Madam Speaker, no, it was not an electric Bobcat, but one day it will be an electric Bobcat, despite the fact that Conservatives will do everything possible to try to prevent that from happening.
Let us think about this for a second. I gave a very easy example in responding to a member earlier. He said the ticket price of an EV vehicle is about $15,000 more than that of a combustion engine vehicle. Let us assume we stay on the low end of things. I did a quick Google search to see how much gas the average vehicle uses in its lifetime. It is between 50,000 and 200,000 litres of gas.
Let us stay on the low end. I will not even push the high end; my vehicle is clearly way on the high end. If that vehicle is going to use 100,000 litres and the average price is $1.20 a litre, which I think is fair to say would be on the low end, that is $120,000 we are spending on gas during the lifetime of that vehicle.
Of course, there is going to be another red herring, which is that it is going to cost so much for the electricity. I have great news: With the technology in my EV, my F-150, I can plug it in and it knows not to bother charging until we have gone into the off-peak hours. It charges overnight, and I pay a lot less.
This is from somebody who has been driving EVs since 2011. The actual impact on our utility bill is negligible since there are too many other variables on the utility bill to see the difference. That is the reality of it. I have owned three Toyota Tundras. I have put $150 in gas into those vehicles every week, week and a half for 10 years.
I have owned an F-150 Lightning for two years and two weeks. I would never go back. To any of the members here, I have it in Ottawa. I will pull up and take them for a drive. I will rent a trailer, and we can drive around the Gatineau region with it and I can bring them back here. I will show them that in reality, what they are saying, these red herrings they keep putting forward, is factually incorrect. To any member of the House who would like this demonstration, I will openly do it at their convenience just to show them that what they are saying is absolutely inaccurate.
I used an example earlier, because what the program is really about is incentivizing the marketplace and getting people and industry to start to look for different options. Yes, EVs are more expensive. An EV right now, and I will take the member's word for it, is probably about $15,000 more than a gas equivalent. However, it was not like that 10 years ago. Ten years ago it was about $60,000 more for the gas equivalent. Why is the price coming down? It is because governments around the world have been incentivizing private investors and private companies to find solutions and to mass produce product.
One would think Elon Musk, the darling child of the right, would be able to convince my colleagues on the other side of the House, but they seemingly do not even want to believe him. However, I am sure they believe just about everything else he says as it relates to his politics.
Earlier, I used the example of the lighting in here, which is LED lighting. Twenty-five or 30 years ago, we did not have LED lighting in this room, but rather the incandescent light bulb, which is extremely inefficient. It produces a ton of heat, a ton of waste and creates a lot of expense in the process of producing the light. What did the Ontario government do back in the early 2000s? It said it wanted to phase out and transition toward another technology that was a lot more efficient. What did it do? It said that by a certain date, I believe it was 10 years, the incandescent light bulb could no longer be sold in Ontario. What happened there? Industry started to look for options.
The first option was the compact fluorescent light bulb. Do members remember those spirally little light bulbs? Everybody was using those light bulbs at first. There was incentivization. If people went to a Home Depot or a Canadian Tire, there were little stickers they could pull off to get two or three dollars off the purchase of each light bulb. That was a government incentive that helped consumers pay the increased costs, knowing that later on those same options would end up costing less.
This is basic economics 101. One would think the party that purports to be the champion of understanding how an economy works would understand basic economic principles like this, yet Conservatives do not. What happened later on? It turned out the compact fluorescent light bulb was just a bridge to get to something else, because next came the LED light bulb. Now, as a result of Ontario and many other jurisdictions making that call 20 years ago, the only thing we can buy when we go into a store is an LED light bulb. As a matter of fact, if for some reason someone needs an incandescent light bulb, they end up paying more for it than an LED light bulb.
As a result of government intervention 25 years ago, we now have a more efficient light bulb that is cheaper to produce, to buy and to operate. The consumer wins all around. To boot, the Ontario government actually helped people buy those before as well. This is not ground-breaking. It is the exact same logic for the transition through the light bulb or the transition through any technology when government has seen the benefit and identifies the need to do that.
We can continue to listen to the red herrings, like the member for Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong talking about the gas tax and all the money the government is collecting at the pumps and how it could be used to help fix the roads. What about the other side of it? What if we do not do that, and we just keep polluting the environment? What about the impacts on our health system as a result of people having more respiratory problems?
Conservatives used to be the champions of the environment, that is, the Progressive Conservatives. Brian Mulroney and Flora MacDonald, from my riding, were Conservatives who understood that acid rain was a problem. Brian Mulroney led the world with respect to dealing with acid rain by bringing people together. He went to see George Bush to deal with the problem. He came up with a protocol. The same can be said about fixing the ozone layer. Conservatives led the charge on the Montreal Protocol, bringing countries from around the world together in Montreal to deal with the problems we had with the ozone and the fact it was depleting. Whatever happened to those Conservatives?