Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's sort of interesting for me, as a member, to watch the various panels go through, and they all talk about greenhouse gases, energy efficiency, and so forth. But I just want to say, at the end of the day, as much as we're all in favour of energy efficiency and so forth, ultimately for me as a member the goal is to improve the quality of life for my constituents. It's not energy efficiency for energy efficiency's sake; it's energy efficiency because it does improve the quality of life for my constituents, and if they have to make trade-offs and sacrifices, knowing the average voter, they're not going to do it.
So it brings me to sort of a point where I was talking about how economies of scale can drive down the costs for these various technologies. How far, in your various opinions, are we from those economies of scale? How much do we have to put into it? What sorts of timelines are we looking at where we can go to a point where the pilot projects are finished and the average Canadian will start to grasp this on their own?
I was at a homebuilding show the other week, because two of us here on the committee are in the process of building houses and we're looking at energy efficiencies, etc. Geothermal seems to be sort of at that tipping point on its own, but for most of the rest of the technologies, it's like hmm.... Better insulation tends to be what most people are talking about.
How far away are we from that tipping point? Is it more technology growth that we need? You mentioned economies of scale. What's the timeline we're looking at? How much more effort to get there do we need before people get the payback without a priming from the government?
I guess we'll start there, and I'm willing to take at least two or three different people responding.