I'll start. My primary responsibility is relative to what we have in Manitoba, which is the green building policy. This policy was established in 2007. It establishes or identifies green building standards and practices that enhance energy and environmental performance for publicly funded buildings. That includes, of course, publicly owned buildings.
The standards and practices are designed to protect occupant health; improve air quality; reduce waste; use energy, water, and other resources more efficiently; reduce the overall impact of building construction and operation on the environment; and minimize the strain on local infrastructure.
The standards and practices apply to building construction projects funded in whole or in part by the Manitoba government, a crown corporation, or a government agency. Residential, industrial, and farm buildings are exempt at this point.
The standards and practices apply to new construction, major renovation, and addition projects where the occupancy is assembly, care or detection, and business and personal service as defined by the building code. Our area threshold is 600 metres or more. Renovations apply if the renovation cost is more than 50% of the cost of building new.
Building projects outside the scope of the policy are encouraged to apply our standards voluntarily. Our standards do not require strict compliance. There is an option for variance under our program.
The building projects within our policy are required to verify the implementation of key performance deliverables. In particular, because we're talking about energy efficiency, we have established a 33% better performance than the model national energy code for 1997, and this is proven through designation under our Manitoba Hydro Power Smart designation program and/or energy modelling under the LEED Canada program.
The requirements for these projects also require LEED certification, or, as I mentioned, under variance, another equivalent or similar system.
As I said, this policy applies primarily to new building projects, but the intention is to expand the green building policy into other aspects, with a life-cycle process involved. We're currently in the process of starting to approach existing building operation on the other side of new construction. It's our intention to engage in post-occupancy reviews to determine the effects of green building design on occupancy satisfaction and behaviour.
We're also starting to look at utility monitoring reporting practices, primarily under new construction, establishing at the very minimum the ability to track and monitor utility consumption. We intend to follow up on these with projects using post-occupancy briefs conducted by the green building coordination team.
We're currently also engaged with an interdepartmental working group to expand the scope of the policy, or at least explore that for the operation and maintenance of existing buildings. Our partners and colleagues here at the table have been instrumental in the work and exploration of that group. We're currently looking at a pilot over the next couple of years to identify initiatives for existing buildings. We're exploring the feasibility of Portfolio Manager, which NRCan will be launching in June of this year. Again, my colleagues here would probably be better able to speak to that, as they will be our primary pilot partners.
It is the intention of the green building coordination team—my group—to analyze the information provided and prepare reports to government summarizing the effect of green building standards, energy efficiency practices, and water efficiencies, if I may add, and the effects they have on our local economy and industry's capacity to provide design and construction services with regard to energy and environmental performance.
We also have the intent to take these standards and practices, review them, and improve on the performance targets as our industry and our community here improve on their ability to deliver. While there may be some increased capital costs needed to implement the green building standards, we expect they would be offset by lower operating costs, improved productivity, and enhanced asset values, which we hope to be able to quantify in our post-occupancy studies.
At this point, I will pass it over to Susanne Parent and her team to talk about our building portfolio.