Natural Resources committee  Absolutely. Given that we are not a producer of many of these goods in all of the categories, John here has a very good relationship with his counterparts in the United States, and has had for many years. I consider it will only grow stronger as our interest in strengthening our

Natural Resources committee  Yes. We'd be reporting to Parliament every three years, and then after the fourth year there would be a report on the stringency of our regime vis-à-vis the North American context.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the committee for having us before you. We are indeed cognizant that this has been before this committee twice before, and I will make my remarks fairly brief. To remind you, the Energy Efficiency Act from 1992 gives the Minister

Natural Resources committee  All goods that are covered by the standards and that are either manufactured in Canada and shipped between provinces or imported into Canada are covered by the regulations, so the regulations will apply to whatever portion is imported from the United States. I can't give you spec

Natural Resources committee  Although we're not yet finished the work on our road map, where we're taking a year to think through all of the policies, programs, and measures that the federal government can put into place, I'll leap ahead and say, just from listening to the comments here, that I think we need

Natural Resources committee  I take your points with respect to small communities. I would just repeat what both my colleague and my colleagues from QUEST have been saying: we think these principles can be applied in different sizes of organizations. Apart from that, my office does run a program oriented t

Natural Resources committee  I apologize that this slide was not made available to you. I will make it available to you afterwards. We put a great deal of effort into some graphics that would help demonstrate--for those of us who are visual--what was different about these communities. I'll now run through th

Natural Resources committee  It's just a quick comment. In Budget 2009 there was a five-year green infrastructure fund. I don't have the details. It's not my department, but it was one of the elements of the budget.

Natural Resources committee  I'm going to limit my answer to my area of responsibility, and that is to improve energy efficiency. I do have responsibility for the federal buildings initiative. It uses private sector financing to fund energy efficiency projects in federal buildings, which helps improve energy

Natural Resources committee  We don't have a dedicated program of that nature at this time. We have provided that service to some extent with one of the examples that my colleague was talking about earlier. In fact, we sort of wrote a book about it so that other communities could learn from the lessons we we

Natural Resources committee  Yes.

Natural Resources committee  We have every intent of respecting the jurisdictional responsibilities of municipalities and provinces and territories, but we still think there's a role for the federal government, with our research capacity, our experience in delivering national programs in energy efficiency an

Natural Resources committee  I'm just going to ask my colleague to speak to that because he was the manager involved in the project, so he would be best placed to give you some specifics.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm happy to reassure you that the program is not out of money. Budget 2009 announced an extra $300 million to be spent over the next two years. As well, 52,500 Canadians have received their grant. That's a lot of transactions to deal with. In terms of th

Natural Resources committee  I'm sorry. I'll make sure it's supplied to the committee afterwards, and I'll just speak to this. I'll give you a little more definition to how an integrated community system would work. We're talking about maximizing energy efficiency in the construction of the buildings thems