Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Residents of the North are clearly burdened with astronomical costs: power, heat, food, and gas for cars, ATVs and snowmobiles, transportation to other communities. Nearly everything costs significantly more here than elsewhere in Canada and the world. For many this burden is manageable. They make a good wage, often two in the same family. However, this is not the case for everyone, and a significant number of Northerners struggle to make ends meet, often losing the battle. Our social service and income support statistics bear this out.
Government has gotten into the habit of responding with millions of dollars in subsidies, particularly in the area of power generation. While attractive politically in the short term, subsidies have not addressed the underlying systemic problems yielding ever-rising costs and causing the true costs associated with diesel power generation to be hidden.
For us, this has meant ever-larger debts and requests to big daddy to increase our borrowing limits. Key funds desperately needed for services are vaporized with ever-more-expensive fossil fuels for electricity generation or heating or food.
Environmental and social costs mount both directly and indirectly. We must stop this policy of failure and begin moving towards an economically and environmentally sustainable model.
From now on, if any new energy subsidies are contemplated, they must be matched by an equal and rigorously justified investment in renewable energy infrastructure for heat and power. In addition, we need to begin a schedule and steady replacement of current subsidies with the provision of energy infrastructure that stabilizes and reduces costs and that through its implementation provides local and lasting jobs in every community.
A concerted and focused policy is essential to address our costly, damaging and undermining reliance on diesel. This shift will pay dividends in cleaner energy, reduced costs across our economic sectors, a reduced cost of living and many new long-term jobs, jobs that will have positive effects on every community at every level.
But what’s required, Mr. Speaker? A key feature of this approach, however, must be community
participation that accrues benefits to communities. To achieve this, we must invest in community-owned distributed energy systems or energy systems…
Mr. Speaker, I seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement.
---Unanimous consent granted