Merci beaucoup.
My name is Bruce Lourie, and I'm president of the Ivey Foundation.
The Ivey Foundation is a 70-year-old philanthropic granting and policy research organization. We have today a programmatic mission to help Canada transition to a low-carbon future using evidence-based policy and communications. Our goal is to better integrate the economy and the environment. We're basically an independent organization that provides grants and undertakes research in the low-carbon economy, and we support many of the groups that are working in Canada , such as the Ecofiscal Commission and Clean Energy Canada. I've done a lot of work with a previous speaker, Allan Fogwill, at CERI. We basically work with groups across the country.
Our work has included—and I think Allan mentioned this—convening experts across the country. We've done workshops in Toronto, Calgary, Ottawa, Montreal, and Vancouver, bringing together energy regulators, energy companies, provincial governments, Statistics Canada, the National Energy Board, NGOs, expert private modellers, experts from the U.K., and experts from the U.S. basically to help understand how we can create a more rigorous energy-data and energy-modelling capacity in this country.
One of the things that we discovered in that—and I'll share just a couple of anecdotes—is that if you're a Canadian energy-resources researcher or an energy-systems modeller or a climate-policy consultant, I'm not sure if you know where you are likely to get your data and information from. It's not Natural Resources Canada. It's not the Department of Environment and Climate Change. It's not Statistics Canada. It's the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Most of us in Canada doing research on these things actually have to go to a U.S. department to get the data that's compiled for us by this American government agency. Of course it's worth considering that, given the geopolitical context right now in North America, and given that we're doing things like negotiating NAFTA, I can almost guarantee that some of the information that we're using in those negotiations was generated by the U.S. government. I think that's a situation that clearly needs to change.
Canada's energy information systems were once very well regarded, but I'm going back many decades now. The support for science and energy data began to unravel in the mid- to late 1990s with precipitous declines through the early 2000s and up until very recently. I heard a story recently of two federal government climate change policy experts, one in Canada and one in the U.S. The Canadian was saying, “We wonder how in the U.S., with all of your data infrastructure, your energy experts, your think tanks, and your sophisticated models, you cannot come up with any national climate policies.” The American replied, saying, “That's funny. We always wonder how, given that you have none of those, you still manage to in Canada.”
We have a challenge in this country. The reality is we're—