Don't you do that. If you move something, I'm in trouble.
Now it's my turn. Most of what I had on my list has already been touched on by many of you. I think only a couple of things might not have been mentioned.
To touch on waste management, because we just had that discussion, there is a lot of research that's done. Obviously, the economic model of today is to try to drive consumption. It's about how much you can sell, about how many pieces you can sell. It's nice if you have a lot of money and you're in good shape and you're in that top 1%, because you can make the kinds of decisions that you're talking about. I do that. I pay.... I'm not in the top 1%, but I definitely take the time to buy something that's going to last my lifetime and to invest in that, but most people really can't spend that kind of money at the front end.
One book, which I think you've read, is Cradle to Cradle. It talks about how if we're actually acknowledging that it's not going to be the majority of the population, if we really want to make change, we have to address that majority. It gets back to using the waste soap out of one product, not necessarily downcycling it, but using it as input to the next manufacturing process. It gets back to trying to couple these opportunities. I think it was MP Gerretsen who mentioned coupling the heat out of one—the waste out of one is to the benefit of another—and bringing these things together. Well, that's true of a manufacturing process as well.
I think the government has a chance to move in this direction with incentives and where we are going to spend our money. That's something that I'd like us to be thinking about as we work through these. How do we tweak? How do we give that little bit of an incentive to move things? I think there are a lot of companies that are interested in doing this. I'm aware of a carpet manufacturer that is taking carpets—not wool carpets but the polyester ones and what have you—and completely recycling them and bringing out new carpets. So there are companies trying to do it, and they're actually economically viable, but how do we help move that? They spent a lot of money because the owner had a vision for this and he made that investment, but how do we help other businesses make those investments and make those changes? That's something I was thinking about.
Number one is climate change and how we transition to a low-carbon economy, or to a post-carbon economy, as people are saying. If you read Jeremy Rifkin's The Third Industrial Revolution, you see that carbon is going the way of the dodo and we're going to have to really make that huge transition. How do we do that?
How do we examine this? Maybe this committee will look at raising awareness of how climate change is affecting our different ecosystems. How do we manage that? I mean, it's coming. What do we do and how do we help communities deal with those changes that are coming? That is something I will put in the climate change bucket there.
For me, endangered species and species at risk are about habitat protection. From my experience in watershed protection in the Humber River watershed, it's about finding places that we need to protect, but it's not just that. Will there be adaptation as the climate changes? Also, it's about having a crucible of species that can exist. If they are in isolated little pockets, species sometimes will die out eventually because they'll get a disease or whatever, or because there's no influx of new genetic material or adaptation just doesn't take place and they die off.
How do we make networks? It's not just about protecting a little space, but about protecting a whole network. How do we do that? We haven't done it very well. We have wonderful parks, but they're isolated. This is looking at it on a larger scale. It's sort of like how water is looked at on a watershed scale. How do we look at a larger habitat protection network to allow species to exist and continue with the changes that are coming? That ties into marine protection, national parks, and all the things that you talked about and that I think MP Fast talked about as well. How do you make improvements in those areas so that we can encourage the protection of habitat?
I love the conversation about how we get the public and those who are affected and living around the park more engaged in that process, because that's the way it's going to be successful. I'm excited about that.
I had hazardous products and microplastics on my list, too. I also had pesticides. It didn't come up in anybody's conversation. There's the auditor's report, which we will have next week, and there are some issues there that are really concerning to me.
How do we turn it around so that manufacturers...? It's like we have to provide the burden of proof that we created a problem before we realized it was one and now we have to deal with it, rather than just give the companies licence to put products out there and then we have to come along and say there's a problem. Microplastics are an example of that. There are a lot of other examples as well, where there's innovation going on in products, but we're not really managing that until it becomes a problem or we're aware. It's the reverse; we have to turn that round.
From my background in volunteering with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority and sitting on its board, sitting on regional council.... Obviously, with watershed protection, best practices in waste water, protecting fresh water...there is so much technology out there now that leads to the different processes that we have today, and we should be trying to find ways to encourage that.
York Region is a very wealthy region to a certain extent, so it's able to spend the money to invest in these things. We have energy from waste. Our new facility has just opened, and I think it is one of the highest operating in Canada in terms of air output, reduction in air contaminants.... It's good technology that we need to encourage for other areas that don't have that kind of money to do that.
Burying it all in the ground is crazy. Not only are we wasting resources for future opportunities, but we're also creating a disaster that just sits there forever. It's there for hundreds of years and becomes a problem.
There's one last thing that I have which nobody mentioned. It comes into sustainable development. I was frustrated when I saw all of these microFIT opportunities, and then I looked at my roof and I couldn't do it. The slope of my roof is in the wrong direction for me to properly take advantage of it. I wondered why we wouldn't, to a certain extent, change the building code to make sure that not only are the roofs structurally able to do this so that if homeowners wanted to do it, they wouldn't have to do major renovations to their roof, but also that their roof would be oriented in such a way that you could do it fairly well. It's an architectural detail, but if it were fundamental that designers needed to think about, why wouldn't we do that? We know in the future this is something we're going to have to do. We're going to go toward individual homes providing their energy, and a distributed network of energy.
I thought about looking at the federal building code and seeing what we might be able to do with that to encourage innovation. In terms of that sustainable development, how do we go about—and many of you have mentioned this—a national building retrofit strategy and encouraging those things to happen in an environmentally sustainable way? I was even thinking about the retrofit that's possibly coming up on the Prime Minister's residence.
We need to make sure that we are innovating and leading, and providing opportunities for others if they should desire them.
I just mentioned supporting green infrastructure investment and building that into the urban environmental agenda. There's a lot of building going on in our cities, and we need to up the ante on those buildings, because they are opportunities for the future, not only with solar, but with ground heat. There are a lot of opportunities that we can build in the new urban areas if we incentivize it, I think.
The last one is obviously environmental assessment processes. It's a hot topic, and we're going to be seized with that soon. That is on my list.
There are air quality standards and supporting investment in that, and protecting and enhancing national parks, and Parks Canada, but that came back around to my bucket of endangered species and species at risk and how we make sure that we have habitat protection in place. We can enhance that through our marine parks and natural parks, and connecting those places so that they function properly. It's great to have a national park, but if it's isolated, it doesn't work as well as it could, so how do we connect that to another park or a boreal patch, or whatever it is in your area that makes that function better for species?
I really loved the discussion on the wetlands, because I have a particular passion for wetlands and making sure that we try to address that here somehow.
I have a ton of fantastic points, but I wondered, there are a couple of things we need to do in committee business. I had put forward a proposed agenda for this week and next. I know MP Cullen mentioned something as well. I'm thinking about how we want to go through the next bit of time we have. We had talked about going back around the table and having some cross-pollination and figuring out how to prioritize. If we get into that, which I think we should, because that's what we set ourselves for, I want to make sure we put aside some time for making sure we set the agenda and bring some things to your attention.
If we do this back and forth, how about we give ourselves 20 minutes? That's not a lot of time. If we give ourselves 20 minutes we still have enough time to do some more work on it, just the committee. Okay, so we have a 20-minute open discussion on what you've heard.
Mr. Eglinski.