Transport Committee on June 6th, 2023

[Dan Muys, Conservative, Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you, colleagues.

My first question is for Mr. Li.

In your experience working with homebuyers, what are the incentives? You mentioned a number of different federal and provincial incentives and things that can be done for home builders from the municipal level. When homebuyers are making that huge investment in a home, what are the incentives that homebuyers would most value to make that investment in a more sustainable home?

[Wing-On Li]

Thank you for the question.

I believe the biggest problem that the buyers have is usually the deposit. Even though we try to make the deposits as small as possible, I think what is most important right now for us is to lower the deposit for so-called eco-homes as much as possible. With support from the different levels of the government, we can definitely do that.

One most gratifying development is the involvement of what I call institutional money. I believe that there are a lot of pension funds or institutional private equities that are now looking at the kind of energy assets we are building, not only in individual homes but also in condominiums. They are willing to come forward. They are saying, “Hey, Mr. Li, I want to support your geothermal initiative.” They will provide all the funding we need for the geothermal infrastructure; then what we need to do when we sell the condos is sign a contract with the condo owners so that instead of paying all the money up front, we can ask the condo buyers to pay a service charge, like $100 per month, so that in the next 25 years, they don't have to pay the utility. Instead, they pay me, the contractor, the fee for the use of the energy for the next 25 years.

This will help us to lower the sale price. This is a great help in making the buyers know that they are getting a home up front at a price that is comparable to prices from conventional builders. At the same time, they're only going to pay a limited service fee for energy over the next 25 years.

This is a big help. I can see that it's a very promising development.

[Dan Muys, Conservative, Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Li.

I'd like to also ask a question of Mr. Ness.

You talked about proactive investment in infrastructure adaptation. I agree that this makes sense.

Is there a list that your organization has or that exists at other organizations or levels of government that prioritizes and assesses the risks? Where do we go to in terms of what the top-tier priorities are? What's the next tranche? Where are the areas of risk, etc.?

[Ryan Ness]

There is no one-stop shop for that kind of information. There is information at different levels that can be used for that purpose.

The national adaptation strategy, at the very highest level, identifies some top-level priorities for the country. Many provinces and territories have risk and vulnerability assessments that identify their top priorities, including their top infrastructure priorities. Many municipalities have done the same as well, but the challenge is still that many jurisdictions have not completed those assessments to know where their infrastructure risks are greatest and where investment might best be spent.

Many of them don't have the capacity. Again, small and medium-sized municipalities specifically often lack the staff capacity and the ability to even hire the expertise to be able to do those kinds of assessments. Supports in terms of capacity and in terms of standardized approaches for doing that kind of work are essential to be able to use that funding effectively.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Ness.

Thank you, Mr. Muys.

Mr. Chahal, the floor is yours. You have five minutes.

[George Chahal, Liberal, Calgary Skyview, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for joining us today.

Mr. Ness, I'm going to start with you and your presentation. I'm going to focus on zoning and building codes. You made comments and recommendations about transparency as well, and about risk and loss and how transparency is important for communities and individuals.

My constituency was hit with a massive hailstorm. We had up to $1.5 billion in damage, with 35,000 homes damaged. One area that we identified was the roofs. If we had had better and more resilient roofs, we could have prevented damage to those homes, and potentially 35,000 home insurance claims could have been avoided.

When it comes to building codes, municipalities have a role and our provincial governments have a role. We had an extensive dialogue on this issue. The City of Calgary came forward with a resilient roofing program, which was very successful and actually was nationally recognized.

When you're in Calgary, you're in hailstorm alley. These storms come, and they're ferocious and do a lot of damage. Wouldn't it make sense to maybe mandate resilient roofs and provide incentives for homeowners to do this?

[Ryan Ness]

Thank you for the question.

Building codes and infrastructure codes and standards that dictate the way in which infrastructure and buildings should be constructed are an essential part of building an adapted country with resilient infrastructure.

The challenge is updating frequently, and what we've heard through our research is that the pace of those updates for research at the national level, the trickle-down and the actual implementation and enforcement of those provincial building codes and standards is a long process. It is one that's going to need to be accelerated if our building approaches are going to be made resilient in the very limited amount of time we have to catch up to climate change.

[George Chahal, Liberal, Calgary Skyview, AB]

I'm focusing on resilient roofs because that was the impact in my constituency. Fort Collins, Colorado, mandated resilient roofs. We've also seen that the other day the IBC talked about providing incentives and also opportunities for homeowners to have those resiliencies built in so they could have lower insurance costs.

Do you think we need to have a conversation nationally to look at further incentives that push our provincial counterparts on building codes to ensure that if you're in hailstorm alley, let's say, like in Alberta and southern Alberta, you have resilient roofing programs?

[Ryan Ness]

To the first point, there's certainly the need for both the carrot and the stick sides of the equation: both the regulation of the way things are built and the incentives for builders and homeowners to apply measures that make them more resilient and that encourage them through things like insurance savings.

Again, I'll repeat that the building codes, whether for resilient roofs or other aspects of design that need to accommodate climate change in more harsh and extreme weather, are a vital part of the solution, but they aren't changing fast enough. It needs to be accelerated, and that will require intergovernmental co-operation.

[George Chahal, Liberal, Calgary Skyview, AB]

Mr. Li, I'm going to go to you. Thank you for joining us today and talking about your community.

It's a net-zero community of attainable eco-homes. In an article, that is what was stated and what you talked about today. Can you tell us about sustainability in your community development? Earlier Mr. Ness talked about roads. Whether it's roads or stormwater, how your community development promotes sustainability and the net-zero component is also a part of your entire community development.

You've done a great job of talking about the homes specifically. I'm curious to know more about the entire community.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

You have 20 seconds, please.

[Wing-On Li]

Right now, it is a challenge for us. Basically, I don't think the municipality is ready for this kind of development and the buyers are not ready, but I believe it is a good challenge for us to put out homes at a price that the buyers can afford, which, as I've said, is very important.

I believe that once we have done a showcase, other builders will follow, and the municipality will give us the necessary support if they see that it works for the community.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Li.

Thank you, Mr. Chahal.

Now we will go to Mr. Barsalou-Duval for two and a half minutes.

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to go to Mr. Valiquette once again.

We're in the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities. I'm also the Bloc québécois' transport critic, and we often receive complaints from people from the Magdalen Islands regarding considerably irregular flights and service, often as a result of the weather. In many instances, we're increasingly seeing storms, freezing rain, hurricanes and extreme weather phenomena, and those phenomena increasingly affect the Magdalen Islands. You yourself mentioned that hurricanes are increasingly frequent and impact the Magdalen Islands more.

In those circumstances, do you think the fact that the runway of the Magdalen Islands airport is the shortest commercial runway in Quebec may be related to this problem of establishing long-term reliable service?

Do you think that worsening climate change could increasingly be a problem in future?

[Antonin Valiquette]

I think so, and, in fact, I'm sure of it.

I have to say that we used to have colder winters on the Magdalen Islands, and our facilities were adapted to those conditions. Now with the warmer winters, temperatures are closer to zero degrees Celsius, as a result of which we get more rain and, especially, freezing rain. Freezing rain really damages transport infrastructure. That's true for the airstrip, which needs to be longer. The airport infrastructure in the Magdalen Islands that belongs to Transport Canada needs to be adapted. As I said in my remarks, that's also true of the port facilities.

Earlier you asked me a question about federal funding for protecting infrastructure from climate change. There's actually a provincial-territorial infrastructure funding program for municipalities. It's called the Provincial-Territorial Infrastructure Component–National and Regional Projects, or PTIC-NRP.

However, I think, first and foremost, that it's up to the federal government to adapt its own infrastructure in the Magdalen Islands in order to cope with climate change and to take financial responsibility for it.

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

There's a specific case, which you referred to earlier, and it's the Cap-aux-Meules commercial dock. Most of the provisioning for the islands goes through it, particularly the material used to protect their coastlines. The dock is apparently not very well maintained or at least needs to be upgraded.

[Antonin Valiquette]

The Cap-aux-Meules commercial dock is actually used intensively by the barges that transport stone and protective material for the coastlines. Many major works representing millions of dollars are under way in the Magdalen Islands to protect shorelines.

The dock is now too old and damaged by climate change, in particular, to accommodate the materials we need to protect ourselves from climate change. You can see the paradox.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Valiquette and Mr. Barsalou-Duval.

Next we have Ms. Zarrillo.

The floor is yours. You have two and a half minutes, please.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you so much.

My questions are going to be for Mr. Ness. They will, I'm sure, take up the full two and a half minutes.

Mr. Ness, I'm going to ask you two questions, and you can answer them in the order you prefer. I want to revisit the communications and the utilities.

My first question is this: What can the federal government do to protect the communications systems and the utilities that Canadians rely on every day, especially during natural disasters?

The second question is this: From your 20 years of experience, can you share some of the government roadblocks you have faced in regard to our lack of preparedness for extreme weather events and in regard to resilient infrastructure?

[Ryan Ness]

Thank you for the question.

Certainly the federal government has a role to play in ensuring the resilience of our telecommunications systems. We haven't researched the specific mechanisms that are available to do so, but certainly its role in regulating those systems and the providers of those systems is to ensure that they are constructing and maintaining infrastructure that is designed to face the future climate.

With respect to the second question, there are always challenges when dealing with a large complex democracy and moving major issues like adaptation forward. Certainly adaptation has taken second place to mitigation, which is obviously still important. Reducing our greenhouse gas emissions is the number one form of adaptation we can take. However, it has taken up most of the air in the room, and there hasn't been as much attention on adaptation.

As well, the benefits of adaptation are realized over quite a long term, and certainly well beyond individual electoral cycles in many cases. Therefore, it's often difficult, with more pressing priorities, to justify expenditures that may not pay off—many won't ever pay off in very dramatic and showy ways—until decades down the line.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you.

I still have a very quick 30 seconds here, so I'm going to ask Mayor Valiquette this question.

I want to know whether there is good visibility into the selection process for some of these climate adaptation funds—let's say, for example, the disaster mitigation fund from the federal government.

Is there good visibility into who's getting chosen and why?

[Antonin Valiquette]

I believe so.

It's hard for me to say that this is the case in all the provinces or across the country, but in the Magdalen Islands, we've done extensive work over the last 10 years to recognize and target specific spots and areas that are most vulnerable to climate change, but we also need the flexibility to change that prioritization for a sudden and unexpected climate event.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Valiquette.

Thank you very much, Ms. Zarrillo.

Next we have Ms. Vecchio.

Ms. Vecchio, the floor is yours. You have five minutes.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Fantastic. Thank you very much. It's great to be here on this important committee today.

Mr. Li, I'm going to start with you.

I'm very fortunate, because I live near Western University. Within our own riding, people from the Canadian Home Builders' Association and the Ontario Home Builders' Association are doing a lot of work on research and development.

You've talked a lot about making sure these homes are net zero. Have you also taken into consideration wind resistance, such as by ensuring those screws are the six-inch screws? What types of things have you done when it comes to mitigation for wind?

[Wing-On Li]

In our case, we have used weather-resilient roofs. We use metal roofs, because it's easy for the solar panel installer to put the panel there. As we are using a more advanced metal roof—like the standing seam snap-lock mechanism—we have very strong roof protection for the solar panels, as well as for the roof. I think one of the members asked this. In a hailstorm, a metal roof is very good protection. It's a foolproof mechanism to protect the property.