Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Before I begin, I want to respectfully acknowledge and give thanks to the original peoples of the lands upon which all of us now live and work.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak about how RBC is helping to accelerate the transition to a greener economy. As this committee knows, we're in a decisive decade for Canada's economy and the collective work required by us all on the climate transition. The coming years must see banks, businesses and investors working alongside governments to drive a fundamental reimagining of nearly every sector of the global economy. This means a climate-smart, 21st-century approach to how we generate energy, grow food and construct buildings and infrastructure.

However, rising temperatures and the resulting storms and wildfires remind us how essential it is for countries, businesses and communities to share our strong sense of urgency and work together to make the carbon-neutral economy a reality.

At RBC, we are aware of the imperative of collective action in favour of the climate. We embrace our role as a bank that supports its customers and communities in their efforts to decarbonize. This is how we believe we can have the greatest impact.

Over the past few years, we've been laying the foundations to help our customers progress along the path to carbon neutrality. We have achieved this by working more actively than ever on ways in which we can help our customers in emission-intensive sectors of the economy who are keen to adopt measures to reduce the level of emissions associated with their activities.

I'm proud that we were the first major Canadian bank to disclose a formal approach for engaging with our Capital Markets clients in the energy sector, including a framework that will guide how we assess their transition plans. This will help us deepen the support and advice we bring to those who are producing the energy our world relies on while we continue to work on bringing more renewable sources of energy online. Importantly, this new client engagement framework will also inform the decisions we make to disengage from clients who don't have credible plans to reduce their emissions.

I'm pleased to share that almost 80% of RBC Capital Markets' lending exposure in the energy sector is to clients who have transition plans. While many of these plans are still in the early stages, we're encouraged by the progress we're seeing as clients move forward on this complex, multi-decade journey to net zero. As a recent RBC Climate Action Institute report projects, Canada needs about $60 billion of annual private and public investment to reach its net-zero goals by 2050. This is double what we currently spend. It means we all need to do more—all banks, every level of government, businesses both large and small, and all Canadians across the country.

To help play a role in generating and attracting more capital to finance the shift to a new economy, we're accelerating our strategy to finance the energy sources needed to build a net-zero economy. We're doing this by stepping up our focus on low-carbon energy development opportunities, including new goals to triple our renewables lending by 2030 across RBC capital markets and commercial banking, allocating $1 billion of RBC capital by 2030 to support the development and scaling of innovative climate solutions, and a new decarbonization finance category that will help us accelerate the deployment of capital to emissions reduction efforts in high-emitting, hard-to-abate sectors.

We're matching these actions with an even sharper focus on accountability and transparency, disclosing how we're tracking against our goals and more clearly and actively outlining the steps we are taking to support our clients. For example, we're now reporting our absolute financed emissions on an authorized basis for the oil and gas sector, and we will continue to do so every year to show our progress. We also plan to disclose a clean energy supply ratio in RBC's 2024 climate report.

Over the past year, I've spent a lot of time with our leaders and teams across the bank to find ways to better support our clients as they take action to reduce emissions. We also engaged with many external experts and organizations, including government and indigenous leaders, because getting to net zero will require unprecedented collaboration across all areas of the economy and all segments of society. While we know there's still much work to be done, RBC is up for the challenge and ready to continue helping our clients and communities build a greener economy.