On codification, whether you're doing it in local government or provincial government, or if there are federal tools, it is really important but it's not the first step. The first step is really fostering the leadership. We can invest extra in our own facilities because we recover those costs. It's actually a good investment of taxpayers' money, because you know you're going to own city hall or Parliament or whatever for a long time.
There is a role for that leadership, but on the codification, once you've built the industry capacity to.... Can the architects design it? Can the suppliers get CSA approval on the machine? Can the trades seal it tight enough? Before you codify, you have to build that capacity, and there are tools to do that. The code is really important, so that it's not a one-off example here or there.
What we struggle with a little bit in Vancouver is that we're actually a relatively small municipality. We're in a big metro area, but we have under 600,000 people. We actually push the provincial building code. In our code, we referenced other codes. The codes that we referenced are not sufficient to the targets that we're trying to reach.
People often reference ASHRAE, which is badly flawed. ASHRAE 90.1 specifies performance of mechanical heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning systems. It's not very good. As for an update, I know there's some work under way, but the model national energy code for buildings is way out of date.
On your question about carbon pricing, I think the pricing of carbon in B.C. now is forcing us to change how we do our own civic facilities. I think there are other examples, though. The Borough of Merton, outside London, applied something called the Merton rule. In the building code for that borough, as a way of driving innovation, they made a minimum requirement for local renewable energy. Because that's expensive, what that did was force everyone to reduce their energy demands. They didn't want to have to build a big solar panel system or whatever, so it got the building community to be very innovative to reduce the loads--