Natural Resources committee  Yes. Good morning, and thank you for inviting us to appear before you. My name is Jim Lord, and with me is Ragui Barsoum. We are from Ecovert and Ecovert CX, and are the founders of those companies. We started in 2007. We are, I think, an environmental success story. We've grow

Natural Resources committee  That's our presentation. We look forward to answering your questions.

Natural Resources committee  I would say it's twofold. I think it's both of those things. It's the education piece and giving them the confidence. It might be working with organizations like the CFIB to let them know that these programs actually work. There was a municipal program where they would do a thous

Natural Resources committee  I think if municipalities through their energy providers have been able to.... They've had a number of incentives. Whether lighting retrofits, chiller retrofits, pump retrofits, there is a whole bunch of different retrofits that help the small, medium and even large companies to

Natural Resources committee  I think building codes need to continue to be the drivers of change for the people who don't want to follow the move that everybody's doing. People complain about them. When we were doing green buildings in 2007, contractors were like, “No way we can do this. No way we can divert

Natural Resources committee  Yes, it's very true. There is a shortage of skilled labour in the energy efficiency technical pieces. There's a change in the people required to run buildings and facilities. Where anybody could sort of run a building before, now they have all these different technologies there.

Natural Resources committee  No, that's not really an area that we focus on.

Natural Resources committee  We only really have an income from the construction side and construction techniques and products. We haven't really come across any barriers ourselves in what we do.

Natural Resources committee  I think for the challenges, we sort of brought this up earlier. We've been building buildings the same way for the last 150 years and now we're asking people to change the way they think, to look at it differently and to look at not oversizing equipment. We are letting them have

Natural Resources committee  It's having that confidence to put in the smaller boiler so you won't be cold in the winter.

Natural Resources committee  It's always easier in new construction, but new construction will not get us to where we need to be, because it's such a small percentage of the market. It's harder in existing buildings, and....

Natural Resources committee  We've seen existing buildings dramatically increase their energy efficiency as well. It can happen. It can work.

Natural Resources committee  I have no comment on that. I think as people are looking at what they want to do career-wise, we will need good construction workers and more technological construction workers than before.

Natural Resources committee  Certainly, we need qualified tradespeople and we need to encourage courses at community colleges and other institutions that will help us bring forward our next round of tradespeople so we can keep building.

Natural Resources committee  Definitely.