Thank you for the opportunity to join you here today.
Buildings continue to be one of the largest burdens on our infrastructure through the use of natural resources and energy, while impacting our carbon footprint. We need to continue our efforts to adapt and update them to be more efficient.
While the government has made investments to support residential retrofits through small grants under the Canada greener homes initiative, we call on the government to increase grants for home retrofits to support deep energy retrofits, as well as supporting large-scale retrofits for industrial and commercial facilities to also be more energy-efficient. This could be accomplished by incentivizing the sustainable construction of new buildings and facilities to minimize Canada's greenhouse footprint.
All incentives, however, should recognize Canadian workers, who have undergone all processes to become certified here in Canada and to meet or exceed the requirements. Past incentives have inadvertently displaced these qualified tradespeople from participation in such incentives.
If we're going to achieve net zero by 2050, we need to have strong energy-efficient standards for all new buildings and update existing infrastructure. These incentives must be based on goals supported through sound design whose expectations can only be verified through commissioning as able to deliver on performance post-installation and/or post-construction. This ensures that private and public investments are sound and continue to deliver value for the life of the systems and the buildings that they serve.