Good morning and thank you for inviting us.
I'm the executive director of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. The CAE, just by way of background, is one of Canada's three national academies, the other two being the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.
Let's go back to 2011. One of our fellows, Lorne Trottier, believed that it was important to create a project that would help guide Canada toward deep greenhouse gas cuts, so he financed, through his family foundation, a project that eventually became the Trottier energy futures project. The project went on for about five years and it wrapped up in 2016. When it did finish, it was under the management of the CAE and some contractors we had hired to project-manage the report. It was seriously peer-reviewed at the end of the day, and the results came out in 2016.
As part of the project, there were two primary mathematical modelling teams, Kathleen Vaillancourt's company and another company based here in Ottawa called whatIf? Technologies.
I won't go into the details or conclusions of the report. That information is available on our website if people are interested. However, in the process of doing the modelling and having all the models communicate with each other and provide us with useful results, the modelling teams found a number of major shortcomings in the data that is available. That is why we're here today: to talk about the problems that we encountered during that work.
With that, I'll pass it over to Kathleen.