Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today. It is my first opportunity to rise in the House since the last election. I would like to thank the voters in Huron—Bruce for their support through the years. I certainly appreciate it. It is humbling; I will say that. I would also like to thank my family and extended family for their great support through the years. I would also like to thank all the fantastic volunteers. For anybody in the House of Commons or anybody who ran in an election in a big rural riding, I say it is quite a challenge. We have volunteers in every community and every town, and they really help out, putting up signs and door knocking. It really is a big effort. I thank all of them.
I am going to share my time with the member of Parliament for Algonquin—Renfrew—Pembroke, a great colleague of mine. Her speech will be up after mine and will likely be 10 or 20 times better than mine, but we will hear everybody's speech.
With the EV mandate that is being brought forward, I do not think it is important to debate what a person likes better. If we like an electric vehicle, if we like an electric truck or if we like a diesel truck or a gas truck, that is our preference. Probably, we would all agree that the issue comes down to how, by 2035, whether we still desire to purchase a gas or diesel vehicle that suits our lifestyle needs, whether we live in a rural or remote area or whether we use it for business, that is something I do not think we need to be penalized for, in terms of $20,000 a vehicle. I think most people would agree with that.
The idea of and the evolution of electric vehicles is on display every time we get in our car and drive up and down a road. Where we never used to see one, we see one at every grocery store. Whatever area we are doing our shopping in, we will see one. We will see charging stations. It has evolved very well over the last 15 to 20 years and likely will only continue to grow. I do not think that this is the debate anybody is really having in here. It is just about how we are going to put the hammer down by 2035 and penalize those whom it probably is not going to work for. When we are doing that, we are saying it is for everybody. I do not think Canadians are saying that.
To take the most simplistic example, I used to have a gas-fired chainsaw and a gas-fired grass trimmer. My neighbour sells Makita battery-operated chainsaws, drills, lawnmowers and so on. One day, he said to me that I am just a weekend warrior, no offence, and he asked me why I did not get into one of these, because then I would not have to worry about it not starting when I wanted it to, etc., etc. I said I did not know. He let me borrow his. The next day, I went over and said I would buy one, and so I started off with the battery-operated grass trimmer, and it is fantastic.
The point is that this is a market-driven demand. I saw a better option that worked for me. For someone who is in the forestry business, an 18-volt or whatever-volt battery that is going in our chainsaw is not going to work for that person, but for a weekend warrior like me, who needs to cut some branches or a little tree that needs to be taken care of, it works great. If we take that approach, it would be a much more logical and sensible approach that Canadians would agree with.
It does not matter if we are 25 years old or if we are getting close to 50 years old or if we are 80 years old, we can make those decisions that work best for us. Nobody wants to go out to their shed and pull it out. If we are only using it once a month in the summertime, we want the thing to work. If it is battery operated, it is going to work.
There are two other considerations here. I am from Ontario, and the consideration I would have is the actual electrical grid. I checked this morning, just before I was up to speak, and the demand for Ontario was about 17,500 megawatts and it is only going to continue to go up today, likely to 20,000 megawatts or somewhere around there. The supply and demand in Ontario's grid is pretty tight when we get into June and July and air conditioning season, etc. The 2035 mandate is really going to be tight for Ontario.
Now, I am sure all politicians will say that we can meet the challenge, we can do it, but if we actually ask the people who have to build the electrical plants, they may be a little skeptical, especially considering all the red tape involved in a new build, regardless of what source of energy it will be. The grid has to be a big part of this; it has to be a big consideration in this.
The IESO put out a report in 2024 that basically outlined the two biggest drivers in demand growth for electricity in Ontario until 2050. There is R1, which we are talking about today, the electrical car mandate. The other is something that has come up as an election promise, and I am sure the government will try and follow through on it: all the data centres that are going to be required for AI. If we look at these two drivers for electricity to 2025, we are going to be really up against it.
The numbers are, roughly, that about 200,000 electric vehicles will use about 5,000 megawatts on average. As the fleet continues to grow, we can see that if we are adding 20,000, 30,000 or 40,000 EVs every year to a province, that is going to really chew into the electrical supply. What we need to do collectively here is to say that we know people like electric vehicles, and we want to be able to provide car manufacturers the ability to make these vehicles, but we also cannot handcuff everyday people in Ontario with not having enough electricity.
We saw what happened in California a couple of years ago with Gavin Newsom. He actually had to tell people there were certain days and certain hours when they could not charge their car. Well, if a person is retired and not having to do everything all the time, that is one thing, but for a parent with kids, running them to hockey, baseball, soccer and music, and going back and forth to work, the possibility of having charging restrictions may not work as well. I am not trying to throw fear into the discussion here, but that is just the reality of what happened, and it was probably because of poor planning of the electrical grid and some other conditions.
Something I think we need to consider is the complete cycle of this. That is a reality of the mandate as we get to 2035, and it will be a challenge. If we look at the IESO report, it anticipates that there could be new builds for some forms of electricity by 2035, but every day that goes by, we are further along.
The other point I really want to talk about is the complete life cycle. Years ago, I worked in the automotive parts manufacturing business. The other point is the recycling of these batteries, which is a reality. If we are adding hundreds of thousands of vehicles with electric batteries in them every year, they cannot just get thrown into the junkyard. There has to be the ability for the entire industry, and the governments that promote these vehicles, to recycle these vehicles safely, environmentally and ethically.
We know the recyclers will take all the nickel and cobalt they can get out of it, because that is the lucrative part of the recycling, but there are the plastics, the copper and aluminum; all of those should be ethically taken out as well. There was a company, Li-Cycle, a recycler in the U.S., mainly, that recently filed for chapter 15 bankruptcy protection, and a company does not file for that if it is making hordes of money recycling these batteries. It could not get its costs down quick enough to make a go of it.
If we have a complete cycle, it makes sense. If governments are going to promote this and we are going to do it, we have to have a complete cycle in the sector. We have to find a way to recycle these vehicles when they come to the end of their life. If we are going to claim an electric vehicle is environmentally friendly because it does not emit, which I can agree with, then we have to be able to recycle the entire car.
