Public Accounts committee  We've had departments do decarbonization plans for their real property. We brought in an expert to aggregate those. Over a 30-year period to 2050, the incremental cost is $3 billion to decarbonize. That represents about one per cent of what we'd spend on real property over that period of time normally without decarbonization.

Public Accounts committee  I think you gave a pretty clear response. We also made a commitment to the management action plan, to clarify that in the next greening government strategy, to actually put a commitment in as to when those plans will be in place.

Public Accounts committee  We've been talking with countries about embodied carbon, which is the carbon in construction materials. We essentially have to extract the materials, process them, then put them in our buildings. That has a carbon footprint. We've been working with the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality and the General Services Administration in the U.S. to look at their equivalent to the greening government strategy, their executive order and the plans and processes they are putting in place.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for the question—

Public Accounts committee  We currently do not use carbon offsets, so they would not appear in the public accounts.

Public Accounts committee  That would be a question for National Defence and whether they could break that out from individual flights.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. We basically have partnered with our colleagues in the U.S. Our equivalent in the U.S. is called the Council on Environmental Quality. It's based out of the White House. In the spring of this year, we announced something called a greening government initiative. That's a collaboration of, I think, up to 50 countries right now, where we're sharing best practices, guidance and so on.

Public Accounts committee  We basically only track the public service, so we don't track ministers' travel or MPs' travel. We just track on a departmental and agency basis.

Public Accounts committee  If he flew on a Defence plane, that would be part of, as you said, the scope 1 emissions of that plane. The national safety and security emissions that National Defence reports to us wouldn't be itemized out.

Public Accounts committee  No, and we are also careful about the information we report and how we disaggregate it for safety and security reasons, too. We have to be aggregated to a certain level just to protect—

Public Accounts committee  Yes, at [Inaudible—Editor], we don't itemize travel to that extent.

Public Accounts committee  Sure. We track it on a departmental basis, so we don't itemize. We basically get aggregated data from each department on its travel on an annual basis.

Public Accounts committee  Sure. To answer what scope 3 emissions are, it's probably easier to say what scope 3 emissions are not. Scope 1 emissions are fuel reburn, so gasoline, natural gas, etc. Scope 2 emissions are from energy we use indirectly: electricity. We have scope and control over that because we can decide how much gasoline and how much electricity we use.

Public Accounts committee  As I said, we focus on the upfront cost to enable decision-makers at the beginning of the project to know essentially the value and amount of carbon savings they're getting out of that project. It's based on a life-cycle cost analysis and total cost of ownership. We recently met with the Canadian Institute of Quantity Surveyors.

Public Accounts committee  Pre-COVID emissions from real property and conventional fleets were reduced by 34.6%. After the first year of the pandemic, they were reduced by 40.6%, so we did see a significant reduction due to COVID. We expect this year's emissions to lie between those two numbers. Those emissions savings were achieved by retrofitting real property, procuring clean electricity, building zero-carbon buildings, and procuring zero-emission vehicles.