Thank you, Mr. Chair. We have our Good Building Practices which define our energy standards for our government-owned buildings. They are based on the National Energy Code and meeting the requirements of the National Energy Code or exceeding them. I think our target is 10 percent better than the most recent version of the National Energy Code. I don’t have the dates in front of me. I know I provided them before and I apologize for not having it here today, but the next round of the National Energy Code is due in the imminent future. I believe it is less than a year away. At that point we will be reviewing our standards again to see how we do with the new code and we will be adjusting our targets accordingly.

We are going back to review and we have just sort of started the internal discussions on updating our Good Building Practices around some of the more recent developments in the area of technology. Those are things that we can put in there now around lighting that wasn’t available four or five years ago and things like energy efficient LED lighting can now become much more standard as part of our day-to-day routine business. Some of the things around biomass, as well, are things we are looking at putting in there. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Chair, I didn’t quite catch the question. I think the question was, when we do a retrofit, do we employ our Good Building Practices? If I can get that confirmed, thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, that’s a good question. Wherever possible we do. For example, in a major retrofit project like the health centre in Fort Smith is a good example where we did a complete retrofit of that building from top to bottom. That was done in accordance with our Good Building Practices and those standards. Other projects, envelope upgrades, things like that, we apply the Good Building Standards wherever we can, and when we do lifecycle replacements of heating systems, alarm systems, lighting systems, we apply the standards of the Good Building Practices as well.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. A couple things we do, we do set sort of a benchmark around greenhouse gas reduction for the department on an annual basis, and we track it and report it in our annual report, which we publish every year. We also, through our Capital Asset Retrofit Program and our energy auditing program, go through and look at the GNWT assets and we set benchmarks around how they’re performing. The lower performing ones we try to move more towards what

we would consider a high performing building. That’s one of the targets we set as we address the various projects through the Capital Asset Retrofit Program. We try to increase the benchmark performance of the various assets that we operate and maintain.

There are about 800 assets in our portfolio and it just takes some time to move them towards a better performing level. However, there is also the challenge that we see around new and emerging technology, so what wasn’t feasible perhaps five years ago is feasible today. Things like biomass were not things we were talking about, per se, 10 years ago; however, it’s a mainstream today. The emerging technology around LED lighting that I spoke of is something now we have to go back and look at lighting retrofits perhaps again going forward to help improve our benchmark performance. What we’re seeing with solar may provide some opportunity. These are all things that we will have to look at as we continue to improve the efficiency of our buildings.

Agreed.

Agreed.

Agreed.

Agreed.