Madam Speaker, the motion we are debating today deals specifically with the mandatory emissions standards for the auto industry, but my colleague from B.C. is absolutely correct in that on the demand side management of our energy resources there are in fact job creation opportunities and unbelievable energy savings that could take us on the road to meeting our Kyoto obligations.
One such idea is the energy retrofitting of our public buildings. I will put this to him as he is a member of the ruling party. The federal government owns 68,000 buildings, many of which are absolute energy hogs because they were built in a time when energy was not an issue in the 1950s and 1960s. With the current energy retrofit program for the government's own buildings, it will take 150 years to actually retrofit all those buildings because they are doing a handful per year. I challenge him and his government to escalate the federal building initiative tenfold and do 5,000 buildings a year.
It will still take the government 12 or 15 years to get anywhere near full compliance, but it could serve as a demonstration to the rest of the country, to both the private sector and the public sector. It could show people how to save costs in operating buildings, conserve energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, create a gazillion jobs, and even create a whole new industry in terms of the new developments in technology, which we could commercialize and export.
There are things that the government could do tomorrow morning. I am trying not to be too critical of the current government, because I appreciate the tone and the content of my colleague's question, but there are things we could do tomorrow that would get us well on the way to meeting our Kyoto commitments. We can start with our own publicly owned buildings.