Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Barakat, for your presentation.
We've talked a bit about national codes for building for energy efficiency, but I want to take it just another step further, I guess, and talk about what our houses are built out of.
When talking about sustainability in the manufacturing of homes, you can look at a lot of the homes in Ontario, Quebec, and across the country that are made out of stone, and they've been around for hundreds of years. In British Columbia, where we have mostly wood, some of them were built 150 years ago and are still standing.
But look at what's happening today in a lot of developments where houses are only built to last maybe 25, 30, or 40 years. The products they're being built with are plastic siding, fibreboard that rots in a few years—just so many things that are used to build our houses that aren't sustainable. They may be affordable for people, but they're not built sustainably any more.
Just thinking about that and about how we use so much energy to create these materials—the plastics for the siding, for the windows, for the flooring.... They might be more airtight, more energy-efficient while they're in use, but they deteriorate a lot more quickly and cost us more money to redo all over again. There's a lot more renovation required.
So I'm wondering about national standards and codes. Is there any thought or any kind of research, from the beginning to the end of building your home, in which you're looking at the use of fossil fuels to make the plastics we use more and more in our homes? That's all energy-intensive use, so we might save energy somewhat. So there's that piece of it.
I wonder whether there's been any research into that.