I think it depends on the sector of the construction industry.
For example, developers that build market-based housing—we see a lot of construction in major cities such as Toronto, Vancouver, and so on—need third-party financing to pay for the costs of energy improvements in their buildings. They build and they sell and they have very little interest in investing in something when they really don't have a payback in that sense. The payback or the benefit goes to the tenant.
In that sector the investment would really be providing the opportunity to finance the energy improvements in that building by a third party. It could be a utility or it could simply just be an investor. There is a business case in how these energy systems and these designs are paying back over time.
On the commercial side, I think it's not so much an incentive in terms of money, because the commercial sector is already quite involved and is already showing some leadership in making improvements to both new and existing buildings. That sector is really showing quite a bit of leadership, mainly driven by institutional investors and pension funds in Canada.
If you go down from a class A building to a class B or C building, these are the ones that actually need to be incentivized, and again it's financing in terms of loans to make the improvements to the buildings, or a tax exemption, because if you invest in your building you have a better building, but at the end of the day you pay more taxes because you have a better building. Therefore, you pay for the improvements and then you pay for the tax.
The federal government and the provinces are in a position to use some of the existing mechanisms to provide incentives to the sector to invest in energy efficiency and low-carbon buildings, and then also to create a favourable business model for a building that's less capitalized to derive some benefit from that.