January 19, 2007

Thank you, Prime Minister. It's great to be back in my home province, and it's even better to have you here for this important announcement. In Canada, energy production and consumption are the cornerstone of our economy, and our land is blessed with an abundance of natural resources.

Canada is the world's third-largest producer of gas, the seventh largest producer of oil and the largest supplier of uranium. We have a huge economic opportunity to develop these resources for ourselves. But we also have a huge environmental responsibility to develop them for the good of the world.

Energy, both the production and the use downstream, is responsible for 85 percent of the greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere. We must do better in reducing both greenhouse gases and pollutants. We in Canada's New Government take this challenge very seriously — the challenge to manage the impacts of our abundant energy responsibly.

As the Prime Minister just mentioned, I recently announced our ecoENERGY Technology Initiative. This is a targeted investment of $230 million to help us clean up our conventional energy. We want to focus these resources on areas like clean coal technology. Right now, science is able to reduce up to 90 percent of the pollutants we put in the atmosphere. You combine that with carbon capture and storage, and we can take nearly all the greenhouse gases out. This represents an enormous opportunity, and our government is delivering a focused, direct approach to get results in these areas.

The second of our ecoENERGY Initiatives is the one the Prime Minister just announced — our ecoENERGY Renewable Initiative. We are investing $1.5 billion in it, and it marks yet another step by our Government in its quest to protect our environment.

The ecoENERGY Renewable Initiative contains two parts. The first part is ecoENERGY for Renewable Power. It will invest $1.48 billion to boost our supply of clean energy from renewable sources — wind, the power in the ocean, biomass, small hydro. These are all opportunities for putting clean energy directly on the grid.

The second part of our ecoENERGY Renewable Initiative is ecoENERGY for Renewable Heat. Over the next four years, we're going to invest $36 million in incentives to encourage the adaptation of renewable technologies for water heating, space heating, and space cooling. If owners of these buildings install renewable thermal energy technologies, we can reduce national emissions substantially and save a considerable amount of money.

I want to come back to the renewable energy portion and why we're here at Pearson College. I'd like to acknowledge Glen Darou, CEO of Clean Current; Randy Eresman, CEO and President of EnCana; and David Hawley from Pearson. We've supported them in installing the first tidal turbine in North America. It's just a few kilometres off the coast, and it's producing electricity as we speak. This pilot project is an extraordinary development. It's anchored to the ocean floor, and it's absolutely emission-free. There are no greenhouse gases. This is just the beginning of our being able to harness the enormous energy in our oceans. Projects like this will be eligible for support under our new ecoENERGY Renewable Initiative.

The college here is the custodian of the Race Rocks Ecological Reserve, which is located just three nautical miles from the Strait of Juan de Fuca. In the past, two guardians living at Race Rocks were supplied electricity from two diesel generators. These generators caused a lot of pollution, and you had to transport the diesel for them out to Race Rocks. Right now, all of the energy at Race Rocks Research Facility is supplied by this tidal turbine. I think that's an enormous first step in harnessing the energy in our oceans, and we look forward to seeing much more in the years ahead.

This project is creating a source of clean, renewable and predictable energy by capturing the power found in the everyday tidal currents in our oceans. Race Rocks is precisely the type of project that Canada's New Government will support through our ecoENERGY Renewable Initiative.

I want to thank you all for coming, and at this point I'd like to turn the podium over to my friend, the Honourable John Baird, Minister of the Environment.

Thank you.