Thank you very much, Chair.
I appreciate the opportunity to conclude what I wanted to share with the committee at the previous meeting when we ran out of time.
I had my last two points, Chair, that I wanted to add.
One of the reasons the study we were working on before this motion was presented is so important for my community is the aspect of the discussion that we were having and were going to have regarding the electricity grid across the country, but more specifically, in our case, the resiliency of that grid—what exists and what needs to be put in place to meet the energy needs of not just Canadians today but also future generations of Canadians, and to make that transition to a greener, less carbon-intensive economy.
The reason that's important for my community and the reason I truly want to conclude the study we're on first and foremost before we move on to any other business—unless it truly is about the safety and security of Canadians, at which point perhaps I would have a different approach—is that the study we're on, at least for members of my community, is about their safety and security.
Since 2017—so in the last seven years, Chair—my community has experienced two once-in-a-century floods, one in 2017 and then again in 2019, in response to which our armed forces were asked to come to the aid of my citizens, to remove them from their homes and to put in place sand walls to protect their homes and to protect critical infrastructure from the rising water.
That was in 2017 and 2019, and then, Chair, a couple of years later, just last year, we had an ice storm that caused a blackout across Quebec and southeastern Ontario and that resulted in hundreds of thousands of Quebeckers' losing power.
My honourable colleague Mr. Simard remembers that, I'm sure.
In my community, tens of thousands of people had no access to power. To compound that, as elected representatives—and I referenced this in the previous meeting, Chair—because the power went out and knocked out all of the transformers and all of the distribution lines for telecommunications at the same time, we couldn't even communicate with each other. I couldn't communicate with my provincial representatives, who couldn't communicate with the 13 mayors who make up my community. We couldn't coordinate our response.
A role that I had taken very seriously was using my social media platforms to help share what the mayors were doing, which community centres were being opened, etc., and I wasn't even able to do that.
It got to the point—and my team will remember this well—where every day for four days, I drove to Ottawa, just so I could have telecommunications, so that I wouldn't be the cause of a breakdown in communications with my fellow elected representatives. I would drive into Ottawa in the morning, spend the day trying to communicate with my elected representatives and then drive back home to be with my family overnight to make sure they were protected because we didn't have power overnight either.
For me, the important aspect of this discussion is what we need to do to Canada's electrical grid right now to make it more resilient, to ensure that whatever we are investing in not only looks to the future but also addresses the challenges that communities like my community, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, are facing right now.
Continuing the study we are on is paramount to me. I've said publicly—and I stated this three or four times in the previous meeting—that I am looking forward to doing the study that was put forward by Mr. Angus. When that time comes, I look forward to embarking on that debate and to asking important questions on behalf of my community, but to me, as a representative for Vaudreuil-Soulanges, one is paramount to the safety and security of my community, and one is not.
The second point I want to address before I turn the floor over to the next speaker, is the economic benefits of that transition, of those investments that need to come and that are going to come in the next-generation electricity grid that we need to put in place and the next generation of clean energy that we need to put in place.
I feel that in that regard Quebec is a leader. Not only has Quebec been blessed with an abundance of hydroelectricity, which makes our electricity the cleanest in the world and which is why companies are coming here to establish their factories and businesses, whether it's the cleanest aluminum produced in the world, battery manufacturing plants or mining....
They're setting up here because they know that to produce whatever they're going to produce and to be able to trade with our American and European counterparts, which are all putting in place stringent measures to ensure the products they're producing are as green as they can possibly be and requiring imports in the future to be the same.... Quebec is not just resting on that but is looking for ways to build on that and maximize that access to the cleanest electricity that exists in the world.
An example of that is the analysis that was done of transitioning to green technology. The Quebec government said that we have the capacity to produce certain things and we don't have the capacity to produce other things. For the things that we can't produce, how can we build that in-house capacity to build what we need to build here to reach our carbon targets and make sure we continue to be one of the greenest places to produce electricity and to produce goods and then sell those goods in the market?
A good example of that, Mr. Simard, I'm sure, is—