Government Operations committee  In terms of the technologies, first off, as I mentioned in my slides, is the recommissioning of buildings. I dare say that most buildings are not performing optimally, and recommissioning will let them do so. I'm sure David could speak to a large number of measures that can be retrofitted to buildings to bring down their energy performance.

Government Operations committee  There's a multi-part answer to that question. First off, in the big picture, energy and carbon are very closely related. So if you do one you're going to get the other one whether you like it or not. The struggle you get into is that some electricity is produced by hydroelectric, which you could argue is close to zero carbon, and some is produced by coal, which has very high carbon.

Government Operations committee  I'm sorry if I went off on a technical tangent. If you strictly base it as you said on our wanting a carbon reduction, and you're in a region that is all hydroelectric, there could be an argument that you're not getting carbon. By using an energy intensity number, you bypass that whole issue.

Government Operations committee  As to carbon targets, what I'm aware of, and I could be wrong, is that the carbon target is a global or high-level target. I think you have to take a high-level target down to the individual building. Canada is supposed to reduce so many millions of metric tonnes of carbon, and to a design team that's a difficult concept.

Government Operations committee  Is my time up? I just had a couple of slides.... That wasn't my great drum-roll finish.

Government Operations committee  Okay. The second one I wanted to bring up was commissioning. Commissioning—or for existing buildings, it's called recommissioning—means going in and making sure the building is operating properly. Just to show you that I'm showing all our shame here and not just plugging all our good stuff, on the graph that's up there, the green line was perfection for our predicted energy performance for the building, and the red line was tolerable.

Government Operations committee  Thank you very much. I'm going to rely on David as my technical assistant here with the slides. We'll see how technically savvy he is. Thank you for inviting me to attend. My name is Stephen Carpenter. I'm with Enermodal Engineering. I've been working in and consulting on energy-efficient buildings for over 30 years now.