Thanks, Mr. Chair. I appreciate that.
Thanks to all the witnesses for being here today.
Patrick, I want to raise a concern with you here and give you an opportunity to clarify. Then I'll probably move to the other witness after that. Here's what my concern is.
Your testimony so far echoes and is perfectly in line with what we've heard from experts before on this committee. In October 2017, for example, the professional lead and chief economist at the National Energy Board talked about the need for better data on energy, but what concerns me is that she said:
When we're looking at policy and changes to the energy system, if we had better [information].... What is the current state of events? We also have very poor information in Canada with respect to renewables. We have struggled...to fill that gap. We've put out renewables reports, but there is much work that could be done on the data side of that.
Then just last week the VP of the strategy and analysis unit said:
That would go to one of the gaps that people speak about, renewable energy. A lot of renewable energy is not tied into traditional data gathering sources, so we need a new method to find the information about renewable energy sources, use, uptake, and costs....
Naturally, I would agree that all this information is required. Here's what my concern is, and I'm not asking you to comment on this part. Of course there are multiple levels of government trying to drive consumers away from various sources of energy to renewable and alternative energies, probably faster than the market or the technology is leading. That's not the debate I want to get into. The fact is that the way governments are trying to do that is with billions of dollars in subsidies and legislative frameworks to try to force that shift.
For example, in terms of the percentage of the total amount of federal grants and contributions in Canada given to the energy sector in 2016 to 2017, 75% went to wind—75% of the total subsidies in the energy sector—much of it in direct subsidies. Only 6% went to fossil fuels. That was mostly in tax deductions or in capital cost allowances, and here you've said that defining what data is needed and capturing it is a requirement.
This is what my concern is. For example, in Ontario, we know that some of these projects have somehow been given exemptions from the Species at Risk Act in order to be rammed through. They've cost taxpayers billions of dollars. There have been several collapses of renewable and alternative energy companies in the U.S., which have not only put taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars of the investments that were put into them but also incurred back-end reclamation and environmental costs involving thousands of square metres of hazardous waste.
This is a major commitment that governments are making on behalf of taxpayers. What deeply concerns me is that clearly from your own testimony, and from testimony of other representatives here, there is a critical lack of data and information even relating to, for example, environmental impacts and cumulative impacts. We're heard that said specifically about alternative and renewable energies.
Therefore it seems to me that if your testimony is true that this level of data is missing, that should be a serious and priority concern for provincial and territorial and federal governments that are charging ahead, sinking billions of tax dollars and picking winners and losers in certain kinds of energy development versus others.
I don't know if you have any comment about how we could expedite the capturing of this required data without creating a brand new separate agency or department or branch of government to do that. Then it would cost both private sector investors and taxpayers even more to collect data that clearly government should have been collecting a long time before it was ever sinking one dollar into picking certain types of development over others.
