Finance Committee on Oct. 31st, 2011

[Shelly Glover, Conservative, Saint Boniface, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much to all the witnesses.

I'm going to start with two of the organizations: the AIAMC and the Retail Council of Canada. Here's why. You both talk a little about tariffs. I want to let you know that in both the 2009 and 2010 budgets, we had some broad tariff elimination, which I believe was probably some welcome news for both of your organizations. We also have decided to initiate a process to simplify customs tariffs, which I think is a good thing. If it's not, please chime in as soon as I give you the mike.

Aside from the tariffs, we've also put in place the accelerated capital cost allowance for manufacturers for machines and equipment. I want to know if either of you have specific examples of investments that might have been made to show the benefit of that measure.

Do you have something to say on both those issues, on the customs tariffs initiative, good or bad, and do you have some specific examples of investments on accelerated capital cost allowance?

[Diane Brisebois]

As it's one of our favourite topics, I'll go first.

I'll speak specifically about tariffs. There's no question that this government has moved very quickly to eliminate tariffs, mostly in the manufacturing sector and mostly with machinery and parts. What we are highlighting is the lack or the number--

[Shelly Glover, Conservative, Saint Boniface, MB]

You already highlighted that. I want you to tell me what you think of our other initiative, because you haven't mentioned it, which is the simplification of the customs tariffs we committed to in the last budget.

[Diane Brisebois]

That is extremely welcome news to merchants. As you know, with less manufacturing in the country, especially with commodity products, it means most of our members are importers. Simplifying the process not only saves them time but also an enormous amount of money. It's quite welcome.

[David Adams]

I would concur with what Ms. Brisebois has just said. The accelerated capital cost allowance is very advantageous for folks who are looking to invest in equipment to increase the productivity of the nation and also businesses.

Simplification of the tariff system is certainly welcomed again. The removal of the tariffs on machinery and in my sector, on automotive parts, has been welcomed. My own observation was with respect to vehicles themselves. If you look at the trade negotiations that this government is very aggressive in terms of trying to negotiate, the auto sector becomes a stick-in-the-mud in that way because of the tariffs that exist.

[Shelly Glover, Conservative, Saint Boniface, MB]

After we're all done here today, maybe you could submit some specific investments that were made using the ACCA to show that it benefited some of your consumers. That would be much appreciated.

I want to mention to Mr. Smoke that there are an awful lot of Conservatives who are supportive of moving aboriginal issues forward. I was disappointed to hear that you haven't met enough of us, but you're meeting one right now. I too belong to a national aboriginal caucus. We are, as the Conservative aboriginal caucus, the largest aboriginal segment of policy-makers in the history of Canada. There are seven in the Conservative caucus right now. We outnumber the opposition by almost double. Know that we are moving forward.

I have five children, and when they decided to go to post-secondary school I told them that they could pay their half and I'd pay mine. If they fail, they're paying back my half. So accountability in my household has led to some incredible marks and devotion by my kids. When I went to school, I was a Métis student who got a student loan. I knew I had to get more student loans, so I was pretty much stuck to making sure I passed.

What do you say about accountability? That's one measure that I've seen repeatedly with some of our aboriginal kids. They phone me and say that the chief decided who got some of the funding and that kid's not going to school, and they want to know why they can't get it. How do we make it accountable? I'd like to see all aboriginal kids who want to get post-secondary education have access, but how do we make them accountable? Would you agree with a measure to make sure that they are accountable?

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Mr. Smoke?

[Patrick Smoke]

You always hear the debate that there's no accountability, but it's always going back to the chief and council. People think they're the problem. But that's not the case. The more common case is—

[Shelly Glover, Conservative, Saint Boniface, MB]

Mr. Smoke, I asked you how we could make them accountable. I didn't just blame the chiefs. I'm saying some kids have phoned me about that. What do you say to making them accountable, to make sure they go to school?

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Just a brief—

[Patrick Smoke]

We are held accountable. We have to show that we're in class. We have to show that we are maintaining an average. If we do fail out, we have to pay back the money we owe. That's accountability.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

The two of you can have a dialogue after the meeting. It is an important issue, and I think you'd want to talk about it.

I want to take the last round. I wanted to follow up with Mr. Gilmour on his presentation, which I found interesting and quite exciting.

You say that energy planning tends to occur in silos and is separate from land use, transportation, water, and waste planning. You're absolutely correct. Then in your principles you have manage heat, capture energy and re-use it, reduce waste, and use waste as energy sources. I agree with what you're saying, but how this could be done remains a challenge.

If you look at managing heat, there's a constituent of mine who's developed something where he captures the heat from his furnace and uses it to heat his hot-water tank. He told me he's reduced the amount he's used for that process by 80% a year, which is astounding. He brought it in and it's a very simple pipe. I thought this should be in every home in Canada. Just imagine the savings you'd have.

If you go to Vegreville, Alberta, the Alberta Research Council facility takes animal waste and adds some water to it, which takes the methane off. One-third of the electricity in the town of Vegreville is powered by that facility, by those digesters. They produce fertilizer and they have water, they argue, that is clean enough to drink. That's debatable. You'd almost have a closed loop system. I've been there a number of times. You see it, and it's fantastic, but then you wonder why there isn't one of these in every rural community in this country. They always point to one or two or three obstacles. So it's the how.

I'm throwing those two things out to your organization. Do you have any advice for us? It's not about funding. We fund an awful lot of energy renewables. It's not about funding. It's about how you get there, so it's challenges. It's exciting on one end, but it's frustrating in the sense that it should be adopted much more broadly, right across the country.

[Brent Gilmour]

Thank you. I appreciate those examples. They're very relevant.

It's not always about access to capital; it's also just about awareness. One of the things I think we've all recognized, whether it's in the case of our colleagues or whatever organization you're dealing with, we all deal with heat, which you started to talk about.

Just to elaborate, capital depreciation has been very supportive of a variety of technologies, including the one you just gave an example of, across Canada. I would extend that to combined heat and power. It was one of the things that have just been moved and captured within that. You could take over 120 examples from across Canada of how communities are able to benefit from that.

To come back to capturing heat, just to give an example to every member, if you're up on the Hill the one thing you all notice when the windows are open is that you can see the heat going out and you can see the things turning on. Heat is wasted everywhere we go. So how do you start to address that? One of the key things that we started to encourage people to do, and what communities, no matter who they are, are starting to recognize, is that most people don't even know that. So we're trying to get that idea out there. How do you start to capture that? What services are available? And that's the other part we're trying to encourage about. This comes back to trade. It also comes back to awareness of services in Canada and to finding out who can provide services for you.

Most of those communities don't have access to services or the technology and more importantly the knowledge or professionals available to advise them on what to do. So there are three very basic barriers: knowledge, awareness, and access. How you start to address that can be one of the directions of this committee. Many departments within the federal government could provide a great example. They are trying, but a bit more direction would encourage them to do that, particularly in our urban and rural and remote communities across Canada. At times, getting access to those with the knowledge is challenging, to say the least.

That is my answer to those two questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

If you take the example of the household using a simple pipe to transfer its waste heat to heat its hot water tank, how do you break down the obstacles so we as Canadians, 34 million of us, are in fact using a system like that?

[Brent Gilmour]

I think we've started, and I think you'll hear that from some of your other members who were presenting here, such as the Canadian Gas Association and the Canadian Electricity Association. There is a new partnership, and that's what QUEST was set up to do, to help bring relationships together between those bodies and utilities. So this wasn't something that was happening in the first place with the consumer. Consumers like to have choice, and choice wasn't always available to them. That means working in partnership with utilities, working with municipalities in a different relationship. Hence, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities is also coming on board.

So there are ways of doing this. They're starting to roll out programs, starting to see those options becoming available, but still getting that information out to people.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

I appreciate that.

I do want to thank you all for being here. If there's anything further--and I know some of you mentioned you might have additional information--please feel free to submit it to the clerk. We will ensure that all members of the committee get it.

I want to thank you for the discussion.

We have one more panel, colleagues, so we will suspend for a couple of minutes and bring the next panel forward.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

I call the meeting back to order and welcome a new panel of guests to our committee hearing in Toronto. We are very appreciative that you're here to join us to consider the pre-budget consultations of 2011.

We have with us a number of organizations for our final panel. We have the Canadian Boreal Initiative; the mayor of the city of Revelstoke; the mayor of the town of Golden; Fédération culturelle canadienne-française; and Engineers Without Borders Canada.

I thank you all for being here. You will each have up to five minutes for your opening statement, and then we'll have questions from members.

We'll start with the Canadian Boreal Initiative.

[Mary Granskou, Senior Policy Advisor, Canadian Boreal Initiative]

Good afternoon. My name is Mary Granskou and it's a pleasure to be here. I'm representing the Canadian Boreal Initiative.

The Canadian Boreal Initiative was launched in 2003 as a place to promote and implement solutions that are shared in Canada's northern boreal region and across first nations, industry, and environmental organizations. We also work very closely with a number of government jurisdictions across the country to implement what we consider to be progressive and broadly supported innovative ways of ensuring that sustainable industry continues. We also work very closely with northern communities to implement solutions that protect wildlife values across the north and community traditional values.

Our goals are to support a vision for Canada's boreal region, which spans close to 60% of our nation, from the Yukon clear through to Labrador and Newfoundland. Our goal is to support a balanced vision of protecting in the range of half of the region we're focused on, Canada's boreal forests and wetlands, and support world-class sustainable practices and industry on the other half of the landscape.

The scientific rationale that we have explored with scientists both in Canada and around the world is that you need large areas for wildlife, and industries such as mining are increasingly minimizing that footprint. We find that there are workable solutions to maximize economic benefit and conservation outcomes across the boreal region.

Today I will speak to recommendations in two areas. One is on the greening of Canada's forestry sector, and the second is on supporting land use planning and working with first nations and other jurisdictions to do so.

First, in brief, is to support federal engagement in a landmark agreement that was reached between 21 major Canadian forest products companies and nine environmental organizations in May 2010. It's called the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement.

These parties came together to support a new way of advancing forestry in the most sustainable way possible. It included an early outcome of a pause in forestry activities in about 25% of the leasehold lands under which these companies are operating, to protect caribou, particularly woodland caribou, across that landscape.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

You have one minute.

[Mary Granskou]

In total, this agreement spans lands of over 76 million hectares, which is larger than the province of Alberta.

As a fundamental principle of this agreement, we support the rights and benefits of first nations communities, and we're here to encourage the federal government to particularly support capacity with first nations communities and first nations governments and institutions to engage to implement the boreal forest agreement.

The second area, and I'll be very brief, is that we encourage the federal government to expand its support of land use planning, which it now supports with first nations but only on reserve. We're encouraging the federal government to open up consideration for supporting land use planning where provinces and jurisdictions are engaged, but spanning larger areas, which include first nations traditional territory. So it's not necessarily new funding. We're really looking at a reprofiling of the terms of reference.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Thank you very much for your presentation.

We'll now hear from the City of Revelstoke and the Town of Golden.

[David Raven, Mayor, City of Revelstoke]

Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here today. I bring with me, of course, Mayor Christina Benty from the Town of Golden.

Revelstoke and Golden are communities along the Columbia River around the Big Bend area, and we're separated by the Selkirk Mountains. The Rogers Pass crosses through those mountains, as does the Canadian Pacific rail line and the Trans-Canada Highway.

The point of our presentation today is to look for improvements to the Trans-Canada Highway from Golden through to Sicamous on the far side of Revelstoke. This section of highway was completed in 1962 and it was built to a design representing the mid-fifties. It's simply not adequate today, and it has not been maintained over that period of time with the upgrades it should have had.

Although there have been upgrades east and west of there, the traffic has increased exponentially, with particular increases in the commercial truck traffic over that section of highway in that 50 years. At present, there are up to 600 vehicles an hour at times going over that highway, and at times up to 6,000 vehicles a day. Remember that this is a two-lane stretch of mountainous road. It's very dark, very treacherous. Fifty-five percent of that is commercial truck traffic. The 55% that is commercial trucks of three axles or more also includes buses and recreational vehicles on this dark, twisty, narrow roadway, both in summer and winter.

The rolling accident statistics over the last five years—and these do not pick up some of the major bus accidents prior to that—indicate there were 34 fatalities and 626 injuries in the section of road from Sicamous through to the top of the Rogers Pass in that five-year period, in more than 900 accidents. We estimate that to be 6.8 fatalities and 125 injuries a year. This rolling average does exclude the multiple-fatality accidents of buses in both Revelstoke and Golden.

The accident statistics do not differentiate among the severity of the injuries—more serious, long-lasting injuries include spinal cord, brain, or internal damages—nor do they include any ongoing costs of these injuries to insurance, medical, or social providers. Nor do they include the impacts on families and communities. Both Revelstoke and Golden are transitioning from resource-based economies to more balanced economies with growing four-season resorts. In particular, we have a ski hill at Kicking Horse and the Revelstoke Mountain Resort. Both are world-class in nature.

The travel patterns over this piece of highway have changed, with the public and business communities now demanding 24/7, 365-day-a-year access. Traffic is now constant and not as weather-dependent as it once was. In fact the tourist traffic is attracted to the glorious winter season more than it is to summer. In past years—and I'm thinking 30 years ago—most of the traffic would have been in that very short summer period. Now it's all-season.

The Trans-Canada Highway is four lanes from Winnipeg to the outskirts of Golden, all the way through Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and the most easterly part of British Columbia, and from Vancouver to Kamloops. However, the section between Golden and Revelstoke and west to Three Valley Gap remains essentially as it was built 50 years ago. What this is doing is bringing the heavy traffic through; it is hitting that really poor section of road at high speeds with driver fatigue, and we're picking up the carnage.

We know that the cost of road construction on this mountainous terrain will not be cheap, nor will it be easy. In fact it will be very challenging. We're confident, though, that with proper engineering techniques and proper incentives it can be done. And we feel very strongly that Canadians deserve a strong, safe, successful four-lane highway through western Canada.

The Trans-Canada Highway between Golden and Revelstoke was closed a total of 260 times last winter. Much of this was due to avalanches, but also to car accidents. The total closure time was 1,466 hours.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

One minute remaining.

[David Raven]

We understand the province has a business case to improve access in the winter. We believe the province and the federal government should be committing to the previous understandings with cash due to the Rockies for a total of $150 million for ten years, to make improvements to bring this stretch of highway up to a safe four-lane standard.

We know that there will be two to six fatalities in the next six months and there will be 125 injuries. Mayor Benty and I will attend funerals for some of those people. There will be a significant impact on commercial export and import and domestic markets, through loss of that commercial truck traffic.

Communities are frankly embarrassed with the current state of this highway, and strongly recommend that the federal and provincial governments commit that $150 million for ten years to this.

Thank you very much for this opportunity, and I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Thank you very much for your presentation.

Now I will hand the floor over to the representative of the Fédération culturelle canadienne-française.