It's interesting, because the mix of politics and policy always comes into this for us with any government. The individual single-family dwelling retrofit model is attractive because it goes to the voter, yet when we do a cost-estimate analysis of where the best bang for the buck on greenhouse gas reduction or on savings to the energy sector is, the mix isn't there.
It's a question of balance between the new and the old. I've had towns, very small communities--Houston, Fort. St. James, little tiny towns--struggle to build a new municipal infrastructure. They've tried to get money from the government to build a better building, to do it with geothermal or to do it this way, and it's very difficult to do. The signal we've been sending—and maybe this has changed over time—is that it's better to build the bad building, the less efficient one, and then apply for retrofit money to get it up to the geothermal and better standard and R-2000 and all the rest. It has frustrated many of the people we represent, at the municipal level in particular.
My question is about balance. Maybe Mr. Ogilvie can step in for this. When we step away and look at the federal budgets of this year and years past, there's something about the priority of efforts. We see $1.4 billion going as a subsidy to the tar sands. We see $1 billion from this government and $2 billion more from Alberta going to carbon capture and sequestration. Many of the solutions that you folks are talking about here today, to integrate energy systems for reduction.... Are we just going to have over and over again the repetition of the bus transit subsidy that was given out or the corn ethanol subsidy of $2 billion that went out with no greenhouse gas analysis at all, with no study of the effects on the green economy at all?
This government talks a lot about these efforts that you folks are making, but when you get down to the brass tacks and the numbers, and how much money is going out the door, it's totally skewed the other way.