Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We need to establish territory-wide building standards to meet the cost and climate changes of today. Currently, this government builds to a standard 25 percent better than the national model building codes. The GNWT’s Good Building Practices for Northern Facilities 2009 guidebook establishes this standard as a condition of RFP for all territorial government construction.
Under its municipal authority, the City of Yellowknife has set similar high energy-efficiency standards. That’s the extent of mandatory energy efficiency standards in the NWT. Outside Yellowknife, all private construction and municipal facilities built with territorial money must meet only the lower national standard, a lot lower. There is no legal requirement to do better.
We could wait for each municipality to expensively enact their own local legislation, or this government could establish a single territorial standard under which all will benefit. That’s what they’ve done in the Yukon. Under that territory’s 2002 Building Standards Act, government has the authority to replace or modify the requirements of the National Building Code and require higher standards more suited to our northern realities.
Governments can lead change with a mixture of incentives and requirements. We missed the opportunity to do this under the New Deal when every community was provided with infrastructure dollars and gas tax funds and had to develop energy plans but no standards were required. With regulation and the right support, it is in the public interest to reduce costs and climate impacts while helping protect citizens and communities from oil’s inevitable price climb.
We’ve put our own house in order, now it’s time to make sure all NWT buildings follow our lead. At a minimum this must be a proposed and evaluated tool in our Greenhouse Gas Reduction Strategy. The Minister of MACA has repeatedly been on record as being willing to let communities and private enterprises continue to build low-efficiency infrastructure and have the public bear the costs.
I will be asking the Minister of Environment and Natural Resources what actions his department has taken to assess and move to adopt this common-sense tool in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Strategy being developed.