Commissioner, I'd like you to talk about your second report, whose title is “Greening of Building Materials in Public Infrastructure”. People always say that the best and greenest energy is the energy you don't use. Eco-responsible buildings that use less energy are the fastest way to reduce emissions and achieve sustainable energy.
Your report takes stock of what happened between 2006 and 2016:
We noted that in that time span, Public Services and Procurement Canada made progress in reducing the operational carbon emissions of federal public infrastructure.
That, approximately, was the period during which Stephen Harper's Conservative government was in power.
And yet, just a little later, you say that there had been “insufficient progress since 2017”. Among other things, you pointed out that “insufficient consideration of embodied carbon in funding programs represents a missed opportunity to contribute to government-wide efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”.
How could such an obvious opportunity be bungled, when it had begun so successfully on other occasions, and yet yielded such disappointing results over the past nine years?