Thank you very much.
Mr. Wolinetz, in your opening remarks, you touched on something that's extremely important in my riding and in a lot of areas across the country, and that's the impact on rural Canadians.
I'm concerned about the viability for rural Canada going forward, especially as the cost of living and the cost of energy go up with these, whether they be policies like the carbon tax and clean fuel standards and regulations, or just the transportation costs they're going to have for all of this change in energy. We also know that it's going to have a disproportionate impact seniors on fixed incomes and have a massive impact on people who are already living in energy poverty in our urban communities.
When we're looking at jobs for rural Canada, one of the strengths of rural Canada is that you can live with a lower wage—or at least it used to be the case that you could make minimum wage or a little higher and still be able to afford to live in rural Canada. These days, that's not so much the case, because the cost of everything is going up. This energy transition continues to drive costs higher for these people, but the wages don't increase with them.
For the people in rural Canada and for seniors on fixed incomes and people in energy poverty, how can we justify continuing down this path that we're headed on?