Thank you, Geoff.
Thank you for the question.
The member is referring to an announcement of a new standard for Energy Start for homes. This is a standard that Natural Resources Canada has developed in consultation with 3,000 stakeholders across Canada, in a standards-based format, to ask how, if we're building a new home, we can make it 20% more efficient than codes.
We have another brand called R-2000, which is about 50% more efficient than codes. We provide training and tools for builders so that they can build homes in these ways, market and differentiate their product in the marketplace, and meet the consumer demand for a more efficient home. It's a great program. It's a great brand. It's well known from the equipment side and from the housing side.
From the government perspective or the building perspective, we have adopted the American Energy Star portfolio manager benchmarking tool. Earlier, there was a question about whether our interactions with our counterparts in the United States are helpful and useful to us. They certainly were, because we're adopting this tool that is being used in the United States, and it also feeds back to the questions about BOMA BESt versus LEED. These are private sector labels out there to help people do a better job managing or building buildings with respect to environmental performance.
We're bringing this database to Canada. We have done a survey of the entire building stock of Canada with Statistics Canada, so we have Canada's buildings performance in a database. Federal government property managers and private sector property managers can use this database to determine how their building stacks up against 300 or 400 office buildings of that size and nature in that region of the country. They can use that as a tool to ask, “How am I doing?” If I'm doing bottom of the pack, it's a rationale to make an investment to improve. If I'm doing top of the pack, well, maybe I'll put my resources elsewhere.
This is an Energy Star tool that we are implementing for buildings, including bringing it to our federal building colleagues.