Thank you for the quality of your presentations. It is refreshing and encouraging to see municipalities taking the energy challenge seriously and coming up with very concrete courses of action.
My first question goes to Ms. McDougall-Murdoch. I notice from your two presentations that your initiative comes from an underlying political will. Your elected officials believed that the process would have significant implications for the economy as well as for energy. A lot of energy then had to be expended, because the second challenge was to promote this idea and make all the citizens of the communities aware so that they would support the political decisions.
In my constituency, municipalities are in demographic decline. This means that their property tax base is also declining. It is no longer possible to generate wealth from other infrastructures. Here is the challenge they now face: the municipalities' fundamental needs, such as roads, regular maintenance and community services, are more and more difficult to meet because of declining revenues.
How can an initiative like yours be carried over to municipalities or cities where demographic decline is putting them into financial difficulty? Does your wonderful model apply only to growing cities where revenue from property taxes is going up?