Really quickly, I'd have a look at New Zealand. In the property tax system, they virtually don't tax buildings in New Zealand. They tax land and they have unit charges for services. There is huge incentive to retrofit your building, to build it as high as you can.
The federal government and Natural Resources Canada--your staff in this department are very good. If you could import that knowledge and look at some of the systems that are doing that.... When I said we tax the wrong things, I'm quite radical on this. I think if we just simply tax land, and I don't mean agricultural land—we don't want to tax productive land—but if we did that....
The second thing is that utilities used to allow—if you bought a green technology that was more expensive to buy, a better heating system or better insulation, you could write that off against your utility rates. So your utility rate was sealed, but as you were actually using less energy, the difference for the energy you weren't paying for allowed you to write down the higher cost of the technology.
The federal government has been very good at introducing those kinds of programs. Those would be two examples. But if you wanted something really big and very cool and dramatic, try to negotiate something along the lines of what New Zealand has.