Government Operations committee  I'm delighted to be here. Thank you very much. That was a very interesting segue. I haven't met Wayne actually, but he referred to two projects, Banff and the RCMP. I think I sent the staff a flyer, and two of the case studies on our flyer are Banff and the RCMP building using a

Government Operations committee  Quite a bit of work has been done on this. In my presentation, I included one slide from the Empire State Building that looks at jobs per billion dollars invested in comparison with other energy generation. Natural Resources Canada has just undertaken a study on the employment be

Government Operations committee  Starting from my experience in the residential sector—albeit I know you're mainly focusing on federal buildings—Canada has among the world's leading building scientists. The R-2000 program developed here in Canada was, and still is, among the best in the world in terms of a volun

Government Operations committee  Yes, absolutely. Thank you. It has been around for a number of years. As I said, about a third of your buildings have already been done, and there's a great opportunity to use it more. It's a matter of using the funding available from the private sector and having them take the

Government Operations committee  Yes.

Government Operations committee  Through the savings, the guaranteed savings: there is a reduced energy bill that is associated with the project. You invest $100 in the energy efficiency of a building and there are guaranteed savings of 15% to 20%, as I said, and it's that income flow for the period of the contr

Government Operations committee  There is a group that's been brought together—REALpac is part of it and our association is part of it—that has advocated this change to the tax of 43.1%. There's a submission that's been made to the finance minister on that. I'm sure you've seen it, but if not, we could make that

Government Operations committee  It's going to mean even more savings. It's going to be even larger savings.

Government Operations committee  You still have two-thirds of the buildings that haven't done anything. So there's still a large number of people out there, building owners, both in the private and public sector, that have decided not to, that they would rather invest their money somewhere else. They would rathe

Government Operations committee  That's a good question. I don't have the answer, but I think it would be a very useful piece of work. NRCan may have begun to do this—albeit I haven't seen it—to rank the buildings in Canada, as you say. Presumably, they started with the low-hanging fruit, probably mostly in Otta

Government Operations committee  There are both direct and indirect effects. There's direct employment and then, because those people have jobs, their kids go to school, and they buy groceries, so there's indirect employment. There's also an issue with net employment. What happens is that, if you save energy,

Government Operations committee  That was documented by the Clinton Foundation, and there's quite a lot of research and reports on that. As I said, NRCan is just in the process of taking this on in more detail. I would expect a study to be available later this year, so I will share with the committee a presenta

Government Operations committee  Yes. I'm quite involved here in Toronto, as are the other people on the panel, with an initiative called the race to reduce. It's a voluntary program to reduce energy consumption in office buildings in downtown Toronto by 10% by 2014. We've decided to adopt a metric that's been b

Government Operations committee  Good question. Yes we do, and it's provincially-based. When we do a project in B.C., we're looking at the cost of electricity and natural gas, so when they do a payback calculation for B.C., it's based on B.C. numbers. Typically though, these reports have focused on the financia

Government Operations committee  It's a bit of a complicated question, but natural gas right now is very inexpensive at $3.50 per million BTU. It was $10. In Europe it's $12, and in Japan it's $16. So we have huge price variations, and right now it is at a low price. So for someone building a new natural gas pla