Mr. Speaker, Motion No. 300 is an interesting and clearly well intentioned motion.
Like many NDP and Liberal initiatives it takes the attitude that government is the be all and the end all of society and that people will not do things for their own good unless they are whipped along by government coercion through regulation and what not. It also refers fairly heavily to a federal building initiative. I wonder about these things. I will get into that a little later.
The concept of retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient is a very valid one. It certainly is not new. On a very elemental level, 40 years ago my parents decided they were going to install central heating, a furnace in the old farm house. Before they could do that they decided they had better insulate the place. They put in a furnace and did not want to spent a lot of their hard earned money to buy oil to melt snow. That was not considered a good idea. These were practical people. They were not trying to protect the environment. They were not worried about that dreadful gas carbon dioxide being emitted from their chimney. They were interested in keeping some money in their pockets.
In his address of December 18, the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre said the savings are unbelievable and almost too good to be true.
I have had some experience around here with spurious data and glossy ministerial bunk in other fields of endeavour so my reaction is that sometimes if something seems too good to be true, it is probably false. Before private owners spend money to upgrade buildings they do cost benefit analyses. They do not do that as a make work project. Their decisions are validated by the bottom line. Above all, after they have made decisions they let contracts to do the work in a properly tendered manner.
As a cautionary note, when we talk about federal government retrofitting, I invite hon. members to look around them. We have been retrofitting this place for the last four years. It is interminable. The last time I looked the government had spent about $400 million. It is already over budget and it is half done. This is the way the federal government operates.
I have some problem with the idea that we must look to the federal government to take care of waste of energy problems. I would like to see some figures that are believable and provable. When our critic in this area tried to get some details on some of these federal building initiatives from the government, he was effectively stonewalled. There was no detail available. So a word of caution.
Industry left to its own devices, free of a lot of regulatory and tax impediments, will develop energy efficient strategies because it is profitable to do so. Although this is anecdotal, I will tell the House about a couple of projects developed by the innovative Canadian mining industry many years ago not to conserve fuel in the national interest or to curb emissions of combustion gases but to help them make more money.
One of the best examples I can think of was designed and built more than 80 years ago in the town of Cobalt, Ontario where a mining company drove a vertical shaft up near the bed of a river at a waterfall so they had an enormous cascade of falling water coming through the raise. That water was used to compress air. The compressed air, which was produced at virtually no cost and with no fuel, was then used to power the drills to drill the holes in which they would load the dynamite to break the rock in the mines in the neighbourhood. It was a wonderful system developed 80 years ago.
There is an example in the Sudbury area with which I am more familiar because it gets into my age group. In order to help with the ventilating system of a deep mine, International Nickel Company drove a raise into the bottom of a very large worked out area near the surface of the ground and installed its ventilating fans. They would suck the down draft air through these old workings. In the winter the company sprayed a fine spray of water into the old workings. As the water froze it heated the air to give them free air heating to ventilate the mine. There was this great mound of thousands of tonnes of ice sitting near the surface of the mine so in the summer they sucked this air past that mound of ice and had a cooling system for the deep levels of the mine.
Industry is not stupid. Industry will do what is necessary to conserve energy, especially now when we consider the extremely high cost of fossil fuels. They will do anything they can to prevent the waste of valuable resources. This is where the real work will come from.
I have no confidence whatsoever in any federal government initiative to do anything, to do it right and to do it economically. It does not happen, or if it does, it happens by accident.
On that note I will relinquish my space to others. I do hope the hon. member from Winnipeg will give some thought to what I have said.