Natural Resources committee  Not necessarily. LEED certification is a true third-party certification of environmental performance of buildings. Over the last five to six years, LEED has grown nationally and internationally, and it has become a recognized environmental plan for environmental performance in buildings.

Natural Resources committee  You particularly find value added in existing buildings, because there are just so many of them, and we have hardly done much to retrofit buildings or to have better operational practices. The opportunities for green jobs are really in the existing building sector: in existing homes, if you do a renovation, or in an existing building, if you do better operational practices—you install new energy systems, or whatever—and maybe there are jobs being created.

Natural Resources committee  Dockside Green is actually built on a remediated site. It has been remediated. There are credits to be had under the LEED rating system for soil remediation. On the LEED for neighbourhood development, there are also credits given for soil remediation, bringing an industrial area back into productive use for development.

Natural Resources committee  I think incentive, and by incentive I mean not necessarily a financial incentive, but various types of incentives, is needed—not forever, but I think it's needed initially to get people over the hump. In Canada we are quite comfortable with our lifestyle and really have never had any big resource concerns, until energy prices went up to $150 a barrel.

Natural Resources committee  Of course. I'm not trying to argue with you. But I think that for consumers driving a car or heating a house, it might be less good. I think we were never really challenged on that front. Incentives are good to get people over the hump, to say that there are opportunities to increase energy efficiency or reduce water use, and that once people use it on a large scale, the costs will come down.

Natural Resources committee  One comment I would have is that most cities.... I only know two, actually, that are allowed to adopt their own energy codes, codes that are not provincial. It's the City of Vancouver, because of the Vancouver charter, and I think the City of Toronto. All other municipalities have to abide by the provincial code to increase energy efficiencies within the buildings in their jurisdiction.

Natural Resources committee  I think you have to divide it into two groups. One is what I would call the professionals. For a homebuilder or an engineer or a housing technologist or a plumber or an electrician, with new technologies I think there comes a significant requirement to upgrade your skills. I can give you an example.

Natural Resources committee  From the information that I have seen, compared with.... I think we compare ourselves mostly to Europe. Compared with most European countries, we are probably more towards the bottom of the list, unfortunately.

Natural Resources committee  I think if we want homeowners to take action to reduce energy use in their buildings, we have to look at.... We have 13 million homes in Canada. We have a goal at the council to target a million homes and 100,000 buildings and cut energy use in half in those buildings. Twenty-five percent of the buildings and fewer than 10% of homes would result in 50 megatons of reduced carbon emissions.

Natural Resources committee  The project is not fully developed, but the community systems--for example, the biomass system and these types of systems--have been put in place. To really fully understand the benefits, the project really has to be fully built out. That will be another—there will be 5,000 people living there at the end of the day, depending on the economy, of course—five, six, maybe eight years, to fully understand the benefits.

Natural Resources committee  I think currently these systems do cost more to build into a project, but it's a different approach on how to do it. For example, in Dockside they took what the typical development would cost and they shifted the costs around, because they didn't have to pay the city development cost charges.

Natural Resources committee  The best way to characterize this until now I think is that there's been too much emphasis on the supply side of the equation. It certainly plays its role in reducing carbon emissions, but there are also many demand-side solutions, as we call them, like energy efficiency and others, that can provide equal if not greater benefits and create more jobs than some of the other solutions.

Natural Resources committee  NRCan says it's about 30%, and the Pembina Institute about 35%. If you include the embodied energy in building materials, like steel, concrete, or anything that uses fossil fuels, you get up to about 48%. That's the current estimate, so it's very high.

Natural Resources committee  I think wood is an excellent building material. It has high durability, and if the buildings are properly maintained, I think it has a very long life. When you look at the building code, you see that buildings—except for houses, which in Canada are all wood-framed as you know—are typically an assembly of different materials, from wood, to concrete, to steel.

Natural Resources committee  It depends on the energy prices in any given year, but typically it's between three and four years, sometimes five years. With a geothermal system, for example, like the Verdant, the cost just for the system itself is a little higher. But usually, to keep the costs down for the occupants so they don't have to pay any additional costs, it could be around 10 to 15 years, but then after that your heat is essentially free.