ENSU Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

COMITÉ PERMANENT DE L'ENVIRONNEMENT ET DU DÉVELOPPEMENT DURABLE

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Wednesday, November 26, 1997

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[English]

The Chairman (Mr. Charles Caccia (Davenport, Lib.)): All right, we are ready to start. Time is very precious.

We welcome Lois Corbett and Mr. Torrie from the Toronto Atmospheric Fund. They are here to tell us a good news story. It's something they can describe to us in the next little while.

If you could summarize your points in ten minutes, so there is time for a good round of questions.... And we thank you very much for coming on such short notice and on the eve of your departure for Kyoto.

Welcome to the committee.

Ms. Lois Corbett (Executive Director, Toronto Atmospheric Fund): Thank you very much, Mr. Caccia. It's a pleasure for me to be here.

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I know that you have an enormous agenda and challenge ahead of you and a debate that you're walking into tonight, so I'll try to keep my points brief. I'll appreciate it if when I start rambling you just look really bored, and then I'll move on to my next point.

Today Stephen has helped circulate a brief that we've put together. It's really very much a working paper on an idea that we have, an idea that we think is a good idea, the establishment of a Canadian climate change fund.

I apologize to Mr. Casson early, and I will apologize to the rest of the committee members right now, that I am from Toronto and I'm going to make a lot of references to the Toronto Atmospheric Fund. With that said, I'll go straight forward and brag, like Torontonians do, about our success.

Mr. David Pratt (Nepean—Carleton, Lib.): Just don't talk about the Blue Jays and the Argos. Okay? Or the Raptors.

Ms. Lois Corbett: The Toronto Atmospheric Fund was set up in 1992 by the city of Toronto with a very specific and simple goal: to help the city reach its target of a 20% reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by the year 2005. The city was the first in the world to adopt the target. It grew out of an international conference in 1988, and the target is actually called “The Toronto Target”.

The Chairman: The commitment was made in January by way of a city council motion. January 1990, was it?

Ms. Lois Corbett: Yes.

The Chairman: And the fund came from the sale of farmland.

Ms. Lois Corbett: The farmlands are called the Langstaff Jail Farm lands, where the city had a nursery. It was in the path of the 407. They had to sell a chunk of land, and city council at the time thought that they had to pay some dues for that new highway. So they took $22 million aside and endowed the fund and had a special act of the legislature passed, called the Toronto Atmospheric Fund Act.

Over the past few years we've invested that money in traditional municipal investments, conservative investments, but also have been able to loan out the capital.

What's really exciting from a community environmental perspective is that we've taken the interest we've earned on that capital, traditional or just straight loans, and helped build what we call a community of concern in the city around climate change, because we know that in order to move within Canadian cities and jurisdictions all over this country we need to engage the public in this important issue.

So what we're proposing with this very early discussion paper is the establishment of something similar, a Canadian climate change fund. We think that the activities of this fund should be focused on energy efficiency improvements in Canadian cities.

Why we think this is a good time to announce a program such as this is that city councillors and people who live in cities will see, first of all, the multiple benefits of setting up a fund. Climate change and global warming can be something that people on the street don't necessarily grasp right away, but when you talk to them, particularly in Toronto, Vancouver and Saint John, New Brunswick, about smog, they get it. They understand air pollution.

First of all, spending on energy efficiency and car use reduction in urban centres will help to improve local air quality. Cities all over the country are facing downloading, downsizing and huge financial restrictions. The interesting thing about investments in energy retrofits and transportation changes, infrastructure changes, is that they also bring about a lot of financial savings for the cities. So we don't necessarily have to talk to our most conservative mayors in Canada, with an environmental or a global warming bent. We can talk to them about saving money on their utility bill, and we've found in Toronto that this has been really important.

Another really important part for people who live in cities is the whole idea of energy retrofits and changes in the cities' infrastructure that bring about job creation. We know that there are a lot of construction workers unemployed, from Halifax and Charlottetown to Toronto, in Ottawa and in Vancouver. We know that we can put some of those workers inside buildings, putting in more insulation and changing light bulbs and putting in better windows.

There are also a lot of partnership potentials with cities working with each other, working within their own jurisdiction with regional municipalities and working with their own energy services companies and with local utilities, because we know that we can't move on a demand side management agenda, an energy efficiency agenda, without the true involvement of Canadian municipal utilities and provincial utilities.

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What we found in Toronto was that first of all we needed the target. We needed the target. We needed to have a politically acceptable target such that city council would say yes, we will pass the target, you guys go away and figure out how to reach that target. And they did.

We knew we had to involve all the people who use energy. Those are people who take the TTC, who drive their cars to work, who heat their own homes, who live in apartment buildings. We had to engage them, understanding that every time they flicked a light switch in downtown Toronto it would have an impact on the Mackenzie Basin. They had to reduce their energy use in order to understand the way cities draw in energy, waste energy, and actually have an impact on Canada's northern climates.

We also had to involve the top level of our bureaucracy at the Toronto Atmospheric Fund. At our fund we found there was nothing better than to have the medical officer of health sitting around these monthly tables and having the commissioner of works sitting at the table.

We did find at the Toronto Atmospheric Fund and within the city of Toronto that once we committed to having this revolving fund, people were at your door, saying “I want access to some of that capital”. We're not the Royal Bank. We're not the Canadian Tire credit card. We can negotiate for much lower levels of interest and return on that. We have a longer payback period. Ralph will talk a little about that later.

What is interesting for us with the fund is that we don't have to go back to city council every year to fund climate change initiatives. The fund is there. The interest on the capital pays for community projects and grants. The fund continues to grow.

Particularly if you think of the early 1990s, when Toronto was in a recession, the fact that the fund has actually grown and we've seen some good carbon dioxide reductions from our investments, and we've been able to double the amount of money going to community groups from $500,000 to $1 million each year, we know we must be doing something right. It's nice to see those investments focus on the real energy pigs in the country, people who live in cities, and build both a community of concern around climate change involving all the market players, all the businesses, all the big office towers, all the building operators, and all the people who have to take the bus from out in the suburbs to work in downtown Toronto.

I would like now to pass it over to Ralph. I have many more things to say about Toronto and the Atmospheric Fund. It has been a very exciting past few years for me.

I hope we could look at the fund purely as a model. Toronto, by being the first city in Canada to have such a fund, has made all the mistakes; and we've made some doozies. So now other cities.... And a Canadian national climate change fund could be established, building on both our success stories and some of the no-nos we found out through our trial-and-error process.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Mr. Torrie, please.

Mr. Ralph Torrie (Toronto Atmospheric Fund): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

When I found out how little time we had I made a bit of a change in what I thought I would add to Lois's remarks. I really want to make only three points.

I did prepare quite a number of slides, and I did that deliberately, even knowing there wouldn't be time to present them. I have left a copy with the clerk, and he can make and distribute additional ones if committee members are interested.

The first point I wanted to make is that our firm has been working with the Toronto Atmospheric Fund for the last few years, and also with an international organization of which Canada has the great fortune to host the international headquarters in Toronto, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives.

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Through that effort, to which we've also been primary consultants, we've worked with about 170 cities around the world that are part of their climate campaign now. All of these cities, in spite of the fact that it's not mandated, never mind funded, have made commitments at the local level to try to bring down greenhouse gas emissions.

There are a lot of reasons cities are doing this, even though they don't have to, which I can't get into. The only point I want to leave you with is that there is a bottom-up phenomenon happening all over the world that basically consists of cities taking on the energy issue in a way they never did before, not even in the energy crisis, when there was an urban energy movement of sorts, if you like, and we had the storefront energy conservation centres in a number of our provinces and so on.

What is happening now is much different. Cities are beginning to realize that energy is a strategic issue for them, for a number of reasons, and that by tackling it through the global warming window, they are able to take an integrated approach to a number of issues on their agenda, including financial savings, job creation, economic development, air quality, and traffic congestion. A lot of interconnected problems get addressed when you address greenhouse gas emissions, and cities are catching on to that.

So the plea I would leave you with is that a tremendous human, managerial, and technical resource is available at the local government level and is standing by, willing to tackle this problem. They are facing a number of barriers. Senior governments can help them remove some of those, and some of the slides refer to that. The main point is that not only is there a growing and already large body of interest, but we are developing the tools, the techniques, and the abilities to measure what influences greenhouse gas emissions at the local level.

This opens up all sorts of doors that are completely invisible at the national policy level. For example, urban planning itself has a very profound effect on how much energy gets used in the community—whether or not it's possible to walk or to cycle, how far you have to drive to get from where you are to where you have to go, and all of that.

I have two other points, which appear technical on the surface, but which have really important policy implications to the local government participation in this issue.

The first one is illustrated by this chart. I've shown on one axis energy savings that can be achieved. The units really aren't important. I can tell you that in this particular example, these are gigawatt-hours of electricity in Ontario's commercial business sector. That's where this analysis comes from. But the important thing is that energy savings are going up as you move up this axis.

As you move out this axis, the rate of return—the internal discounted rate of return, to use the economists' jargon—which goes along with a particular level of energy efficiency improvement, is shown. We get this relationship over and over again when we look at opportunities for energy efficiency and conservation and renewable energy investment. If you are out there—as many of the private energy service companies have been, at least until quite recently—looking for two- and three-year paybacks on your investments, which correspond to 20%, 30%, and even 35% returns on your investments, you are are going to be restricted to a relatively small share of the total energy efficiency and therefore emission reduction potential that's available in an economically cost-effective range.

Once you are willing to start taking a lower rate of return than 20%, the savings you can achieve skyrocket. And you get very much more if you're willing to take 15%, 10%, or even 5%, which is the rate we built a lot of our hydro dams with in this country. You can achieve much higher levels of emission reductions. So the message here, in technical terms, is we have to get a low rate of return on investment directed at this problem to really get at the deep emission reductions.

The policy implication, however politically incorrect it may be in the 1990s, is that if the public sector is not a partner, it isn't going to happen, because the private investors will be out getting 10%, 15%, 20%, and 30% doing something else, whether it's building strip malls in Malaysia or mining gold in Indonesia.

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One point that I think a group like this really has to bear in mind is that like so many other very large projects in this country when you look back over our history, whether it was building the railroad or developing the hydro-electric potential or electrifying the rural countryside, it's going to have to be a private sector and public sector partnership or the policy objective will never even come close to being achieved.

The third point I want to make starts off with a bit of a technical feel but the policy implications quickly become apparent. What I've done here is that I've taken the going rate for natural gas and the going rate for electricity in the North American marketplace and translated it. Instead of dollars per cubic metre for natural gas, or cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity, I've translated that cost into dollars per tonne of carbon dioxide by looking at how much carbon dioxide is associated with those different energy commodities.

What is the going price of energy if you think of it in dollars per tonne of carbon dioxide instead of cents per kilowatt-hour, or whatever? The results are that in the case of natural gas, depending on where you are in North America, there is a range that goes somewhere between $75 and $120 a tonne.

When it comes to electricity, the range is much greater, for reasons I'm sure you've all become familiar with in your deliberations. In some places electricity is made with coal, and in some places it's made with hydro and nuclear. So there's a huge difference in how much carbon dioxide is associated with kilowatt-hours, depending on where they come from. There's also a very large range in the price of electricity.

By the way, this is a low and a high in each case. In the case of the electricity bars, then, the range starts out at around the same level as natural gas in places like Oregon and Quebec and Manitoba and British Columbia, but goes as high as over $200 a tonne of carbon dioxide.

What is the point? The point is, it's not likely, it seems to me, that either carbon tax proposals in the $5- or $10- or $20-a-tonne range or carbon trading schemes where the premium for carbon dioxide reductions is in the $1- or $5- or $10-a-tonne range are going to get a dramatic response. People are already paying $100 a tonne for their energy, sometimes $200 a tonne. If you offer them a $5-a-tonne premium for saving it, they're not going to be that impressed. They're out there saving it, even in spite of these levels, because there are cost-effective opportunities to reduce energy use.

The basic implication of this kind of research—and I think it's the strongest practical difficulty with both carbon trading and carbon tax proposals—is that the price signal you have to send out if you really want to see a strong demand response is so high it's difficult to see it being politically feasible.

Those are little snapshots of different parts of what was, or what might have been, a much longer presentation, but fortunately for you will not be.

Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Torrie.

We have Mr. Casson, followed by Mrs. Kraft Sloan.

Mr. Rick Casson (Lethbridge, Ref.): Who controls this? Is there a board?

Ms. Lois Corbett: There's a board of directors appointed by city council. We have three city councillors, three senior civil servants from the City of Toronto, and four citizen appointees. That's actually written into our legislation. The board, like municipal councils, rotates every three years.

How would I see the governance on a national or a Canadian climate change fund? I think it would be very interesting. We've been playing around with some ideas on this. Obviously there are some key stakeholders, including energy services groups, wind energy and solar energy people, and the government itself.

I think Environment Canada would play a very strong role, for example, in helping the cities quantify and monitor their reductions. Industry Canada would help introduce people in cities all over Canada to new technologies and innovative technological steps cities could take. NRCan—energy efficiency and wheat measures, for example.

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The board is an interesting thing. What it does is it keeps the measures quantifiable and accountable, so if someone comes with a project, building a solar rooftop over the Gardiner, for example, something way out there, something you would never even think of, well, where are the tonne reductions from that? They meet every month and they are pretty tight. It's the taxpayers' money and they are conscientious about it. Our statements are audited every year. We get that nice mix: political people, citizen activists, and senior civil servants who can help open doors for all the different projects we fund but also work together in a strategic fashion.

The Chairman: Madam Kraft Sloan.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan (York North, Lib.): Is this linked to the program Louise Comeau has been promoting through the Sierra Club with the climate fund she's looking at?

Ms. Lois Corbett: Yes. We've asked Louise to do some background research for us.

Mr. David Pratt: Tell me, is Councillor Jack Layton involved in this?

Ms. Lois Corbett: Jack Layton was on city council when it was established back in 1992, but he hasn't been a member of city council.... I've been there for three years, and he hasn't been involved.

The Chairman: Mr. Jordan.

Mr. Joe Jordan (Leeds—Grenville, Lib.): I just want to reinforce something you said. It hit a nerve. I appreciate your being here. I think this identification of the economic viability of adopting sustainability is critical for getting from A to B. I've always thought that and you've reinforced it. But the notion of the grass roots and the latent capacity.... People want to help, if they have an instrument.

Just a quick anecdote. As I organized a little meeting in my riding of local grassroots environmental groups.... I just got off the phone with a guy two hours ago. He said this thing has taken on a life of its own; people are just desperate to get involved.

Ms. Lois Corbett: I grew up in a rural farming community in northern New Brunswick, and my mother always used to say there's nothing like new wallpaper to open up a community. Funnily enough, nothing like renovations are happening on a block-wide...new roof; two months later, new roof; two months later, new roof. Think about bundling all the homes built in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, after the Second World War and in dire need of energy retrofits. Think about that kind of community concern, where neighbours are talking to neighbours about levels of insulation in their attic. This can happen through the mobilization of a fund like this, one that's done in an accountable, practical, exciting way.

The Chairman: Mr. Knutson.

Mr. Gar Knutson (Elgin—Middlesex—London, Lib.): What was the biggest single item or thing Toronto did to come to the top of the list?

Ms. Lois Corbett: May I say two things?

Mr. Gar Knutson: It's up to the chair. He's pretty strict here. The two biggest things, then.

Ms. Lois Corbett: The regional government of Metro Toronto captured their methane from their landfill. They have the biggest landfill in Canada. They have a lot of garbage going in there, and they captured a lot of methane.

Mr. Gar Knutson: And did what with it?

Ms. Lois Corbett: And sold it to generate electricity. So they are replacing electricity on the grid with methane that would otherwise have gone into the atmosphere. Of course methane has twenty times the potential as a greenhouse gas that carbon dioxide does.

The second thing the City of Toronto did was they changed all their light bulbs. They borrowed some money from the Toronto Atmospheric Fund and they went out and changed all their street lamps and lane lamps to high-energy-efficiency light bulbs. They get a 21,000 tonne reduction in carbon dioxide per year from that simple measure, and they save $2.2 million from their utility bill. They liked that.

Mr. Joe Jordan: What is the life of the bulb, though?

The Chairman: Fifty or sixty times.

Mr. Clifford Lincoln (Lac-Saint-Louis, Lib.): I'm just curious that in your brief transport ranks as the third-highest source per capita of greenhouse gas emissions, whereas in national statistics it's the highest. Could you tell us why it would be different in Toronto from the national average?

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Mr. Ralph Torrie: Generally speaking—and we've looked at the energy use patterns in a lot of urban centres now—transportation does come out at the top of the list.

This work was restricted to the city of Toronto, proper. Number one, there's a huge concentration of commercial buildings there, which distorts the relative contribution from that sector and makes it very high. Number two, the average energy use for transportation by Torontonians is much lower than it is even in Metro Toronto, never mind the greater Toronto area. There's clear evidence that the denser urban cities use much less transportation energy than the average for society at large.

We also, in our work with cities, only count the transportation that's happening inside the city. We don't count planes, the intercity freight movements and so on. So that tends to make this number come out a bit lower than it otherwise would. But it is low, even for a city, and that's because Toronto as a city is relatively efficient when it comes to the movement of people. It has very high transit use for a North American city. It has very high pedestrian levels for a North American city. When we understand why that's the case, there's a lot that we can do in other cities to bring their transportation energy use down as well.

Mr. Rick Casson: It indicates that the $23 million that you started with was from the sale of land.

Ms. Lois Corbett: Yes.

Mr. Rick Casson: How much of that $23 million are you able to put out on an annual basis? A return, I guess, or whatever.

Ms. Lois Corbett: What's interesting about this is that you don't have to spend it all at once. If we in Toronto did want to invest in a deep lake water cooling system and pay for all that, we could blow the capital in a couple of months. But because it's a revolving fund, the very first act we did was loan the city $15 million. The day after we did that, we didn't have that $15 million to play with. But because the payments are coming back monthly, our fund is always growing. That's what's interesting about a revolving fund.

We're worth $26 million on the books—do you see that?—because these guys are making regular monthly payments. Sometimes—and this is what's interesting about the fund—we just need to say “We will securitize your loaning us the money”. We've seen that in retrofits in big buildings and co-op housing and social housing. I think that's really exciting. Instead of the Co-op Housing Federation of Toronto having to borrow at an outrageous rate of interest because they're not that secure because it's co-operatively owned as a building, we will securitize their loan with Canada Trust or a credit union. That brings the interest rates right down, so all of sudden they are excited about new windows. Our money stays in its investment until they default.

Of course we're at them every month not to default. This is taxpayers' money, and people are just as cautious about it in Toronto as they are from a federal perspective.

Mr. David Pratt: I mentioned Jack Layton's name earlier because Jack and I served on the board of the FCM and I noticed that you have them down as a supporter.

I did see, going back about a year or two, a very thick report on district energy in downtown Toronto. I'm curious as to what the status of that project is and whether or not you have been able to move some of the objectives of that along through the fund, because there are some big capital items there.

Ms. Lois Corbett: The Toronto Atmospheric Fund is a partner. There is a three-way joint ventureship that has been built up over the last two years, and we've invested $150,000 in feasibility studies. This is something that a fund does a lot. We'll help you fund the feasibility of a good idea.

We actually think that a scaled-down version of that original proposal of deep lake water cooling is within our political framework. We will likely see.... In fact, we've seen it. We've seen a pipe extension from our water filtration system being used to cool the new Metro Convention Centre. We were there to cut the ribbons just a few months ago. Prince Phillip was there.

There are a lot more opportunities for district energy, including district heating, but what's interesting in Toronto is that we're gradually moving toward a cooling peaking city. It is ironic if you think about Toronto using more energy and electricity to cool itself in the summer than to heat itself in the winter, but that is happening. Lake Ontario, we think, offers a lot of opportunities for cooling.

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The Chairman: Mr. Knutson.

Mr. Gar Knutson: I'd like to come back to those two charts you put up. The first one said big reductions are expensive, and governments are going to have to participate if we want big reductions—that was the gist of it.

Mr. Ralph Torrie: They're very capital-intensive.

Mr. Gar Knutson: They're expensive. They get a low rate of return, or they only make sense over an extended period of time.

What did the second chart say, in layman's language?

Mr. Ralph Torrie: It's basically saying that energy is very cheap. Energy commodities are very cheap. That's what it boils down to.

Mr. Gar Knutson: If energy commodities are cheap, why wouldn't carbon tax...? You're saying that because they're so cheap—

Mr. Ralph Torrie: I'm saying if you're running a firm—unless you're in the pulp and paper business or the steel business or something like that—if you're in general manufacturing or if you're operating a commercial office building like this, your total fuel and electricity bill is probably well under 2% of total value-added in your operation. You're going to whine and complain like everybody else if your utility bill goes up, but when you stand back and look at the big picture, the world does not revolve around the price of energy the way energy economists sometimes say that it does.

Mr. Gar Knutson: Do you think that's true for private automobile use as well?

Mr. Ralph Torrie: Well, that's interesting. The price of gasoline as a contribution to the total cost of owning and operating your family car is a little under 20%. It's not as high as you might think if you just went with your intuitive guess at what it is. It is more responsive to price changes because it's out of your hip pocket every week, but it is still a relatively modest contribution to the overall cost.

Even if you think of your family home, if you look at your total home-heating fuel and electricity bill for the whole year, it's probably in the range of one month's mortgage payment. From the point of view of the total cost, even on a society-wide basis after you add in all of those steel mills and paper mills, energy is still less than 10% of the picture.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Mr. Laliberte, Mr. Pratt, and then the chair.

Mr. Rick Laliberte (Churchill River, NDP): In one of the two documents we received, the “Canadian Climate Change Fund” looks at a target. The target is total elimination, isn't it? “In 1990 greenhouse gas emissions...totalled 570 million tonnes.”

Mr. Ralph Torrie: I can clarify that point. What we're trying to suggest with this target is by the year 2010 achieving a reduction of 90 million tonnes per year. That compares with our emissions in the year 1990 of 570 million tonnes, and with our projected emissions in the year 2010 of somewhere around 700 million tonnes.

What we did is we added up all of the emission reductions that we would get year by year between now and the year 2010. It came out to 570 million tonnes, which happens to equal the emissions in the year 1990, and that's where the confusion is coming from.

Mr. Rick Laliberte: Oh, okay.

Mr. Ralph Torrie: We thought actually, that's kind of neat. If you really pulled out the stops between now and the year 2010, over the 11- or 12-year period the cumulative emission reductions that you would have achieved would equal one entire year's worth, if you use 1990 as the reference year.

Mr. Rick Laliberte: This is a Canadian project, not just Toronto?

Mr. Ralph Torrie: This proposal is for a national fund to reduce emissions, yes.

Mr. Rick Laliberte: What is the percentage? People are talking percentage. At the international table they're talking about percentage.

Mr. Ralph Torrie: In terms of the way the international debate goes when they talk about annual emission reductions, if this fund achieved the target of 90 million tonnes a year, that would be like achieving maybe a 12% or a 13% reduction in Canada's entire emissions. That is very remarkable, considering that it leaves out entire sectors like heavy industry and inter-city transportation and what can be achieved with fuel efficiency standards in automobiles.

The Chairman: Mr. Pratt.

Mr. David Pratt: What, if anything, has the fund done with respect to public transit?

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Ms. Lois Corbett: There are two key projects. One is our dream project, the light rail to the airport. We want to talk to Minister Collenette about that. We've also set a goal of helping the TTC increase its ridership and get it back to the rate it had in 1988. In order to do that, we've asked groups to come forward, and we have ideas for a combination of marketing, negotiations with TTC for students' and seniors' discount packages, and basic lobbying. The first project that we got off the table this year is with a group called the “Rocket Riders”. We're trying to form a consumer advocacy group of transit users. We're not building any new railway lines in the downtown core though.

Mr. David Pratt: That's interesting.

The Chairman: If the Canadian atmospheric fund were to be formed tomorrow, how should it be run? What should the composition of its board be? And what projects should it tackle first?

Ms. Lois Corbett: First, the announcement of the fund needs to be coupled with an announcement of commitment of money. What we're suggesting in this brief—and I see that I've made one mistake in the brief—is an amount of $20 million to $30 million. Those announcements need to be made together.

Then we need to have three or four working groups to suggest how to set up the governance. My idea about how it should work is that it should use the different important stakeholders. The industries that will face the most severe impact should be included, like fisheries, the forest industry, agriculture, the wine industry and some tourist industries. The health sector needs to be represented. The workers need to be represented, and we've already flown this by the environment committee of the CLC. They're very interested in participating. They're also interested in bringing other funders to the table, including another key stakeholder like labour funds and mutual funds and pension funds that their workers control. I think that's important. The insurance agency industry should be there, and obviously environmental and science interests need to be represented.

The Chairman: Mr. Knutson.

Mr. Gar Knutson: Back to this light bulb example, don't you think the city would have just changed its light bulbs anyway?

Ms. Lois Corbett: Cities like Toronto very seldom have $15 million in one year to spend on a capital project like changing all the light bulbs. Usually you fix a light bulb when it's broken, so it's a $60 expenditure each week versus a $15 million strategic action plan to systematically change street lights. Would it have happened without the fund? I'm not sure. I don't know what the mindset of the commission of public works was then. What I do know is that once they saw climate change as a backdrop issue and saw financing as an option and saw $2.2 million returned in the first year after completion of the project, they moved on it and they moved on it quickly.

Mr. Gar Knutson: Do you know how many municipalities have low-efficiency light bulbs? Is that still a common thing?

Ms. Lois Corbett: I know of other cities that have them. I don't know if there are a lot or if it's predominant.

The Chairman: Final question, Mr. Laliberte.

Mr. Rick Laliberte: You just mentioned an error in regard to this fund. You said $20 million to $30 million as opposed to—

Ms. Lois Corbett: It is $200 million to $300 million. I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. Thanks for catching it again.

Mr. Rick Laliberte: So if it were a generous offering of $300 million to $1 billion you could do more.

Ms. Lois Corbett: Absolutely. Think of the easy math here. The Toronto Atmospheric Fund was $22 million, so $200 million is 10 Canadian cities at that scale and $300 million is 30. The more money, the more cities. And I don't mean cities that are huge cities either. Charlottetown has energy efficiency and transportation needs as much as Vancouver or Montreal or Ottawa or Toronto do.

The Chairman: This is extremely exciting and very helpful. We are only limited by the fact that the debate starts in ten minutes in the Centre Block. Otherwise I'm sure we could go on for another half hour at least.

On behalf of my colleagues, allow me to thank you very much, particularly for coming to Ottawa on such short notice. We are very proud of you. Don't apologize for being a proud Torontonian. It's a good virtue.

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Best wishes in your work. And if after Kyoto you have specific suggestions to make on this particular subject of a Canada atmospheric fund, please let us know.

Ms. Lois Corbett: Okay. Thank you.

The Chairman: This meeting is adjourned until tomorrow.