Environment committee  In my previous life as an academic, I did quite a bit of work on governance of innovation in public sector organizations that govern innovation, so I'll pick up on some of that. One thing that's quite important is to have clear goals and missions, but with the flexibility to se

Environment committee  Yes, I think that's something we definitely have to explore. There's one company that sends drones over buildings and looks at heat loss on the roofs and so on. One real value of a virtual energy audit is actually being able to get a quick energy performance label, which is quit

Environment committee  I'm aware of the greening government strategy, which I would say is really a leader in defining the standards that they want to hit and trying to give forward guidance to industry about how they can do that.

Environment committee  It does, absolutely. I'm in complete agreement. It could also be expanded to Crown corporations—not just exactly narrowly government, but kind of a larger expansion of government, including public buildings and high-value buildings that people go to. The other thing I think is

Environment committee  Denmark—and this was a while ago—was named one of the most energy-efficient countries in the world. The example that comes to mind about how they do user-producer interactions is actually from the wind industry. The textbook case of wind development was that technology developer

Environment committee  If you look at the last federal budget, it seemed very focused on crowding in private sector capital. I think everybody would love to see more private sector investments in reaching net-zero emissions, but I don't think you get that by offering incremental incentives to co-fund w

Environment committee  We ran a model in which we tried to add up what it would take to retrofit almost every building, and the cost would be $20 billion to $30 billion a year, so it's huge. The public sector has to lead that, and of course we need private sector investment to come in too. You mention

Environment committee  I think the government needs to set a clear goal, including what net-zero emission performance would look like for a whole bunch of different building sectors. Then they need to target any incentives, any financing and any policy towards meeting that goal. Right now we're saying

Environment committee  I'm again blanking on the numbers, but certainly the jobs created per million dollars spent for energy upgrades tend to be much higher than in most other initiatives in the economy. I think part of it is that this is an area for good jobs, especially good jobs in the trade. A lo

Environment committee  As I said, these are obviously the people in need. These are obviously the Canadians who are not going to do the retrofits on their own unless they receive some help. They're highly vulnerable to energy price increases that are happening because of global factors and because of t

Environment committee  It's a good question. You're catching me without specific numbers. The potential study that was done for Canada said we could save about 40%, I think, of our energy needs by 2050, which could be met by energy efficiency, by saving energy instead of supplying it, I believe.

Environment committee  I think there are multiple technologies, but I think maybe the innovation in energy efficiency that's needed is around specific technologies like cold climate heat pumps. A lot of it is finding the process to really scale up energy efficiency. Some of that could be technologies

Environment committee  I think the key thing that could be really transformative is coordinating the demand on the supply side and having them work together better. For instance, we need to not just retrofit every building at a time; we need to retrofit thousands, millions, of buildings. By aggregati

Environment committee  I think you need to find what a net-zero retrofit means, and we haven't done that yet.

Environment committee  Thanks for the question. For residents, the principal program in market right now is called greener homes, which you might be aware provides both an incentive and loans. The loan is about $40,000. A deep retrofit can cost a bit more than that—$50,000 to $80,000, even $100,000 is