I come from a construction background. We would have a new office building there if the price didn't keep doubling, tripling, and quadrupling, to where we're talking hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars for a simple office building. There's nothing more simple in the world than building an office building, but it was going to be three times the price of a hospital, which has operating rooms, MRIs, and equipment. It's just insane. So building in Ottawa is three times what it costs anywhere else in the country. Building on Parliament Hill is ten times more expensive. It's out of control.
But I have to move on to other issues here.
Our whole reason here is to try to get best value for tax dollars. Another thing that bugs me about the real property is the federal building initiative. I remember when this was created, because I was doing energy retrofitting in my own career at the time. The government owns about 50,000 buildings, many of which are absolutely sick buildings, energy hogs, because they were built in a time when nobody cared about that.
The federal building initiative was supposed to reduce the operating costs and create a healthier work environment and better indoor ambient air quality by energy retrofitting all these buildings. Yet, out of 50,000 buildings, maybe 500 or 600 buildings have been done. We'd have to do 5,000 a year to get the federal building initiative to actually energy retrofit. The retrofitting they do is things like changing the light bulbs. They never do the building envelope. They do the low-hanging fruit.
Could you briefly give me the status of the federal building initiative, how much priority it's getting, and how much attention it's getting within Public Works?