Natural Resources committee  There's no doubt that they do decrease consumption. It's sometimes in the order of 30% or 35%. People don't like them because they add an element of uncertainty to the bill. In many cases, people don't realize that in an average apartment building when you go to submetering, or s

Natural Resources committee  I'm sorry. I confess to having thought that the question wasn't overly applicable to me.

Natural Resources committee  Exactly.

Natural Resources committee  I also had the same surprised reaction when my researcher gave me this information. Her reference was not to Okotoks but to another area in a western province for which her information—I think it came from government sources—was that these people were not supposed to be doing thi

Natural Resources committee  Electricity is a provincial matter, and the province has a regulation with respect to refrigerators, the age at which it was installed, in order to get to the refrigerators that are more sound from an energy point of view. That has been addressed on the refrigeration side. On th

Natural Resources committee  What happens is that in the classes that provide for a 50% CCA rate, there's a half-year rule, so in the first year you get 25%, and then it's a declining balance. You get 37.5% in the second year, about 25% in the third, and about 10% in the fourth year. People think of 50% and

Natural Resources committee  I think that of the programs that did run, the last iteration was a good program. One or two programs before that had not been as effective. They had certain limitations; they came at it in a particular way. I think the most recent one was the third version, and it was properly s

Natural Resources committee  Yes, to some degree it has within the sector. The references I've made to the U.S. and the U.K. in the written paper were specifically with respect to tax programs that gave a preferential approved tax treatment to energy-efficiency renovations. They are more akin to the one we

Natural Resources committee  Mr. Chair, thank you very much for inviting us to this committee, and thank you to all the committee members. You have our written submission, but I will speak more broadly than that submission, leaving that submission as one example of a broader theme. The Canadian Federation

Natural Resources committee  Yes. Now, our tenants are not all teenagers—some of them are 18, 19, and 20 years old—but by the same token, any of us, if we are faced with a free good, will tend to waste it. We want to use submetering. We want to use it for electricity. We also want to use it for heat. But u

Finance committee  Thank you, Monsieur Carrier. The position of our federation is that there should be much more attention paid to direct subsidies to tenants rather than construction, because the situation we have is that low-income people, in the vast bulk of cases now, are housed. They are hous

Finance committee  Again, is it the point for the system to provide subsidies based on the values, so that if you have an expensive home you get a lot of subsidy? Normally, the answer would be no. Assuming that away, I would say that the point you're making has some validity, but the discrepancy i

Finance committee  Many of those programs are also available to homeowners, and we have taken into account some of those. What the study does not address—I'll be quite frank with you, and we have it in written material—is the money that goes to social housing. In our view, social housing is essenti

Finance committee  Well, understand that we're not saying that these things should be taxed. Frankly, you'd have a revolution on your hands. What we're saying is that there should be recognition that this is a benefit that is received, and it's a valuable benefit that equates to real money. So when

Finance committee  Well, society actually would be better served, at the point we're at, if more people were renters, because renters, when they become unemployed, will look for a job wherever there's a job and then will move to take it. Homeowners look for a job within commuting distance of their