That wasn't a Google lookup. That was a picture I received of my granddaughter, who's four months and 27 days old today. She rolled over, so everybody's excited in our household. Her name is Arianna, and I love her very much. I'll gladly show you her picture.
Why is there urgency? Let me tell you. “We need to move very quickly, and probably with a different approach, you know, no hurdles, no timeouts”, that's what Mr. Greenspon said.
There are significant unanswered questions about the new power mix and the speed of switching away from fossil fuel power in one of the biggest political battles brewing in our country. I believe that MP Dreeshen went through a lengthy commentary on that.
Let me give you some stats. Six provinces, including the three largest, get more than 90% of their power from clean sources. That includes hydro, nuclear and wind. Four provinces—New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Alberta and Saskatchewan—still rely heavily on coal or natural gas for their electricity. The premiers of Alberta and Saskatchewan have declared the 2035 clean air regulation too costly and have said they simply won't meet them, so there are challenges. However, we know we have to move in this direction. We have to make an investment. We have a very short runway of 25 years, and here we go. It took us over a century to get here, and now we have to work faster, and we have to work smarter.
All of those elements I talked to you about are things that we really need to hear from witnesses. I personally don't think that four sessions is enough, but if we can get all those answers in four sessions, I'm all for it. The sooner we start on this thing, the better it is. The federal government is quite flexible. We are ready to work with the provinces. We are ready to work with generators. We work with entities that are in charge of transmission. They need to come in and work together to create that think tank on how we can move.
We already know the questions. Now we have to find the answers. It's 25 years and $80 billion a year in my estimate. We know the sources of generation. We need to look at different ways. We need to be innovative, we need to be agile, and we need to make sure that the end solution means that we have adequate, reliable, affordable and accessible sources of green electricity.
Mr. Chair, I'll end by saying once again that I believe the urgency, and I hope I have demonstrated, over the last whatever minutes that I talked about this, the urgency that's needed for us to deal with all of those elements. The urgency is today, but I don't think that study should supersede the study we are in.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.