Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you for this opportunity. Today we'd like to focus on investment into our economy and enabling action now.
Canada's clean energy plan needs to ensure the following—no carbon leakage, no financial leakage, no jobs leakage. As it stands, the IRA threatens each of these.
To protect our economy, our jobs and our leadership position on climate action, we need certainty and stability in our regulatory system and financing mechanisms that ensure that both public and private sector capital are accessible and efficiently allocated. Our clean energy plan should encompass the tools that create an imminent need for other jurisdictions to meet our performance standards, given our history with economy-wide carbon pricing, active carbon markets across the country and multiple successful incentive programs. However, we need to streamline these financing mechanisms to incent further action.
It is clear that we need to do more, because the scale and scope of our investments are not sufficient to keep pace with the IRA. Canada's clean energy plan can create domestic jobs by greening our value chain through distributed technologies and by providing large infrastructure projects with the certainty they require to operate over the long term.
Subsequently, we need to be proud of our products like liquefied natural gas and our homegrown technologies like methane mitigation from oil and gas, as each contributes to a cleaner global energy economy. There's no doubt that we are seeing significant innovations, large and small, in Canada: in transportation, such as hydrogen, electrification; in agriculture, such as methane reduction through cattle feed additives; in the built environment, with heat pumps; in oil and gas, with methane emission reduction technologies; and in partnerships with indigenous nations.
We're seeing this permeate now into other growth sectors like lithium, CCUS, biofuels and geothermal. And let's not forget about the unicorn success story in direct air capture with the recent acquisition of Carbon Engineering, out of British Columbia, by U.S.-based Oxy Petroleum, a clear signal that the IRA is driving massive investment into clean energy solutions.
We need a suite of new financial incentives that efficiently deploy capital to our high-emitting sectors, and we must not halt programs or initiatives like our functioning offset system, which generates substantial emissions reductions. We have the data to prove it.
Please welcome my business partner, Mr. Al Duerr, to provide further comments.