Environment Committee on Feb. 6th, 2018

[Frank DesRosiers]

I would say that generally speaking, I mentioned the fact that Canada was an high energy user. It's true across the board.

Today we've been focusing, as per the committee's deliberations, on buildings, but generally speaking, in industry, in manufacturing, and in transportation, in North America we tend to be high energy users. There's a bit of a cultural element also that not just our elected officials, our federal and provincial government officials, but also our industry leaders have to be more attuned to, which is that these are important to your bottom line and they are important input costs for your operations. We see now more and more of those smart operators paying more attention to it—

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

We're not seeing that. That's what I'm saying. It's not happening.

[Frank DesRosiers]

—for many reasons, but also just for their sheer bottom line. Are they all there? No, but I think this is a bit of a generational shift that we'll have to observe and encourage.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

All I'm saying is, yes for housing, but big energy users are those kinds of facilities.

[Frank DesRosiers]

True.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

I have one more quick question. Where these people are going to be trained is not the universities, which has advanced tech and so forth; it's in the technical schools. There's Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. Lethbridge has a wind turbine industry. We need more federal funding to go there. There are waiting lists already for oil field workers who want to have that training. I would just encourage, with regard to research money or development, that there needs to be more money going to actually training the people who are going to do the work.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Okay. Thank you.

Mr. Godin, you have three minutes.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair. Did you say three minutes?

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

We're going to do three.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Okay. I will ask a brief question.

Can you tell me which G20 countries are leaders in the built environment?

[Frank DesRosiers]

Well, I'm thinking spontaneously. I'm not the authority on making international comparisons, but I'm thinking of South Korea, Germany, Japan.... For me, these are off the cuff, without data to back me up, but it's who I'm thinking of when considering where the leaders are.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Can you tell me where Canada is in the G20? Are we ahead of the pack, at the back of the pack, in the middle? Are we leading? I would like to know where Canada stands.

[Frank DesRosiers]

It depends on the parameter we use. If we take the parameter for the use of energy per square foot or per unit of GDP,

Canada has some catch-up to do.

[Richard Tremblay]

Yes, we do.

It depends on the unit being used.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

That brings me to another question. I will sort of continue along the same lines as Ms. Duncan.

Can we not speed up the process? We are talking about 2030. We are not certain, but we think we can do it... We are going to introduce a code...

Let me give you a specific example. In my riding, a company called Logard has produced asbestos pipes. It complied with the standards and invested in research and development—I have already talked about it here. This company is waiting for approval certifying that their product complies with the building code. They are still waiting; they are struggling like a fish in holy water—I do not know whether that's the right expression—

[Frank DesRosiers]

Like the devil in holy water.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Thank you. It does not matter, not many people understood.

We know that we need to speed up the process to make businesses more efficient. In order to improve the environmental situation, economic development must of course also be taken into account. We must work together.

Is there not a way to speed up the process so that we are even more effective? For the planet, time is ticking, and measures need to be put in place very quickly.

[Frank DesRosiers]

The Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, as a whole and in this sector in particular, is a powerful boost to the efforts of the federal government, the provinces and the country as a whole. The targets are ambitious. In our view, they are achievable and realistic, but it is certainly important to pick up speed.

What is being proposed is already faster, as demonstrated by the discussion we had on codes, as well as technology and the adoption of measures. We will all have to redouble our efforts. Will it bring us to the same level as the countries we mentioned, such as Japan, South Korea and Germany? Probably not, because the climate of these countries is very different from ours. Their context, which has evolved in recent decades, is also very different. I do not think it would be realistic to use that as a point of comparison because our North American world and our climate are very different. We will certainly be able to make significant progress compared to what we have done in the past.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

And so we could do better in this regard.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Thank you very much.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Mr. Saini, you have three minutes.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

You mentioned, and we've talked about, the 75% of the building stock that's already present. I just have one question about that. Out of that 75%, some of it will be commercial and some residential. If we look at some of the commercial aspects, there will be smaller enterprises that may not be able to take advantage of the new technology because of cost or whatever. You may have residential folks who cannot take advantage of the new technology.

Is there any way we can have some sort of climate financing package for those people who cannot afford the upfront cost? Let's say there's a new appliance or something that's new that they simply can't afford because of the upfront cost. They'll get the tax credit afterward. Is that some sort of scenario we could look at? You could have some climate financing—i.e., these are the projected savings over a certain period of time, and if you invest in this, then we can help mitigate some of that cost.

[Sarah Stinson]

Certainly. In fact, it's an area that I think has been much contemplated. We've seen a lot of our stakeholders, particularly in the commercial building sector, the Canada Green Building Council in particular, calling for these kinds of measures. In one of the initiatives we're undertaking, last fall we met with a number of different stakeholders in that sector to look at what options there are internationally and to look at some best practices, whether it's a green bank model, or otherwise. We continue to engage with stakeholders on that. In fact, the Canada Green Building Council is organizing a workshop on energy efficiency financing for retrofits at the end of February. We're working with them in that regard, to see what options make sense for Canada, and we're looking at some of our international partners for best practices as well.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

If we look at our international climate financing objective, we're investing $2.65 billion. I know that in other parts of the world, climate infrastructure, climate resiliency, is a very big thing. They might have different building codes and different weather patterns. Is there any way of helping them initially rather than waiting until we get our codes done by 2020? Is there any initiative right now where we're working with certain parts of the word that have fragility in their climate but also fragility in their infrastructure, where we're bringing them on board to sort of help them along to develop their policy rather than waiting once we have our policy developed?