Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
This has been a very comprehensive discussion from a variety of perspectives and a number of things come out. Across the country, there is no one-size-fits-all matched to the energy menu of choices and technology to the plan development. But if I can be a little more.... There are rural applications, there are suburban, and there are urban applications with respect to the experience in Toronto.
Glen, you mentioned the Toronto district heating and cooling example as a best practice, and I certainly would agree with you on that.
The issue of smart growth and intensification is a lesson well learned. The objective of these hearings is to attempt to have a strategy where instead of this experiential looking backward and repeating the mistakes of the past, we're looking at the opportunities to take large developments off the grid, and in fact not only take them off the grid, but offer the opportunity to contribute to the grid and reinvest those moneys into sustainable development parts of projects.
Now, in Toronto, as in many of the large urban areas, the challenge is that you don't just have a single development; you have a 60-acre brownfield site with a choice of options. In a mixed-use development, you can try to include many jobs that would be localized to reduce commuter times to try to add to your transit system in a sustainable way, to serve that development but also to integrate with the rest of the system. So the issue becomes very much what you have said: it's matching a planning template to an action plan that's going to add the value.
My question is whether there is a pilot project in Canada that has attempted to look at those objectives--some of which I mentioned--that could be used as an option of choice that could be looked at by large cities right across the country. It would have the costs and benefits worked out and the financial backing that would be required that wouldn't be sort of a grant on a specific road improvement or a specific infrastructure piece, but would be a more comprehensive grant and support regime for the concept of that sustainable community. In Toronto, I can think of a half a dozen right away, a mixture of industrial and commercial and residential uses with a transit system that's localized but is part of the growth strategy for the Toronto area. So is there an example, or would you support a pilot project that would attempt to have the objectives and meet them through the program that would be suggested?