Finance committee  No, it's an annual report, so this is the one most currently available. They have to provide it to the ministers within five months after the end of their fiscal year end. This is the 2017-18 one, and they have to make it public. They do make it public already, but it's not necessarily tabled in Parliament.

Finance committee  Yes. I'd like to apologize for not being here earlier. I'm actually with the Department of Natural Resources, with the office of energy efficiency. The FCM is required to provide an annual report to the three ministers with whom they have an agreement, those being the Minister of Natural Resources, the Minister of Environment and Climate Change and the Minister of Infrastructure.

Finance committee  It's a “may”, but the language in the current agreement with the new funding on energy efficiency has been strengthened to say “shall”. We would go forward with tabling.

Finance committee  Sure. It's actually $300 million for the home retrofit portion, if I can call it that. It's called the community eco-efficiency acceleration. The details need to be worked out with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. They are an arm's-length organization, although there are federal members, including me, who sit on the council.

Finance committee  Absolutely. The FCM does an annual report each year on their activities under the green municipal fund. Equally, they do a forward-looking report on what they intend to use as objectives under the current green municipal fund. Both of those are publicly available and tabled in Parliament.

Finance committee  Thank you. Actually, Bogdan's going to stay here with me, because there's an infrastructure component to this. My name is Joyce Henry. I'm the director general of the office of energy efficiency at Natural Resources Canada. I'm here to speak to you about the proposal contained in clause 131, in division 4 of part 4, which proposes to provide $1.01 billion to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities on energy efficiency improvements for houses and buildings, and to improve strategic infrastructure decisions.

Environment committee  Sorry, I don't have a specific answer on that.

Environment committee  I'll certainly take that comment back to the National Research Council and to my provincial and territorial counterparts and the experts who feed into that. The building code was updated and released in 2015. The electric vehicle market is a very dynamic market right now, a really fast-approaching market.

Environment committee  It does, yes. The building code has a housing component to it, and it also covers commercial and institutional buildings.

Environment committee  I'd say two things. Building codes have obviously been advancing for several years now. My understanding is that there's a new code expected to come out this spring. There's also 2011 and 2015. The codes work on a five-year cycle. Under the pan-Canadian framework, what's being asked is that the cycle be accelerated and we adopt a much more stringent code, which would be published, and it would be tiered, so it would be advancing over a number of years, which would then be adopted by the provinces and territories by 2030.

Environment committee  I'm sure we do. I don't have those numbers off the top of my head, I'm afraid.

Environment committee  I just want to go back to your last question briefly. Were you asking for how much better buildings would have to be to reach net-zero energy?

Environment committee  Right, so it's in the range of 60%, I think. I'll verify that number, but currently under energy star, you can already build your home 20% better, and under R-2000, 50% better, so this is another significant step forward on that.

Environment committee  I will speak broadly, and then I'll turn it over to Frank, because R and D is really his specialty. In terms of building envelopes, heating and cooling, and windows, these are the key areas for us in this respect, because those can make major advances. Things like heat exchange pumps are big ones for Canada.

Environment committee  What I would say is that in my office we've met several times with Passive House Canada. We're very supportive of their work, because they are advancing energy efficiency goals within houses. That's certainly one of the very high stringent standards that can be looked at. There are some challenges around that for Canada, because often the technology that is used is certified in Germany, but not necessarily for the Canadian market.