As part of one of the initiatives coming from the Treasury Board's centre for greening government, they are now asking that federal infrastructure projects submit a life-cycle analysis and a total cost of ownership assessment of the asset. It's not going to be used in the bid selection. Essentially, it is to raise awareness and capacity, and the Canada Green Building Council in their net-zero standard also requires submission of those two items.
We found in the development of this is that we do not now have sufficient maturity right now, and accuracy in the LCA, to embark upon a competitive bid analysis, where we're looking at the total cost of ownership and the total carbon footprint. The problem was traced back to a lack of a national database for LCI and LCA materials.
About two weeks ago, Treasury Board and NRC hosted a joint workshop where we brought together government departments and industry leaders and associations to look at what the next steps should be in developing a national database whereby the inputs are regionally specific, validated, open and transparent. This database would allow us to engage in more accurate LCA and LCI evaluations and ultimately get to the end state of adjudication of bids where some of the KPIs are total cost of ownership and total carbon footprint over the entire life of the building—embodied carbon, operational carbon and end-of-life carbon.