I most certainly do.
First of all, if I've given any impression that I was critical of the industry, that was not my intent. Frankly, it's quite the opposite. You're right, Canadian homebuilders have been among the best in the world in building safe, healthy homes.
As for R-2000, I'll speak to that point, because it helps illustrate some of the challenges. Approximately 6,500 R-2000 homes exist in the country today. How old is the program? And there are 6,500 homes out of the length of it.
There has been an enormous uptake of interest in R-2000 in terms of training, so that builders could learn how to build the homes and tell people that they were an R-2000 builder. But do they produce them? That was the question.
As to the consumer—I'll just try to answer your question—part of the problem is how you effectively market a need that may or may not be there at the time. R-2000 might have been ahead of its time, if you ask me, to a certain degree. But we know how to build energy efficient homes right now. Consumers now, for the first time, are becoming more acutely aware of the energy cost challenges, the operating costs of the home, because of higher energy prices. This is the reason we have more interest from government and more importantly from builders in Ontario and across the country, concerning how to design and construct these homes.
I would say to you that it's not a question of builders failing Canadian consumers; rather, it's a question of leveraging what we know builders can do today, helping them move the code on energy efficiency and then recognizing that it's not net-zero homes overnight as a concept, but net-zero-energy homes over an extended period of time that matters—just giving the consumer the option to get to that point. I think builders can be part of it, and they are already building them.