Environment committee  Absolutely. NRC is very similar. Sustainable Waterloo Region was successful in receiving funding from IRAP within NRC. This is the industrial research assistance program. Again, they got in line behind other.... Again, the purpose of the program was to ensure more commercializati

Environment committee  Absolutely. I'll briefly answer and allow Ms. Ryan to also answer. It allows me to underscore the point that this is not for any one level of government or any one sector. This needs to be a group effort and very much speaks to some of the other questions we've received. What w

Environment committee  Those are the kinds of things you can get when you are that forward-looking to have the waste of one site becoming the heat of another. With those kinds of stories, if a network like ours operated in Guelph, we'd want to take the folks who were behind a project like that and get

Environment committee  Sure, and it allows me to go back to an earlier question I was hoping to get back to. There are pockets of funding federally, programs like Canada summer jobs, which NGOs can also apply to, that provide additional support that is very much needed. FedDev would be another example

Environment committee  The vast majority of the savings were through operational costs of reduced energy usage. I would be pleased to send you a link to provide a full list of the 37 projects I first cited and the specific.... Paul, if he were here, would share about reduced maintenance costs, would ge

Environment committee  Sure, and I'll relate it to an earlier question. We are not currently based in Guelph, so I'm by no means an expert in their community energy plan. However, community energy plans are another example of a tool that municipalities have to demonstrate leadership, to plan, and to en

Environment committee  This is working with the utility and the municipality to plan out the energy needs of the community and to look at local energy sources that could meet those needs over, I understand, a 10-year to 20-year horizon. It's really been the cornerstone of Guelph's sustainability effort

Environment committee  Great question. There are a myriad of answers to that. The first is having examples to look to and seeing success—and not in a report of a company in some other country, but a peer. It's seeing other peers take a leadership role, which relates back to the question about municipa

Environment committee  Absolutely, particularly when they have had some big wins, for instance when there's been some financial windfall from a T5 retrofit. I think it goes to an earlier question we received. All of a sudden, if employees are getting excited about it and are proud of their employer, th

Environment committee  I can share the process any business goes through. In every community, the NGO would create a milestone process of some kind. It starts with establishing some kind of a green team, or a group of employees who are responsible for the environmental performance or impact of the comp

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

Environment committee  Thank you for the question. If I can clarify, are you asking about the current role or the desired role?

Environment committee  Thank you. I will respond in English, if that pleases the committee. The current role of the federal government is almost nil. That is to say that locally MPs in each of the communities have been very supportive. Certainly that's been the case in Waterloo region, and that's act

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