Environment committee  Yes, but I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for the honour of addressing this committee and to invite anybody who would like to tour any of the carefully restored older buildings that York Heritage Properties has been involved with. You are all welcome. You have my em

Environment committee  Absolutely.

Environment committee  It has nothing to do with commercial viability. We just stick to our knitting. We know Toronto really well, and our particular ability is to know our customers. I've tried building in other communities. I've tried building in Dallas, Naples, and other communities. Frankly, we'r

Environment committee  I have to be frank with you. This is not an area of expertise for me. We don't do any residential development whatsoever, and it would just be one person's opinion, and I don't think it would be very helpful to you. I'd love to weigh in, but you are looking for expert testimony,

Environment committee  Sure. My partner and I are peculiar; we're not particularly ambitious folks. We've managed to build a reasonably sized company in spite of ourselves, not because of. We restore things just because, frankly, we love doing it. But there are many historical elements, for example, t

Environment committee  I mentioned that, with our environmental heritage, there are a couple of very small things the government could do that would have huge impact, and one is to speak to Revenue Canada to discourage them from attacking environmental groups whose sole purpose is to protect our enviro

Environment committee  To answer your question directly—although I would love to have chimed in on the previous speaker—we restore buildings for three different reasons. One, because of architectural excellence. In those instances you don't want façadism. Two, we do it for scale. Sometimes those histor

Environment committee  Well, that's okay; I'm out of time. There are many instances of building code issues that impact historical buildings that do not impact new construction. Thank you.

Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  No.

Environment committee  It's funny, you know, because we've restored well over a million square feet of commercial buildings, retrofitting them from industrial to commercial, and I'm embarrassed to tell you that I've never even heard of that.

Environment committee  That's really a great question. When I was asked if I wouldn't mind addressing your committee, I pointed out that I could talk for about two hours on recommendations I could make to the municipalities. I could talk about the Ontario Municipal Board and the necessity of some type

Environment committee  I'm really in your hands. I was asked to be here. This is not really a deputation. I will tell you some of the challenges we face. I'll try to make it reasonably quick, and I'll do it in more of a point form rather than a discussion. Our company has been restoring old buildin

Environment committee  In the first place I'd like to talk for about 30 seconds about an issue where the federal government has a very significant role to play, and that relates to our environmental heritage, if you'll indulge me in that for one moment. I started a committee called Campaign Fairness O