Mr. Speaker, it is good to think about what these solutions or programs would look like. It is a very fair question to ask.
I had the honour of being a community stakeholder and consultant with the EnerGuide for low-income households program. The EGLIH program was introduced by a previous Liberal government. It never made it off the paper. As a community consultant, I did have a view into what the EGLIH program would look like. It works with low-income homeowners. The key thing is that we cannot have up-front costs for low-income families. People on welfare in Nova Scotia get about $6 a day. A compact fluorescent light bulb costs about $6. If I had to make that decision, I would not buy the CF light bulb. I would choose to eat on that day.
With the EGLIH program there was no cost to homeowners. We would go into the home, do an energy audit and work with the homeowner. We would take out the incandescent light bulb and crush it so that it could never be used again. We would put in the compact fluorescent light bulb. We would insulate the roof. We would cover the hot water tank with an insulating blanket. We would go in and make the changes without any cost to the homeowner. We would then go in for another visit to ask how things were going and ask, for example, whether or not they were remembering to put the lid on the pot when they were boiling the spaghetti because it is more energy efficient. It was a lot about education. It was a lot about transforming households.
One flaw with the EGLIH program, and this was known, was that it was only for homeowners. Nova Scotia is an exception in that the majority of low-income Nova Scotians live rurally and quite a few of them own their homes. However, for the rest of Canada, most low-income Canadians are renters. How do we deal with renters? EGLIH was considering this. Community consultations were being done to figure out a good way to offer the program to tenants. One solution was to tell landlords that if low-income people were living in their building and they planned on doing renovations, we could give them a percentage of the renovations per capita. There are solutions out there.