It’s one thing for us to say it here in this place, it’s another thing to hear it from municipal and First Nations leaders from across northern Ontario, which is precisely what happened at the northern Ontario municipal association meetings just about 10 days ago and, of course, FONOM yesterday. All we heard, Mr. Speaker, was the costs associated with the carbon tax on just about every aspect of a municipality’s operation and, for isolated and remote First Nations communities, that additional cost on their fuel.

Now, despite the Prime Minister’s inculcations that this is good environmental policy, there is an overwhelming number of people who are opposed to it. When the leader of the provincial Liberals took the throne, you would have thought that she would have said no to the carbon tax. She sat back and she did precisely the opposite. It’s what makes her the queen of the carbon tax. Everybody in northern Ontario says they’re out of touch. It’s too expensive in northern Ontario. Scrap the tax.

I want to thank the member for that question. As you know, there are stakeholders that agree with Bill 165, because at the end of the day, we have to make homes much cheaper in the province of Ontario—when it would cost an individual house $4,400 here in Mississauga or in Toronto, or $8,000 to $10,000 to hook up gas in northern Ontario.

I know that we are going to transition to electric moving forward, but at this time, we still need natural gas because if everybody today were driving an electric car, with the investments that we are attracting here to the province of Ontario, we would have blackouts here in the province of Ontario. We have to have a combination of natural gas and electricity to move forward in this province and create the jobs that we are attracting here in Ontario for the future.

With all the investment that the Minister of Economic Development is bringing to Ontario—$43 billion of automotive investment with electric vehicles—we are going to need electricity, and right now, if we just kept the electricity that we do have in the system, we would not be able to end up driving electric cars.

So this is what this will do moving forward. This will help us to stabilize the system as we’re moving forward to the next 20 to 30 years down the road. I wish we could get rid of natural gas by 2030, but that will be impossible with what is going on right now across Canada and across Ontario.

We need our nuclear fleet to help, as well as using natural gas to heat our homes at this present time, but we have to do it to combine this together, to move forward as we do move off natural gas moving forward.

I still have a natural gas furnace. I have a natural gas water heater. I have a natural gas barbecue and a natural gas fireplace, and I know that moving forward, we are going to be moving off all this—and a natural gas stove, too, in the kitchen; I forgot about that one. I know, moving forward, we are going to be changing that, but right now is not the time to put this extra cost on the consumers and the new homes that we’re building in a housing crisis that we are having right now in the province of Ontario. This will only cost people more money at the present time, so Bill 165—