Mr. Speaker, my colleague raises a compelling point.
When I was head of the carpenters union, I conducted a study that showed that job creation through energy conservation actually employed as much as seven times the number of people as the extraction of energy production. A unit of energy harvested from the existing system through the demand side management is indistinguishable from a unit of energy created at a generating station, except that it is available at about one-third the cost, creates seven times the person-years in employment, does not create greenhouse gases and it is available online immediately. In other words, as soon as one turns a light switch off, the unit of energy one saves is available to resell to someone else at the same moment instead of six, eight or ten years to build a new generating station.
The way of the future, the largest single source of energy in the country, is that energy wasted in the current system. Harvesting that energy out of the current system would put more people to work and would be more sustainable than the extraction option that we seem to be reliant on today.