Member for Beaches–East York, come to order.

Supplementary question?

The next question.

Supplementary question?

Before I begin, I want to say that I’m going to share my time with the marvellous member for Beaches–East York.

Speaker, we make laws here in this Legislature, but there are certain laws which cannot be repealed—certain laws in this world, which cannot be repealed, and they must always be obeyed. I’m speaking here of physical law.

One of them is energy conservation. We get a lot of light and energy from the sun, and this brings with it energy that can be turned into heat. Some of that heat gets captured and kept on earth by sort of “floppy” molecules, like carbon dioxide or methane or bigger molecules. That heat doesn’t just go away. Something happens to that heat. That heat affects us.

There’s another kind of unbreakable principle in the world, and some people may not be familiar with it. It’s called the ergodic principle—a very, very powerful idea—but the result is that this energy that we get from the sun, it gets into everything. It heats the air, heats the water. It affects weather extremes, warms the oceans. It’s going to cause the sea level to rise. It causes drought and flooding and it has consequences for ecosystems, and that in turn is going to affect things like insects and disease and famine. It’s going to create mass migration, social conflicts, and war.

This is something that people are expecting. The heat will affect everything. And it has really begun to make everything a lot more expensive. It makes everything a lot more expensive. We have to change how we behave and it’s not something that we’re going to do in 40 years. It’s not something we’re going to do in 30 years or 20 years. Really, it’s the next 10 years that are the most critical.

Les gens vont-ils changer leur façon de vivre, leur façon d’utiliser l’énergie? Ce gouvernement, qui dit se soucier de bâtir des maisons, veut-il sauvegarder notre maison commune?

I think the Ontario Energy Board has faith in people. They have faith that people will care for our common home. The Ontario Energy Board believes that people will move away from burning fossil fuels for heat and switch very soon, because we have to switch soon, to alternatives like heat pumps.

Now, heat pumps have been praised by this government. I think I just heard a minister today praise heat pumps, and I know the energy minister’s house has a heat pump with an electric backup, and so does his parliamentary assistant’s home. There are Ontario government incentives for heat pumps. So it’s no surprise that the Ontario Energy Board believes that Ontarians will respond and understand that this is the direction that we must go to save our common home. And there’s no reason why the government of the day, the ministers, should not believe that as well.

Now, the Ontario Energy Board concluded, after much deliberation, that this change in energy use pretty clearly risks stranded infrastructure, like pipes. Stranded infrastructure means unused infrastructure. And our system of regulated utilities means that all the remaining customers on the system must still pay back the utility for these unused assets, the cost of building these unused assets.

The Ontario Energy Board, which has a duty to protect consumers, said that we should pay for the infrastructure upfront in order to be fair to ratepayers, to protect ratepayers, especially in this time where affordability is so much of a concern for consumers. Now what that means is that there’s no more free natural gas pipeline insulations for housing developers, no more incentives to install natural gas pipelines to service every new residential subdivision.

The Ontario Energy Board decision to pay at least part of that cost upfront will help preserve our common home in the form of a minimum requirement for any reasonable climate strategy. At the very minimum, fossil fuels have to compete on a level playing field with other sources of energy, with all the costs accounted for, so no more perverse incentives where somebody—in particular, a house builder—doesn’t see the cost of putting in natural gas infrastructure and therefore just goes ahead and does it without bothering to think about what the consequences are.

And this, Speaker, is why Bill 165, overturning an independent regulator’s carefully considered decision, fundamentally is wrong. It hurts consumers and it does not help us care for our common home. Thank you.

I recognize the member for Beaches–East York.

I recognize the member for Peterborough–Kawartha.