Environment committee  Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you to the committee for asking me to be here. I'm very glad to share my experience of the private sector partnering with local not-for-profit organizations. What you'll hear is that it's not only to reduce their environmental impact, but also to incr

Environment committee  Wonderful.

Environment committee  Absolutely, I would be glad to. When Sustainable Waterloo Region, or Niagara Sustainability Initiative, or EnviroCentre approaches a business, their conversation is twofold. The first side is the business case for sustainability broadly. To be clear, that business case differs

Environment committee  Absolutely. The software is critical because you can't manage what you don't measure, so it is critical to your ability to set goals. If sustainability is in a business' best interest, then why would they not set goals on this too? The software that is provided is from a comp

Environment committee  That's correct, yes.

Environment committee  No. The entire program is funded based on membership fees, sponsorship, and event attendees. While government was supportive with grants back in 2008, within four years—by 2013—that sinking fund of grants had sunk, and membership fees and sponsorship had risen to the point.... It

Environment committee  That's a great question. Thank you. To be clear, the businesses set their own goals. For each community a framework is provided, and by that I mean the rules by which they can set a target. In Waterloo region, for example, the targets are between 20% and 100% over 10 years. A gr

Environment committee  The commercial businesses would respond very well, of course. I would encourage you to look no farther than within our own borders. Provincially, we have a number of programs, in B.C., in Ontario, and in Quebec, for example, that would be wonderful models for the federal govern

Environment committee  I could not agree more. Incentives are absolutely critical, if you look at the amount of change that's required, based on what we're hearing from the IPCC. The targets I'm talking about here are not science-based. They are based on what the companies are setting within their mean

Environment committee  It's a great question. I think one important divide would be those that are publicly traded versus those that are private firms. For those that are publicly traded, they are required to meet a profitability objective. Still, that means engaging employees and their employees may

Environment committee  There is absolutely a trickle-down effect, where we see employees of regional carbon initiative members who are then participants in different programs of the GRCA, for example. They may then also volunteer with one of the many environmental groups in their community, so it is an

Environment committee  That's absolutely an option. We are trying to scale in a measured way; that is, to ensure the program is financially self-sufficient in multiple communities across the province. That means that currently we are in seven communities in Ontario. As I mentioned earlier, those are Ni

Environment committee  Sustainability CoLab has four employees and is very focused on a model that scales based on the workforce of the local entities, so Sustainability CoLab does not have local employees in every community. Rather, for example, here in Ottawa EnviroCentre is our network member. Envir

Environment committee  Absolutely. Municipalities are critical players in all seven of the communities in which we operate. In fact when we select a member, that is to say, when we receive applications from groups like EnviroCentre in Ottawa or reThink Green in Sudbury, one of the criteria is how sup

Environment committee  Absolutely, yes. Many of the larger firms we work with have dedicated staff. Sun Life Financial has a director of sustainability, for example. Those are the kinds of people we want to have at the front of the room to be sharing the successes that companies like Sun Life and the