Thank you.
The private sector represents about 10% of the work we do. One of the more high-profile buildings recently was the Empire State Building, done by Johnson Controls and using a performance contract. It was heavily monitored, so there is a great deal of data available on it. One of the pieces of information that I use in presentations is the employment impact, because they monitored that quite carefully and found it very positive. It was very labour-intensive. That was something that people had known.
We do have some projects in Canada. Typically, in the private sector they are looking for very fast payback, and five years is a long time for many of them. Some of the owners of properties have a lot of access to capital owned by pension funds or very wealthy companies, so they just don't seem to be as active. I think it's a growth opportunity for our industry, as some of these companies look to go beyond making smaller, incremental changes to their building performance. We'd be delighted to do more of that work.
There was a very interesting example of a fairly small project here in Ottawa. They did a $2-million project through a performance contract, and part of that performance contract improved the accessibility, the elevators, and the washrooms, because it was an older building. They were then able to rent to the federal government, which they had not been able to do before, and the value of the building went from $15 million to $20 million, so their $2-million investment was immediately paid back on the value of the real estate. That's a little unusual. I'd love to see more examples of that.