Finance committee  It may be indirect, but instead I'd like to emphasize that the cost of renewable energy has declined sharply in recent years and continues to fall. The International Energy Agency has declared that renewable energy is now the cheapest energy in history. It makes no sense to allocate these sums to small reactors.

Finance committee  I think one thing that's really critical is to create some policy certainty. For instance, I appreciate that the government has brought in a price on carbon pollution across Canada and has indicated what this price is going to be out to the year 2030 to ensure that we don't have these lurches in policy that have been happening at the provincial level.

Finance committee  I think the way we look at this tax credit is that, first of all, you have this technology that continues to disappoint. Wherever it's used, we're promised a whole bunch of emissions reductions and that a certain percentage of the carbon is going to be captured, and typically that has come in much lower than expected.

Finance committee  Well, just quickly, I'll speak to the building retrofits side of things. We really need to see deep energy retrofits. While there are some good investments being made there, the thing you don't want to do is a partial retrofit, where you don't get the full benefit of a deep retrofit, which allows you to basically electrify your building, really reduce your energy consumption and completely switch the building off fossil fuels, for instance.

Finance committee  I'm very pleased to be here today. Thank you, committee members, for the invitation. As you know, the climate crisis is accelerating, and I understand many of you in Ottawa are on Zoom today because it was impossible to travel around, as electricity is still out in many parts of town.