Evidence of meeting #74 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 buildings.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Director, Indigenous Heritage Circle
—which is a caribou skin, or polar bear pants. Believe me, you would take that over a snow goose down jacket any day.
What I also need to stress to people is that we will eat the meat. That hunter, when he comes back with the bear, and the sports hunter will take the hide, and will feed many, many people in that community. It is highly nutritious and a big delicacy.
Conservative
Robert Sopuck Conservative Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB
I'd like to have one quick follow-up to that very important comment.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
Sorry, you're out of time. You know what, though? There's more questioning. Just share it amongst yourselves, because we only have so much time. It is a good questioning stream, and I hope you pick it up.
We are being absolutely fair, if you have a look at the timing. We're always very fair.
Mr. Gerretsen.
September 28th, 2017 / 9:50 a.m.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
Thank you very much.
Mr. Wiebe, I know that the gist of your points was on commercial and private redevelopment of built heritage. I strongly believe that a lot of the incentive to do it should be from the government leading by example, and I think that's what makes things so effective in the States. The government is really good at maintaining its own historical sites.
How would you rate the Government of Canada and its crown corporations' ability to maintain its historic sites?
Manager, Heritage Policy and Government Relations, National Trust for Canada, As an Individual
I think the States has an interesting example of the good that the general services agency has done on.... What is it called, crown assets? There's a whole program that they have where they've taken these iconic buildings, which were designed—
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
I'm sorry to cut you off, but I'm really limited in time. I'm curious to know how you find the federal Government of Canada and its crown corporations do with respect to maintaining their built heritage.
Manager, Heritage Policy and Government Relations, National Trust for Canada, As an Individual
I think the federal government departments do a reasonably good job in some respects, but the crown corporations are not restricted. I know that Canada Post—
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
Do you think the crown corporations should be obliged to restore their properties? We have this weird system in Canada where crown corporations are exempt from the requirements to maintain their built heritage.
Manager, Heritage Policy and Government Relations, National Trust for Canada, As an Individual
Yes. I think that would definitely be a progressive measure. Crown corporations, including ports, Pickering airport lands, among others, and these iconic post offices....
What I would say about the federal management of buildings—and it comes to another point I think Mr. Stetski made—is with regard to disposal and who gets the buildings or who should be getting them first. I think the federal government, when it's disposing of its own buildings, places like Booth Street complex here in Ottawa, puts them on the open market for top bidder through the Canada Lands corporation. I think there should be consideration for different kinds of levels and maybe not getting the top dollar, but getting good dollar and having it go to the right people. That kind of recalibration of that system will get better results in terms of more interesting places and more honouring of that federal heritage.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
I represent Kingston and the Islands. We have, according to the Canadian heritage registry, about 96 national historic sites, some government-owned, some privately owned. In Kingston we have an original CN train station. This is the site where the first prime minister of Canada travelled to and from Ottawa. Numerous individuals, including royalty, have travelled in and out of the city. Many different presidents visiting Canada, especially back in the day, would come in and out of this particular station.
What we've seen, not by design but in the way the system is set up, is that we end up with demolition by neglect. CN owns this station. It wants to sell it. It's literally been sitting abandoned for years, and now it looks like this. It's hoarded off. The roof is completely gone. It's completely falling apart. CN won't do anything about it.
Do you think there should be more incentives or more requirements for these crown corporations to actually take care of their properties?
Manager, Heritage Policy and Government Relations, National Trust for Canada, As an Individual
I think with a case that falls between the cracks—well, between the tracks, on railway land—in terms of who's responsible for it, in that case there is remediation and other things around it. It would be important to tighten up some of those rules so that we wouldn't have these iconic buildings languishing in between jurisdictional elements. In that case there would need to be some kind of tax credit or something that would give extra incentive for a developer to step in and actually do something with that building. That would be extraordinary.
Take, for example, in the other part of Kingston, the mental hospital Rockwood, down by the prison. It's been languishing there for, I don't know, a decade?
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
There's the women's penitentiary and now Kingston Penitentiary.
Manager, Heritage Policy and Government Relations, National Trust for Canada, As an Individual
Those are other examples of iconic buildings that don't have an answer, that need to have a boost to transition into something useful, to have some useful future.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
Can you give any kind of specific recommendations that the government should adopt on that in terms of policy?
Manager, Heritage Policy and Government Relations, National Trust for Canada, As an Individual
In terms of the transition of railway stations from railway ownership and the requirement to have them designated at the local level, railway stations and railway properties are completely above the law. Provincial governments can't touch them with designation, and municipal governments can't. Even the federal government can't. That's why it brought in that special legislation, which was created basically as a mechanism to move those iconic places into private ownership.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
As a matter of fact, as a point of interest, when I was mayor of Kingston, we started to issue property standards notices against this property because of the way it was essentially just derelict. The federal government's response, through its crown corporation, was “we won't do anything about it because we don't have to, this is federal land”—that type of thing.
Manager, Heritage Policy and Government Relations, National Trust for Canada, As an Individual
I think those rules could be tightened. I think there are ramifications for grain elevators, roundhouses, and other important properties on railway property.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
That's why you were elected to come up here and fix it, right?
Mr. Kitchen.
Conservative
Robert Gordon Kitchen Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you all for coming. I appreciate that.
Karen and Madeleine, I come from southeast Saskatchewan, the southeast corner. I have eight first nations in my riding. I was interested to hear you talk about shared history and shared reality. We have a lot of small museums in there that actually try to showcase the shared reality we have in the riding. You talked about indigenous-led aspects and design. Can you comment a bit on how you would see something like my riding share some of that, especially when I hear about sharing the history of the Hudson's Bay Company, etc., and those buildings?
President, Indigenous Heritage Circle
It's interesting: I'm sitting here listening to everybody talk, and I'm thinking about how different our perspectives are. We're talking about built heritage, and I work every day at the Kamloops Residential School. That's where my office is. I work with the Secwepemc. That site is built heritage. It has layers of meaning for us. That site is the site of a burial ground, an ancient village site. It has a horrific history.
We sit there every day and we look at it. It's falling apart. There's no money to actually do anything to restore it, even if they wanted to. But we also have caretakers. We have traditional caretakers who come in and cleanse the building, who do ceremonies. We have people who take care of the fire when someone dies, for the ancestors, for people today who pass, for the old ones. So when I think about built heritage and we're talking about how we're going to actually have a shared relationship, I think that how we braid this relationship, how we bring it together, and the fact that we are even starting to talk are really critical now. This is the first time Madeleine and I have actually had a chance to sit down to talk with all of you.
I can't speak for the indigenous people in every province, but this conversation needs to be had nationally across every province. I think that's where we start, and I don't think I would feel comfortable talking about what needs to happen in Saskatchewan without that conversation.
Conservative
Robert Gordon Kitchen Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
Thank you.
Chris, you were talking about heritage homes. My mother was a heritage history buff, and when I was little, she dragged me through England, through every church and every historical part of England, so my knowledge of English history is quite massive. It was to the point that my parents actually bought a heritage home in Bath, Ontario. They had that house. It was built circa 1813, and they restored it as well as they could, but the reality is that they were passionate about it. They cared about it, and they also understood that they took on the responsibility for it.
How do we encourage people to do the same thing that my parents did, at their cost, their dollar, and with them recognizing the issue of that?
Manager, Heritage Policy and Government Relations, National Trust for Canada, As an Individual
I think it's about recognizing the public value of those acts of care and the stewardship of these valuable resources. An 1813 house of that nature is incredibly rare, and I think there should be mechanisms that help encourage that, because once there's an owner who is not sympathetic and that building is lost, it's lost forever.
I think there aren't very many mechanisms to assist with heritage homeowners currently. In Ontario, there are property tax incentives that are quite, quite modest, but there need to be other ways, levers to help encourage those kinds of people. I think there also needs to be, as Julian was also mentioning, expertise and help for people to make the right decisions. I think the federal government can help on the financial side as well.
Conservative
Robert Gordon Kitchen Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
The interest is not so much financial as it is how we get them motivated to do that. If all we're doing is putting in the money to get them motivated, we're now putting the onus on somebody. What we think about today as today's history.... Ten to 40 years from now, people are going to look at what I think is history, and because of the way generations evolve, they will be thinking totally differently. So how do you encourage that, without putting money into it?
Manager, Heritage Policy and Government Relations, National Trust for Canada, As an Individual
I think it's about connecting with what Madeleine and Karen and Julian were talking about, in terms of putting it in a larger context. It's not about the idea that John A. Macdonald slept here and that's the important thing about this building; it's about the fact that it's there and that we need to take better care of what we have in terms of the ecological sustainability of our society. I think we're at 60% overreach in terms of our resource consumption on the planet this year, and we can't really afford....
When you put heritage conservation and landscape conservation in the context of something bigger ecologically in terms of using what we have more thoughtfully, I think it actually connects with a whole new generation and it connects the ecological, cultural, and social dots in new and exciting ways for people.
Conservative
Robert Gordon Kitchen Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
Thank you. I'll share my last quick question with Rob.