Absolutely, and thank you so much for inviting me to be here. I'll follow along on that great presentation.
An awful lot of the information that was provided by Thomas is very relevant to the information for our organization. In fact, if I may say so, we are in the process of working on a formal agreement to collaborate as two organizations, because of the compatibility and the synergy of the system that is delivered by the Canada Green Building Council for new construction and BOMA Canada's program, which is for existing commercial buildings.
So just by way of a bit of an introduction, BOMA Canada, the Building Owners and Managers Association of Canada, is a national, not-for-profit association representing the commercial real estate industry, primarily office buildings and some industrial and retail. It does not cover the residential area, just to be clear, but primarily the office buildings across the country.
As a national organization, we represent about 1.9 billion square feet of commercial space across the country, and our members are real property owners and managers, developers, asset managers, leasing agents, and brokers. That's the sort of realm we're dealing in.
The organization addresses issues of concern to the industry, and one of the biggest initiatives we have launched very recently, in the last couple of years, is BOMA Go Green, which is a national environmental certification and recognition program. That's the reason I'm here and that's the reason we are working with Canada Green Building Council.
Again, I would like to emphasize that it's a Canadian-developed program. It was created here by BOMA, by the industry, by representatives of the industry. A portion of the program is related to benchmarking, and that's in the Canadian context. It is a voluntary program, and it's available not just to BOMA members but also to any buildings in the country. In this case particularly, we are continuing to work closely with Public Works and Government Services Canada to roll the program out across the crown-owned portfolio of buildings for the government.
I'd like to just give you a few details about the program itself.
Again, for existing buildings it's a voluntary program. It is designed to encourage environmentally conscious management and operation of buildings. So once they already exist, then it's the next steps in the life cycle of a building to make sure it's operated in an environmentally efficient manner and that they've looked for ways to reduce resource consumption. This program is designed to facilitate that, to measure that, and to recognize that in the industry.
We have over 250 properties that have been certified across Canada in pretty much all provinces right now. We have about 10 of the major commercial real estate firms that have committed their entire portfolios to going through the program in the next period of years, to be certified and to participate in this whole process.
Public Works and Government Services Canada...of course, we're in the process of rolling that out, as I indicated, to the 300 crown-owned buildings in Canada, and the Alberta Ministry of Infrastructure and Transportation has adopted the program for Alberta. I should also mention, just as an aside--and you may have seen it in the paper yesterday--that the Ontario Power Authority is collaborating with BOMA Toronto in a conservation demand program that is directly linked to the Go Green program, whereby the Go Green program is the measure by which the conservation will be determined and therefore incentives delivered. So that was a pretty exciting announcement from our standpoint.
Go Green basically has two elements. The BOMA Go Green program, which was originally developed, is a best practices program, probably designed more for smaller buildings that are not in a position to be able to undertake the full program but wish to show environmental leadership and wish to be recognized as such. Go Green Plus is a performance-based program that's based on the Green Globes online web assessment tool. BOMA Canada delivers Green Globes for existing buildings in Canada now under the banner of Go Green Plus. It's the Go Green Plus program that we're looking at for Public Works and Government Services Canada.
The specific reason for that is because it not only encourages environmental leadership, but it also provides the tools to measure and to assess changes, advancements, and improvements in resource consumption and energy usage, for example, and it also involves the building management in the whole process. It's not an outside consultant who comes in and does the process. The building management is involved in assessing their building and measuring it on an ongoing basis.
The areas that are covered are very much the same as the LEED program: resource consumption in energy and water use; waste reduction, construction, and recycling; building materials, including hazardous materials and material selection; interior environment, including indoor air quality and HVAC maintenance; and a very specific component related to a communications program and tenant awareness, because in commercial buildings and office properties in particular, the tenants are participants in the process.