Natural Resources committee  It's a great opportunity for Canada because we are a forest nation. It's a great opportunity. There are a couple of European countries that are really innovating. Austria is one of them, and Switzerland in the alpine region, but that's a great opportunity for Canada, absolutely.

Natural Resources committee  This is a real scenario that we continue to refine now, because there are also the job opportunities as well. These are great jobs, great demand for services, and so on. There's a business case for it too. You actually do save money. There is a good return on investment.

Natural Resources committee  That's a very good question. When we established those targets, we were modelling what it would take to reduce carbon emissions from the building sector by 2030. That was our target. I'm not talking about homes, but larger buildings over 25,000 square feet. We looked at approaches and technologies, particularly in the existing building sector, that would take us to that goal.

Natural Resources committee  It certainly would. I would say in terms of reducing carbons, we shouldn't just rely on one strategy or two strategies. We need to use the whole arsenal of approaches and opportunities that we have. What we focused on was mainly operational energy, or carbon. When you look at buildings, over 35% of carbon emissions in Canada come from building operations such as lighting, cooling, and heating.

Natural Resources committee  From our perspective, from the building sector, once the carbon price is at $50, it might have an impact, not necessarily on individual homeowners, but more on owners of a portfolio of buildings. There's one example I can give you from British Columbia, which has had a carbon tax for a number of years that is now at $30.

Natural Resources committee  Mr. Chair, thank you for the invitation to appear before the committee. I wanted to bring a perspective from the building sector, particularly the green building sector, in regard to the risk or opportunities for clean tech. The green building sector here in Canada and globally is growing at a rapid pace year after year.

Finance committee  First of all, I want to clarify that I am not talking about houses or individual homeowners, but buildings over 25,000 square feet.

Finance committee  The public sector is also a big building owner in the country.

Finance committee  I think the opportunity here is that retrofits, as we are proposing them, actually do have a payback. After three to seven years, there is payback.

Finance committee  Some of the building owners lack the access to capital to make those decisions and to invest in their buildings. We are not proposing that the government should give away money, but there are ways, for example, to establish revolving funds to provide low-interest loans to building owners to get them into making retrofit options.

Finance committee  I think there is no general number, because it really depends on which sector of the building industry you are dealing with. Commercial owners, for example, are very much business-driven. They make improvements, and they try to recoup those investments. In the public sector, they own buildings for a very long time.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Green Building Council represents the building sector in Canada on sustainability issues. We think that there's a significant opportunity, one of the biggest opportunities, to reduce carbon emissions to meet Canada's target of a 30% reduction by 2030. In fact, the recommendations we're bringing forward today were modelled on the premise of how to get to a 30% reduction in carbon emissions from the building sector by 2030.

Finance committee  Thank you. That's a very good question. I have to comment from a buildings perspective, and it's an infrastructure perspective as well. We need to design our overall system a lot more efficiently, because simply replacing the energy that's based on fossil fuel now with renewable green energy would not be an easy transition.

Finance committee  I think it depends on the sector of the construction industry. For example, developers that build market-based housing—we see a lot of construction in major cities such as Toronto, Vancouver, and so on—need third-party financing to pay for the costs of energy improvements in their buildings.

Finance committee  That's a very good point. It would vary by region. In some regions, the fuel mix is based on coal and in some regions it is based on hydro, so the benchmarks we would strive for would vary from region to region. That's correct. One of the first steps would be to define what net zero building emissions would mean by region.