number, I have just a couple of comments. We're essentially talking about, and I alluded to this in my opening comments, a system that was built a generation ago.
If you think of the Canadian economy as a house and think of the electricity system as the roof, we built that roof 40 years ago. We got a mortgage on it and we built it. We're saying that it's now time to put a new roof on the house, and let's do it before it starts leaking. Also, that roof is going to cost more today than the roof we bought 40 years ago did, just as anything we bought 40 years ago was a lot less expensive than it is today. The $350 billion that we're looking at is in real dollars.
The other thing is, and I want to emphasize this, this was based on a study done by the Conference Board of Canada that was talking about business as usual. As I've said to a couple of your colleagues in the past, one thing we do know about the future is that it will not be business as usual.
Personally, I would expect that the dollar figure will probably be more than that when we look at the new technologies we'll be moving towards in the future with a smarter grid, with the electrification of transportation, and so on. We don't even know what the future's going to look like 10 years from now much less 40 years from now, but we do know that from 40 years ago to today we've built a system that now needs that reinvestment.