Mr. Speaker, a short time ago I asked a question regarding the concept of job creation through energy conservation and the energy retrofitting of the federal government's some 50,000 publicly owned buildings.
The idea is based on the concept that we can benefit in many ways from the demand side management of our energy resources and the increased commitment to the concept that we should be doing everything we can to embrace this concept for any number of reasons.
The first obvious reason is that the federal government could in fact save as much as 30% to 50% in operating costs. All the evidence shows that huge gains are possible in streamlining our energy use in our federally owned buildings.
The second reason is that we can reduce the wasteful use of energy. We can also reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions which obviously should be of some concern.
The third benefit, the most obvious one and the reason I raised the question, is that we have the opportunity to create thousands and thousands of jobs in the building trades, in engineering and in the manufacturing of all the technology that goes into high tech and state of the art energy efficiency.
The study we conducted with the carpenters union shows that there are between three to seven times the number of person years of employment in energy retrofitting as there are in new construction. This should be of great interest.
The last point is that every time we undertake a comprehensive energy retrofit of a building, the ambient indoor air quality benefits to such a degree and all the evidence shows that there are fewer days of sick time, people are more productive and they feel healthier. The best and most graphic example of this is my own staff who suffer because of the air quality in the Wellington building. It is one of those old, dated federal government buildings that could benefit from an energy retrofit program.
The reason I raise this now and the reason I am hoping the federal government will embrace this idea is that all of the above can be achieved at no upfront cost to the taxpayer. Many private sector financiers are anxious and willing to finance the upfront costs of this energy retrofit at 100%. The property owner, in this case the government, then pays the financiers back slowly out of the energy savings, and only if there are energy savings. It is an idea whose time has come and it is too good to ignore.
Another reason we should be showing the world how to live in a harsh northern climate in the most effective way possible is the unbelievable benefit in terms of the engineering and technology associated with energy retrofitting. We could be marketing it around the world and exporting our expertise in this area.
A unit of energy harvested from the existing system is indistinguishable from a unit of energy produced at a generating station, except we can preclude the need to build more generating stations at a huge cost. We could harvest these units of energy and resell them to other customers or export that energy to the United States or to wherever we want to sell that energy. This is another good reason environmentally why we should be doing everything we can to use our energy resources in a better way.
The government's answer to my question was that there already was a federal building initiative which was undertaking to try to energy retrofit federal government buildings. My problem with the federal building initiative is that it has been ponderously slow. It has only affected a handful of buildings. The red tape or bureaucracy involved is such that many of those investors have found it impossible to participate.
We are asking the federal government to release a block of buildings of 100 or 1,000 at a time, to get this thing under way and to put some people to work.