Thanks, Andrew.
We are only replacing our existing building stock at the rate of some small percentage per year. It's the existing building stock where we feel the focus is most important.
Speaking specifically to energy, it's a much bigger picture than that, but for energy alone there are three parts, in our view, to an integrated approach to energy supply.
Number one is that distributed energy has a future. Gas-powered turbines, locally distributed, are more efficient than a central plant because you can heat hot water with them. We don't do that in the central plants as they exist today. There's a recovery there. They're not going to burn any more fuel than the large plants will, so there's a future there. Solar also has a future, but the problem is regulation. We put a gas turbine in a hotel downtown and it took us about a year to get through high-pressure gas problems, to get through the fact that this might be an industrial production site, of all things. Any sane person would not have done what we did, because it just wasn't worth the brain damage.
The second thing is demand load reduction. Planning is a great idea; integrated planning is a good idea. There are other things that we can do to inform, empower, and reward our people for conservation. We can sub-meter our apartment buildings. You wouldn't believe how aggressive people will be about turning off the lights in their apartment buildings if they know that they can save a couple of bucks a month. You know what? We're not allowed to do that in Ontario because we're not allowed to sub-meter apartment buildings. So that savings is just not there. We're regulated at every turn against doing things that we think are the right things to do.
I would go into government procurement, the third way that I think we have to approach this. Government is a big buyer of goods and services, and a user of energy. I have a building downtown right now where I have a choice. I can install energy-saving equipment for a million bucks and save a pile of money and energy, or I can install not-so-efficient equipment for half a million bucks. If I install the million-dollar equipment, with a private sector tenant in place I can recover the cost of that, and it's a neutral cost to the tenant. He doesn't notice a thing. He gets a better building, he makes a contribution to the environment, and there's no change because I use the cost savings on energy to pay for that additional cost of the equipment. PWGSC's policy is in fact against that. Their answer is no, put in the wrong equipment and that's just the way it is.
I don't want to paint a picture that people are being malicious or mean; it just happens to be the way a lot of policies work. We're talking about a new world, a new age, where we have to incorporate into our economic system the environment where it's not been accounted for before. It's a big job, but there are a lot of small places where we can start.
Maybe I'll leave it there.