Madam Speaker, I appreciate the comment of my friend from Miramichi who has obviously thought about the consequences of the bill, but I take exception with his comments when he tries to paint the government as assisting in the development of wind and solar energy. The reality is that we produce less than 1%. Some .06% of all our energy is from wind.
The United States and Germany are ahead of us. Denmark is the leading country in the world right now. It is at 18%. It will be at somewhere between 25% and 30% by 2010. We are way behind.
Let us talk about our solar energy development. Canada lost its priority that it had begun to develop after the oil crisis of the late seventies. We lost that as recently as the last few years to Japan. Its development of cells to facilitate the use of solar energy is now significantly ahead of where we are.
The Europeans are way ahead of us on wind which is a shame because we were at least competitive with them at the start of the nineties. We were way ahead of a number of countries in the world and we have lost that in solar energy to the Japanese. It is not a proud history. It is absolutely nothing to brag about. The unfortunate part is that the country will have to buy at great expense some of this technology
Through the summer I happened to be in Calgary. Great kudos to that city. It insisted that its entire rapid transit system be operated off wind power. I was talking to the owners of the wind farm who indicated they had to buy their turbines at an expense of between 5% and 10% more from Denmark.
If they were built in Canada they would see a savings of 5% to 10%. Of course that would create jobs and the new technologies that the country needs. Because of inaction on the part of the government we are in that kind of situation. That story is repeated in many ways across the country and will continue to be for a number of years until we play catch-up.