A net-zero energy home is a tool. You can't change the behaviour of the inhabitant of the house. You can have someone buy these homes and you can provide a general guarantee of how the home will perform, but you cannot guarantee what the inhabitants will do in the house. So they'll open all the windows, they'll turn their air conditioning on, and in the wintertime they'll leave their windows open again with the heating system on. But if the home is constructed in a fashion that gives them the ability to reduce their environmental footprint through energy consumption, water consumption, if it's a truly sustainably built home, that's the goal we should be aiming for.
The market will decide what kinds of homes will find their way into the community. The builder, as long as they know there's a consumer out there who is conscious of price fluctuation in their utilities or is conscious of the environmental footprint they're making on a daily basis, will respond to that customer's demand. But until we put in place a framework that supports these kinds of energy sources and these kinds of tools to enable a net-zero energy home in the marketplace, we're just merely talking about tinkering on the margins and trying to find a couple of demonstrations here and there, and never getting to the community-scale development where we can then impress upon people through a large-scale demonstration to say, “It works. It's up to you as the inhabitants to decide how to use that tool, that tool that you've purchased.”
You have in Ontario small- and medium-scale builders right now--I put Marshall Homes in the PowerPoint presentation, and you have many more--who are demanding help from us as a coalition and asking elsewhere, and this came as a result of a recent forum we had. They want to build these homes. They can't afford, clearly, to put photovoltaics on the home and be competitive with Minto or with Mattamy Homes or with Alouette Homes and other home builders out there. They have to remain competitive, but they want to do it because their customers are demanding it.
If there's a demand in the marketplace, and there's a policy decision by the government or governments to say, “Our goal is to reduce environmental footprints, to change the policy energy paradigm, to achieve certain goals, and societal benefits are going to emerge from this decision”, then that's what governments have to do to give people tools to help achieve those goals. There is a demand out there; there are builders who want to do these kinds of homes. We just need to nurture the marketplace. It will be the small- and medium-scale builders that will move the large-tract builders along, because the large-tract builders are not going to want to lose their market share. So you give incentive to the medium-scale builders to corner more market share for themselves, and I guarantee you, Minto and others, which they're doing in part because they're part of this, and they're leaders, too--this is not a slam against them. Let them compete. But if we decide that as a societal benefit we want to achieve certain goals, we have to give the tools to get those goals.