Mr. Speaker, different ideas have been thrown around about what this would look like. It could be a tax credit that is specifically for green measures, but there has been a lot of talk in the past about actually having a program for energy efficiency retrofits.
There was the EnerGuide for housing and there was also a program that lasted about three weeks, the EnerGuide for low income households. The EnerGuide for low income households program had a few flaws. It could certainly have been improved but it was an incredible step toward trying to help low income households meet their energy efficiency needs and actually do the retrofits. A person would go in and do an assessment of a home to figure out the most cost effective measures to take and it helped people pay for those measures.
I have done work in Nova Scotia where we have shown that it is cheaper to go into someone's house, insulate the roof, replace the windows and have the energy consumption go down than it would be for us to build another coal-fired power plant in 10 years, which is really the way we are heading because of our increased consumption.
There are different models for these programs. I would suggest that we look to the United States because it is doing wonderful work on low income energy efficiency projects.