Mr. Speaker, the federal government could help the province of Quebec and all of the provinces in fact reach their Kyoto targets with one simple measure. The Government of Canada owns roughly 68,000 buildings across Canada. Many of them were built in an era when energy conservation was not an issue; they are wasteful and older. The government also leases space in many buildings that are of a similar vintage.
Through its energy retrofit program, the federal building initiative, it has renovated I believe less than 1,200 buildings total out of 68,000 and usually just in very simplistic ways, such as changing the light bulbs to a different type of ballast, et cetera, picking the low-hanging fruit.
I am sure the minister is aware that a unit of energy harvested from the existing system by demand side management measures is indistinguishable from a unit of energy generated at a generating station, except for a couple of important things. It is available at one-third the cost. It creates seven times the number of jobs. It is available and online immediately for resale to someone else. It saves greenhouse gas emissions. These are all huge pluses.
Would the minister not agree that one thing the feds could do immediately without even an outpouring of cash to the provinces would be to clean up those energy wasteful buildings?