No, there is no such database, to my knowledge. It's a necessary first piece, but it would have to be done very quickly because the issues are compelling and we must respond very quickly to the commitment we've made as a nation. We only have 14 years to get our emissions reductions down by at least 30%, if not more. There are pods, centres of excellence across this country, but there's no coordinating body that is integrating them, tying the threads together. What we foresee doing is inviting those people to the table and having them work with the other disciplines that have a perspective that could shed light on the same general question, the same general area.
Let's bring all of those perspectives together so that the economists at McGill, the Chris Ragans of the world, the Ecofiscal Commission, would work with the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, with the knowledge mobilization people at Waterloo, with the centre for international governance at Waterloo, with the ice people in Manitoba.
But you put a single question in front of them. This isn't just a hodgepodge where you throw people into a room. It has to be structured. You give them a challenge, and the challenge might be transportation. I mentioned transportation earlier. It might be energy efficiency in the built environment. How do we attack that when you have a very warm climate in Victoria where the rhododendrons are blooming today, record low temperatures in Ottawa over the weekend, different housing styles to accommodate those different needs, and then we have the north where we have other issues, where the permafrost is melting and foundations are crumbling?
Yukon College has a very active program now working on cold environment housing construction, that sort of thing. But we need to put all of that together. There needs to be a national coherence on what we do with our building stock. The turnover time for buildings is very long, half a century or so, maybe longer, but we don't have the luxury of waiting half a century to let things adjust. We have to get going now on a national front.