No. 97, Electricity Act (amended) - Third Reading

I am pleased to rise and say a few words about the Electricity Act.

I would agree with my colleague that we remain concerned, as I said earlier, about the lack of detail about the regulations, but we certainly support this bill. Unlike my colleagues in the Official Opposition, I don’t talk about the transition to a clean energy as an “if.”

I believe the member said if we transition from coal to a greener grid, which is mystifying to me that anyone could even have that idea in 2021. We are moving away from coal, we are, despite its storied history in our province and particularly on the island of Cape Breton. It is time for us to make a shift. This is one small piece of that, I will agree, but it is an important piece.

This bill, as we understand it, is in particular actually geared in many ways towards lower-income Nova Scotians because it enables solar farms and net metering and all of the things that allow people to access energy. Renters, et cetera, can buy in to accessing renewable energy without having to physically have a solar panel on their own home.

We appreciate what this means for the solar industry. We have heard many people in Law Amendments Committee but also in our caucus offices and on the phone tell us that this was a positive step forward.

Again, we appreciate what this means for communities that have been held back from being able to access solar and also for larger entities that draw from the grid that can now set up substantial solar arrays and be able to take advantage of that and not have the limit that was formerly in place as to how much energy they could generate and that could be used and not wasted.

We introduced an amendment to put a time limit on the introduction of regulations because we want to ensure that this isn’t just enabling legislation, as we have seen many times before, but that this happens and happens quickly.

We are happy to see progress on the efficiency, but I also want to put this bill in a little bit of context. We’ve been in Budget Estimates now simultaneous to this, and if you look at the budget for Energy and Mines you’ll see that petroleum resources and the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board will receive two and a half times the money that is allocated to sustainable and renewable energy in this budget. So we’re moving. We’re glad we’re moving. We’re not moving quickly enough.

In Estimates this week we also learned that we’re spending $12 million on a multiyear agreement with Morocco to learn more about how to extract fossil fuels. This government has confirmed that they support the Goldboro LNG proposed project, knowing that it would cost the federal government $1 billion to get it off the ground and that it would create 3.7 megatons of GHG emissions annually, which would trash our climate targets. That’s the basic formula that needs to change.

So we’re happy to see this but, as my colleague the member for Dartmouth East always says, the order of operations is backwards - I think that’s what he says. That’s how this feels to us, a little bit.

We’re glad to see it happen. We need more, and we need it quickly. This is a time to make historic investments in a green transition, based in renewable energy but also based in care work, based in green jobs, based in labour. This is what we’ve been talking about this session.

I appreciate that changing the Electricity Act to enable shared and commercial solar problems is a step in the right direction. We’re hoping that it’s the beginning of a sprint. We’ll be supporting this bill but, tomorrow, when students gather across the world for Fridays for Future, know that they are not asking for steps. They’re asking for bold, transformational action, and we still wait for that to come. Thank you.