I'll ask JP to think about that as well.
It depends on the building. Labs are different from air force bases, and they are different from office buildings, and they are different from hospitals.
One of the advantages is that the performance contracting industry has been around, as I say, for 25 years, so there's a lot of experience with almost every type of building, but it's not simple. It's not a cookie cutter.
Some of them have moved pretty quickly from innovation at an early stage to wide adoption. LED lighting is an example. Ten years ago, it was really expensive. The colour quality wasn't very good. The white on the Christmas tree lights was pretty blue, and of course, in a home application it was very expensive. A few crazy people like me had it, but that was.... I wouldn't expect the federal government to take on that large a risk.
Over a fairly short period of time, the performance has improved hugely, almost like a Moore's law, and the cost has come down, and now it's competitive. That's a model we would love to see for other technologies.
Having been with a government agency in Ontario, I think the biggest challenge for governments occurs when they start to try to pick winners and losers. They end up saying, “That's a good technology; sorry you didn't make it.” That's very dangerous, because they never have the information available. They're listening to people who have interests, and it's hard for them to balance that.
The lesson I take from this is a really interesting role, a trend that we're starting to see in more of the provincial programs on energy efficiency. It's performance-based. They're not going to say they want that and that; they're going to say they want this level of performance, this level of carbon reduction, and this level of energy reduction. That's what they'll say they want. Now, private sector, you go figure it out. Use your innovation and creativity and come back to us with what you think is the best way to achieve that.
We're starting to see a bit of a move for that with the building code, which has gone from what they call prescriptive—thou shalt have R16 here or R40 there—to a performance basis, saying to an architect or a builder, “Here's the performance I want for your building. Figure it out.” It's harder to monitor it and harder to know whether that actually happened or not, but it's that performance base that really encourages innovation.
I agree with you. The government has to know what its risk is. This is why Céline's idea of putting something together.... Say that we're not going to blow our brains out, but we want to have this innovative technology and we want Canadians to play a role in it, so here's some money and here's a program to apply to. Again, you're going to have to have somebody say, “We got 50 applications, but we can only support 20. We're going to use some criteria to select them.” You have to do that because you can't do everything.