Evidence of meeting #70 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was municipalities.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Assistant Deputy Minister, Emergency Management and Programs Branch, Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness
—in terms of what we do about that.
There are three main areas that we're having these conversations about in terms of the challenges. You have houses built on flood plains that become a high risk from an insurance perspective. We need to have some preconditions in place to support the conversation on a flood insurance market. Flood plain mapping is one of them.
If I can use the analogy, when you build a house, you need to have a good foundation. Well, a good foundation of urban planning and building in appropriate areas is to have the appropriate flood plain mapping done. That's one reason why we have so much focus and attention on that area: so we can set up the right conditions to introduce that residential flood insurance.
At the same time, one of the thorny issues is around what you do in terms of having an equal opportunity to get that insurance when you're the person sitting in the high-risk area, on the one hand, and the person next to you down the road is not in that high-risk area. How do you balance that out from a financial perspective? That's one of the issues that the insurance markets themselves are grappling with.
Conservative
Jim Eglinski Conservative Yellowhead, AB
Can I stop you there for a moment? A national building code was mentioned earlier. Are we working with our provinces and our municipal counterparts in looking at a national building code? A number of us here are ex-councillors and ex-mayors, and we know about drainage systems. The drainage systems are inadequate in most municipalities in Canada.
Are we looking at a national building code? Are we working with the provinces? How are the provinces coming back to us? Are we getting some agreement on coming out with a national code? I think a lot of people built with old standards that are not applicable today.
Assistant Deputy Minister, Emergency Management and Programs Branch, Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness
We're doing a lot of work with provinces and municipalities in terms of the conversation around what you do with respect to those building codes and in introducing some of the concepts such as the backwater flood valve that I spoke about earlier. We have a couple of really good working groups. The flood plain mapping technical working group has on it representatives from the municipalities, from a number of key areas across the country, and is trying to influence those conversations on the building code.
One of the struggles, of course, is always that it does depend on the different views that are brought to the table in terms of having something that's standardized across the country, meaning that you're going to force the municipality or the province into implementing that national building code. The conversations are lively. They're well. They're happening across the country. We hope they're advancing to a place where we get something more standardized.
Conservative
Jim Eglinski Conservative Yellowhead, AB
Thank you. I'm glad to hear that you are looking at that.
I have a quick question for the Department of Health on a part of your overall policy. I was looking it up on the computer the other day in getting prepared for this, and I had one question I wanted to ask you. In terms of your actions, you induce, encourage, and compel companies in the observance of your legislation.
I know that you had an audit here within the year and some things were mentioned, but I wonder if you can tell me roughly how many actions have been taken over the last year by your organization to resolve issues out there. Did you do any prosecutions? How are you finding the industry? Is it compliant or not?
Director General, Consumer Product Safety Directorate, Healthy Environments and Consumer Safety Branch, Department of Health
Thanks. That's a good one.
We publish a sort of quarterly dashboard that shows what kinds of incoming incident reports we're getting on various things. We get something in the order of a couple of thousand incident reports, which would include the industry-mandatory incident reports as well as consumer reports, at roughly a 60:40 ratio.
Each one of those things gets follow-up from us. We have a triage system established. Within a couple of days, we have taken a look at the report we got and have established, at the most gross level, how serious of a risk this looks like. Ones that look trivial or.... There are many that we don't need to follow up on. Those go into a database and feed our ongoing analytics in the future, but a substantial number of those would go through into risk assessments.
Director General, Consumer Product Safety Directorate, Healthy Environments and Consumer Safety Branch, Department of Health
No, no prosecutions in the last year. In fact, prosecutions have been fairly rare in industry consumer product safety.
Director General, Consumer Product Safety Directorate, Healthy Environments and Consumer Safety Branch, Department of Health
Industry does typically work with us. We've only had to issue two orders in the last several years, for instance, that would compel....
I'm seeing a red card being waved. I don't know if that's—
Conservative
Jim Eglinski Conservative Yellowhead, AB
I'm trying to move along because I want to get three answers there.
Liberal
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
Well, I know that for some of these questions, everybody wants to hear the answers. It's all good.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Ms. Di Paolo, I'll ask you a question first. In your remarks you mentioned the spring report, and indicated the objective, among others, to “improve the environmental performance and sustainability of Canadian communities”. How do you measure the success of that? I understand you talked about the gas tax fund, and about how it's reported, but how do you measure success as to whether or not communities are performing better in terms of their environmental sustainability?
Director General, Program Integration, Office of Infrastructure of Canada
It is a very complex and difficult thing to measure. One area that we are looking at, as we establish our new programs, is getting a solid baseline on where communities may be at now. I can take as an example the innovation and climate program of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. In that program, as well as the asset management program, we'll be looking to establish where communities are at now in their development and their thinking around climate resiliency. Then we'll be looking to move them along a maturity model to see how, over the course of the program, through funding and training and various workshops that they'll participate in—
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
Do you apply that same maturity model to all municipalities, at least broadly?
Director General, Program Integration, Office of Infrastructure of Canada
It would apply to the municipalities that actually apply to the program itself.
Director General, Program Integration, Office of Infrastructure of Canada
They would need to do a self-assessment on where they're at now, and then, with the support of the FCM staff and resources, we'd be able to build on that.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
You talked about the asset management plan. In my previous role as a municipal politician, one of the things I always found very perplexing was when communities that didn't have an asset management plan would come to the federal-provincial government looking for money. They quite often seemed to be, and would be, in some kind of dire need, where they needed it to survive. But if they'd had the asset management plan in place, they might have been in a much better position. Quite often the municipalities that were being smart and proactive would end up being almost penalized because they didn't have that same kind of dire need when they'd go to other levels of government for funding.
I guess the important thing for me is to see that there's some kind of common measure of success so that when you talk about this, whether it be the asset management plan or not, everybody is pegged against the same kind of continuum in terms of how you are preparing and how you're improving your community.
Director General, Program Integration, Office of Infrastructure of Canada
That's very much the approach we're looking to take, going forward. Some municipalities will be assessed at a much stronger level because they have their basic plans in place. It's more a matter of getting a more cohesive approach to the life-cycle management of their assets. Then there's still an opportunity to move the ball forward with those communities. They would still be eligible for funding under that program.
It also supports the applications under other programs. If they can demonstrate that they have good asset management planning in place, then it does support their applications for other funding under our various other programs. It really is an opportunity for us to support communities and municipalities to make that happen.