Madam Speaker, it has been a good summer, and it is nice to see you back here in the House of Commons. It is also nice to see my friend and colleague from Kitchener Centre. The member from the Green Party is a voice of reason in this House, and I want to thank him for bringing really good ideas forward to this House.
I have accepted this new position as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, and every time I have stood up in the House of Commons on behalf of the minister until now, it has unfortunately been to speak to the opposite, to speak to members of the Conservative Party who believe that we are doing too much to fight climate change and that we should do less to fight climate change. It is refreshing to be sitting just down the way from a member who believes, like I do, that we ought to do more to fight climate change and who agrees that creating a clear path forward to a net-zero electricity grid by 2035 is absolutely essential to enabling other parts of the economy to decarbonize by switching fuels.
To exemplify why I personally believe that this is so important, I have a brief anecdote. I often talk about my past as an Olympic athlete in this House. It is where I come from. We all come from different places in this House. There are 338 members with 338 different backgrounds. When I was 20 or 22 years old, I was training at a very high level. In 2005, the air quality was so bad in Ontario that I actually had to travel to Europe for the remainder of the summer to complete my training for the world championships. This was disappointing because, living in Canada, we grow up thinking that this is a beautiful and clean country with a massive hinterland and lots of trees that clean our air. However, the fact was, back then, in 2005, that Ontario still relied on coal to generate electricity, which led to really bad air quality levels. In 2005, there were actually over 40 smog days in the province of Ontario, which disproportionately affected our little area, halfway between Hamilton and Toronto, on Sixteen Mile Creek at the Burloak Canoe Club.
I was really proud of the fact, back then, that the Liberals of the day ran on a commitment to end all coal-fired power generation, and that we, in Ontario, were actually the first jurisdiction in North America to do so. It is important to recognize that today, in 2023, we are 15 years or so removed from that reality of ending coal-fired power, and since then we have not had a single smog day. These policy decisions have a really important impact on our life, our health, our livelihood, our communities and certainly our ability to fight climate change, which is the most existential threat of our generation.
All G7 countries have committed to net-zero electricity by 2035, and the U.S. government just released its clean power regulation last spring. A clean electricity grid is also becoming an increasingly important factor in international competitiveness, as investors, industry and consumers are all looking for clean power.
Our government is using a range of tools, including regulations, investment tax credits and funding programs, to clean Canada's electricity grid, and it is working closely with provinces to identify regional priorities for clean energy.
I would like to acknowledge that across Canada, every province has a different intermix of electricity generation. We have provinces, like Saskatchewan and Alberta, that still use quite a lot of coke, coal and a majority of natural gas. Gratefully, in Ontario, our strong hydroelectric contributions, as well as nuclear, mean that over 80% of our grid is greenhouse gas-free. It means that only 6% of our electricity generation comes from natural gas. However, it is important to make sure that this does not grow. We want to make sure that our grids get cleaner and cleaner, particularly the ones that are still using coke and coal to generate electricity, which is last-century technology.
To send clear and early signals to investors and utilities, we published the draft clean electricity regulations in August 2023 for public comment. This will set a technology-neutral emissions performance standard that fossil fuel-fired electricity generation will need to meet by 2035. Those draft regulations include some flexibilities to enable some provinces and utilities to continue to provide reliable and affordable energy and electricity to their consumers as they transition to 100% clean electricity. Those flexibilities enable some ongoing natural gas generation in strictly circumscribed conditions. It is certainly not all and certainly not in the way of growing those capacities.
The CER, along with other complementary measures, will help spur investments in clean electricity and send strong signals to avoid investment in new unabated—