Mr. Chair, thank you very much for inviting us to this committee, and thank you to all the committee members.
You have our written submission, but I will speak more broadly than that submission, leaving that submission as one example of a broader theme.
The Canadian Federation of Apartment Associations, CFAA, represents the owners and managers of close to one million rental homes across Canada, through 14 provincial and municipal associations and also direct landlord memberships.
The rental housing sector as a whole consists of four million homes, housing four million households, or about nine or ten million Canadians. We heat; we light; we use water. We use a lot of energy.
In building new rental properties, developers often go with a LEED standard. But most residential rental buildings are old, often 40 or 50 years old. In a technical sense, they have lots of inefficiencies. In other words, most rental buildings are not very energy efficient. The building envelopes leak air. They have older equipment. They are not set up properly to use more modern equipment or techniques, and certainly not cutting-edge or new innovations. It is important to address our sector correctly because it is a big sector, because we use a lot of energy.
In addition, we disproportionately serve lower income people. Most people who can afford to buy a home do so. We provide housing for people who cannot afford to buy their own home and for some people who rent by choice.
The industry is also very competitive. There are many suppliers in every community. We are constantly forced to keep costs down. We as a sector need to use proven technologies. We are not in a position to go out on a limb and adopt technologies that are new, revolutionary, which are unproven over the long term.
What I'd like to turn to are some barriers that our sector faces in adopting improved technology for the use of energy.
One barrier I'll mention is with respect to submetering. You may be familiar with the notion of submetering for electricity. In other words, the power company puts the electricity into a building, and then the technology exists to measure what goes to each suite.
When people are paying for their power, they tend to conserve it. Those of you who are parents can think of your teenage children leaving the lights on all around the house. They're not paying for it. We go around turning off all the lights because we are paying for it.