That's a good question. I don't have the answer, but I think it would be a very useful piece of work. NRCan may have begun to do this—albeit I haven't seen it—to rank the buildings in Canada, as you say. Presumably, they started with the low-hanging fruit, probably mostly in Ottawa, large central ones. I'm very keen on benchmarking our practice: where we are what the potential is. I think that would be a very useful evaluation. I will find out from NRCan if they have started that.
Interestingly enough, in Ontario, that's the first step they're taking. They retained the private sector to do an analysis of their 5,000 buildings. They wanted to know where they were, where they should start and, in effect, where they should end, because at some point it's just not worth doing that works yard in some small community. By the time you get a crew there, maybe you could do the lighting. Again, there are some things that aren't going to make sense everywhere, but I think there's a huge amount that could be done now and I think we need a strategy for it.
Right now, my understanding is that the FBI, the federal buildings initiative, encourages other departments to understand the project, this energy performance contracting model, and provides facilitators and helps them through it. They're responding when they're asked and try to promote it, but I think we need to drive it a bit more. I think this committee could be engaged in really making sure this becomes more of a priority.
It's not that you're going to do 100%, but you could certainly do more than one-third. I think it's about setting that benchmark on how far you want to go and setting yourself a timeframe—a 10-year payback is pretty reasonable.
An interesting feature of our contracts is that they can also be used for non-energy upgrades, like a roof. Building managers will know that it's going to go but hope that it won't be during his or her time managing it. The performance contract savings could be used to do that non-energy sort of work as well.