Thanks very much for having us here.
I'm Greg Rogers. I'll just do a quick introduction. Glen actually captured a couple of thoughts around my page, so I thought I was going to be a couple of minutes shorter, but I came up with some extra stuff while I was sitting here.
In any event, I'll give you a little bit of background on Minto. We're a developer of houses, condos, and commercial buildings. We've built about 60,000 homes in Canada, a few million square feet of commercial buildings, and we own and manage 16,000 apartment buildings in Ontario.
In the year 2000, Minto made a firm commitment to the environment. Since then we have been constructing every one of our new high-rise buildings to a LEED standard. All our new homes from this point forward are going to be constructed to an Energy Star standard, and we also formed a department to help us define, measure, and reduce our carbon footprint, with a long-term goal of getting that footprint down to zero. That department is headed by Andrew Pride and has a staff of 12 people. We invest in them to help us invest in turn in environmental initiatives.
We've made pretty good progress so far. We've received a number of national and international awards for our efforts, most recently at the sustainable buildings global conference in Australia, where Canada came number two to Germany, so we are on the map.
There certainly is a lot more we could be doing. Some of the new things that Minto is doing soon to help us become even more well known globally will be the LEED certification of Minto Midtown, a 900-unit building in Toronto. It will be the largest certified residential building in North America, so we are making some progress.
We're making progress in two ways. Andrew will talk about one, which is is top-down. It includes major initiatives such as gas turbines and other innovative research that we've looked at. The other is ground-up: we educate, empower, and reward our staff in the pursuit of carbon footprint reduction, because a lot of the ideas rest on the shop floor. These two methods are really a metaphor for broader policy initiatives that we'll talk to in a minute.
At this point I'll turn it over to Andrew to talk more specifically about some of the things we're doing.