Thank you, and thanks to all the speakers for making time to be here today. It's much appreciated, and it's nice to see you again, Ry.
By great coincidence I'm subbing in on this committee today for Darren Fisher. My background is in city planning and architecture, including some preservation. I had the great fortune to lead the process that created downtown Halifax's first heritage conservation district several years ago. That process—where we used your guidelines and standards, by the way, to help us with that, so thank you—led to a conservation district that used matching-facade grants, some deep tax incentives for more substantial work, and alternate building code compliance to allow the reuse of heritage buildings in ways that don't meet the modern code. Therefore, I'm going to focus my questions and remarks on the built environment more than on landscapes or places.
There are plenty of heritage assets across the country, it seems, where this balance of carrots, grants or incentives, can be matched or balanced with the stick of conservation regulation in a way that can help to unlock private capital, and use the market forces to pay for the work that needs to be done, and keep those heritage resources alive and useful.
We also have a lot of other assets in Canada where there is very limited or even no likelihood of private participation. Some of your examples, Ry, I think are in that box. In my work as the MP in Halifax, trying to sort out things like proper funding for Georges Island, or the Sambro Island Lighthouse, I have come across the very instilled mindset in some of the line departments about needing to have a business case to even take on the asset to add it to the list of registered historic places.
What advice can you give the committee or the line departments or the government about understanding that there are both kinds in Canada, and helping to find the appropriate balance of where much higher levels of public participation are required versus more subtle financial taxes or other incentives? You see what I'm getting at. I want to help this committee to make an impression on people who are making decisions in departments that there needs to be that balance and understanding that there are some cases where there's a higher public requirement.
Maybe we could have an open discussion about that.