My question is to the Minister of Energy.

Last week, I asked the minister what he was going to do to protect people from the risk of power outages this summer. That same day, hours after the minister told me that everything was fine, wonderful and under control, 8,500 people in Kanata–Carleton lost their power, apparently because the local grid couldn’t handle the heat.

The minister needs to take action now to ensure we don’t face much larger outages this summer as people deal with climate-driven extreme heat events. Will he take action?

I want to go back on this. I listened to the minister last week. I listened to him today. I’ve heard about how wonderful things are, how he has things in hand, and how now no one else can do as well as him.

Well, this year he may get the chance to give exactly that same explanation to frail seniors whose air conditioning cuts out because the grid can’t handle the demand. Maybe he’ll get a chance to talk to corner store owners who lose freezers full of food because the power isn’t there. Maybe he’ll get talk to seniors who are overheating because the grid can’t keep up.

Closing his eyes, pointing fingers in every direction, claiming that he’s in great shape isn’t going to make the problem go away.

Speaker—

Interjections.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker, what happened in Kanata last week was a distribution-level temporary issue with Ottawa hydro. The utility there, the LDC, has indicated that they’re going to repair the piece of equipment that was faulty that day so that this type of outage doesn’t happen again. But I can assure my ambulance-chasing friend over there that the provincial grid had more than enough power to meet the needs of the province on that very, very hot day. It was a record-setting day in Ottawa, to be sure, but we had a lot of excess energy that day.

I can assure all the members of the Legislature of one thing: If that member were in charge of our power grid, we wouldn’t have our nuclear supply—8,500 megawatts on that day that was there, at almost 100% of its capacity—and we wouldn’t have the natural gas fleet, which is our insurance policy, because not only is he against nuclear, he’s against natural gas as well.

While the member opposite clutches his pearls and pretends that the world is coming to an end, I can assure him that because of our consistent support for our nuclear grid, the refurbishments that are under way, on time and ahead of schedule, on budget—this member would not have those workhorses, those dependable baseload emissions-free power suppliers that we have in our province every single day.

At the same time we’re investing in new technology, a small modular reactor, that isn’t going to just power our grid; this is an SMR that’s going to be adopted by jurisdictions around the world to help them do what we’ve done in Ontario, and that is, reduce emissions and provide baseload power on a daily basis, 24/7, that the world can rely on. This is a great Ontario nuclear—