Environment Committee on Feb. 8th, 2018

[The Chair (Mrs. Deborah Schulte (King—Vaughan, Lib.)), Liberal, Deb Schulte]

I call the meeting to order.

Thank you very much, everyone, for your patience while we got organized. We had a subcommittee ahead of us, so it put us a little behind. I'm sorry about that.

I want to welcome our guests. I will introduce them in a minute, but I want to thank them personally and on behalf of the committee for being in front of us today. We have a very short timeline on this study. We are most thankful that you've taken the time to join us and in such a short time frame.

I'd like to introduce our guests. From Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, we have Mr. Duncan Hill, who is the manager of Housing Needs Research. From the Building Owners and Managers Association of Canada, we have Benjamin Shinewald, who is the president and chief executive officer. We have Randal Froebelius...did I say that correctly? You'll correct me if I'm wrong—

[Randal Froebelius, President and General Manager, Equity ICI Real Estate Services Inc., Building Owners and Managers Association International]

I will, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Thank you. He is the president and general manager with Equity ICI Real Estate Services Inc. Thank you very much for being here.

From Passive House Canada, we have Rob Bernhardt, and he is the chief executive officer.

Thank you again for being with us today.

As a little bit of detail, I have some cards. Obviously, we have 10 minutes for your statements, and then I'll hold up a card when you have one minute to go. The red card means that you are out of time. I don't want you to stop, but just wrap it up, knowing that you are out of time.

Who would like to start? Mr. Hill?

[Duncan Hill, Manager, Housing Needs Research, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation]

I'm ready to go.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

I don't mind. Why don't you start?

[Duncan Hill]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Is the sound good?

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Yes. I can hear it fine. Is everyone okay?

[Duncan Hill]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'm pleased to be here on behalf of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. CMHC is Canada's national housing agency, and our mission is to help Canadians meet their housing needs.

Many know us through our housing finance initiatives—CMHC has been around for a while—such as mortgage loan insurance, which helps Canadians access the housing market. We also fund affordable housing solutions, working in partnership with the provinces, territories, indigenous communities, municipalities, and other stakeholders.

Finally, CMHC provides market analysis, information, and research—which is my bailiwick—which helps businesses, governments, and the public make informed decisions about housing. We're one of the most comprehensive and trusted sources of housing information in Canada.

Madam Chair, housing is more than just the roof over our heads. Good housing creates healthy, sustainable communities, and of course it is a vital component of the economy. This is why CMHC has encouraged innovative green building practices for several decades now through our research, information transfer, and funding programs.

We work closely with Natural Resources Canada and the National Research Council to study ways to improve the performance of housing, from single-family homes to high-rise apartment and condominium buildings. We make a point of sharing our research widely with the housing sector, policy-makers, and the public. We publish fact sheets on energy-efficient design, construction, and renovations, and case studies sharing lessons learned through the research that we do.

We've extensively used demonstration projects to advance innovation in housing. Reaching back some 20 years now, our Healthy Housing demonstration project was the first to show that it's possible to build homes that are healthy, affordable, energy-efficient, resource-efficient, and environmentally responsible as well.

Most recently—well, we started it 10 years ago and finished it about four years ago—our EQuilibrium sustainable housing demonstration initiative showed the housing sector that it's technically possible to achieve net-zero energy housing with commercially available materials, equipment, and systems. As a result, there are several net-zero home building initiatives under way across the country now.

CMHC has also incentivized green housing across the sector through its funding programs, prioritizing projects that are more energy-efficient, with fewer greenhouse gas emissions than what local building codes call for.

Our Green Home program offers a premium refund on our mortgage loan insurance of up to 25% to borrow to either buy, build, or renovate for energy efficiency using CMHC-insured financing.

We're also helping to green Canada's affordable housing stock. Through the 2016 federal budget commitment of close to $600 million over two years, we're supporting the renovation and retrofitting of existing affordable housing units to make them more energy- and water-efficient.

The impact of this environmentally sustainable approach to housing will be even greater with the launch of the federal government's new national housing strategy this April. The strategy represents an investment of $40 billion over 10 years, with the focus on the housing needs of Canada's most vulnerable populations, and incidentally, those usually most unable to pay high energy bills. It will remove 530,000 households from housing need and reduce chronic and episodic homelessness by 50%. It will also lead to the creation of over 100,000 new housing units and the repair of another 300,000 units, while at the same time upgrading them and making them more energy-efficient.

CMHC is pleased to be leading this unprecedented investment in building healthy communities. It's a comprehensive strategy that will advance a whole host of broader government initiatives, objectives, and priorities, including supporting Canada's climate change goals. Many of the initiatives under the national housing strategy will give priority to projects that exceed mandatory minimum requirements for energy efficiency.

For example, the national housing co-investment fund will create up to 60,000 new high-performing affordable homes located near public transit, jobs, day care, schools, and health care services. They will be at least 25% better in energy efficiency and in greenhouse gas emission reductions compared to equivalent buildings built to the 2015 national energy code for buildings.

This fund will also invest in renewing and repairing some 240,000 existing units so that they have 25% less energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions when we compare before and after.

To maximize the impact of the fund, the federal government will transfer up to $200 million in federal lands to housing providers to encourage the development of sustainable communities. Funding will be provided for renovations, retrofits, and environmental remediation to ensure surplus federal buildings are suitable for use as housing.

The national housing strategy will continue to encourage housing innovation in a number of ways. In my area, we will be moving forward with demonstrations that exemplify higher-performing affordable housing projects. When we speak to performance, we think in terms of energy efficiency, greenhouse gas emissions, affordability, resiliency, and of course, occupant health.

We will also be moving forward with solution labs, where we will be enabling the industry to develop more innovative solutions to persistent and problematic challenges. We will address problems and issues facing the housing sector through dedicated teams of experts, people of lived experience, and academia, focusing on problems to more rapidly develop solutions. This is an exciting initiative that we'll be launching this April.

The national housing strategy also includes an investment of $221 million in research, demonstration, and surveys, which moves the needle in terms of environmental responsibility. We are going to make a point of exploring new relationships with organizations like the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, as well as the other members of the tri-council in order to carry out research in ways that might not otherwise be possible.

We'll carry out demonstrations of forward-looking technologies, practices, programs, policies, and strategies to show what is possible for the future of sustainable housing in Canada

I'd like to thank you, Madam Chair, for the opportunity to appear before this committee and to inform you about the important work we're doing at CMHC and with our partners.

I'd be pleased to answer any questions you might have at this time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Thank you very much, Mr. Hill. That was fast.

What we're going to do is hear from all of the witnesses and then we'll get into rounds of questioning, if you're okay with that.

Next up, we have Benjamin.

[Benjamin Shinewald, President and Chief Executive Officer, Building Owners and Managers Association of Canada]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

We will make our presentation in English, but if there are any questions in French, we can try to answer in that language.

We just got notice a few days ago, as you've mentioned, so we prepared this short deck. We have a longer deck that's also ready for you, but it wasn't quite ready for translation. We'll have a further document following.

I'll start with just a word of introduction about who we are. We thought we'd answer the four questions that you put to us as well as we could, and then we might tell a brief story that might flesh out a bit more of what we do, if the time permits us.

First of all, what is BOMA Canada? As you mentioned, Madam Chair, we're the Building Owners and Managers Association of Canada. We are a very mature organization. We're over a hundred years old. BOMA B.C. was the second chapter formed in the world, about 110 years ago. BOMA Toronto just had its 100th birthday in 2017. We represent many thousands of building owners, managers, and suppliers, ranging from energy engineers to janitorial service firms to lawyers, occasionally, from coast to coast to coast. With our 11 chapters, we have representation in all 10 provinces and even in the territories as well.

We have a flagship program called BOMA BEST. BOMA BEST is our building environmental standards program. We're closing in on 3,000 certifications of existing buildings in Canada. The private sector has really run with the program, and the public sector has embraced it too, although not quite as much. We truly believe that it can be a flag-bearing, public diplomacy global champion for Canada. To that end, we're actively expanding the program outside our borders.

We have our first hundred or so certifications in the States. I was in Mexico last year, as well as in China and Korea, with interest from elsewhere in Latin America, so we really think this can be an awesome thing for all Canadians.

Those are a few words of introduction, so maybe we'll to move to the questions. Randal, do you want to do the first one?

[Randal Froebelius]

Sure.

How can GHG emissions reductions in the building sector be accelerated prior to the next scheduled update to the national model building codes? Property managers and building operators have market-based incentives to operate their buildings efficiently, which means energy, water, and waste efficiency too. Therefore, invest in the human beings running our built environment. Let's provide incentives for training of building operators. The building operators are the blue-shirt fellows or women that we see running the buildings. We could provide incentives for early adoption of emerging sustainable technologies, new heating sources, new air conditioning sources, solar power, and that type of thing. Demand BOMA BEST sustainable buildings certification for all federal buildings. We believe this would have a significant impact.

[Benjamin Shinewald]

I will just elaborate on one point that Randal made, and then I'll move on to the next question.

A lot of people look at buildings as being static entities, where a guy with a broom comes at the end of the day, and that's the maintenance it requires. In fact buildings—and I highly suspect this is one of them, since I lived in Ottawa for many years when this building was being renovated, and I'm astounded at how well it came out—are complex machines. They are driven by IT increasingly. There are environmental factors that the building operator shapes much more than the designer or the architect, the construction firm and so forth. A lot of what we do is to try to focus on educating and bringing up the skills of the operators, the trades and the professionals who run the buildings day to day. The temptation often is to look at the newest technology, that ground-breaking innovation, or even just the new build as being newer and better. That's human nature. However, in fact—and I may get back to this, time permitting—investing in people, irrespective of the beauty, the age, the stage, the size, the location of the building is very often the best way to drive performance.

[Randal Froebelius]

I'll just drive that home a little further.

In a recent renovation of the kind you've done in this building here, the BAS, or the building automation system, that would have been installed would be incredibly complex. Typically what happens when we commission the building and turn it over to the people who are actually operating it, there's often a bit of a slip, and the people who take it over may not know all of the features and ways that it can be maximized or optimized. A big part of what we advocate is to get our teams educated and make sure they understand everything they can do, so that at two o'clock in the morning, when no one's in this room, we drop the temperature by five degrees. It's very simple, common sense stuff, but it's a matter of making sure everyone knows how to engage in that.

[Benjamin Shinewald]

I will go on to the second question, looking at provincial programs for energy efficiency retrofitting of buildings and how federal existing or new programs could further incentivize energy-efficient renovations. You've listed a bunch of them.

Obviously, our view is that our program is the answer, but it's not just vanity or whatever. BOMA BEST is thriving. It's a brand that's poorly known outside the industry, but is a powerhouse inside the industry. We're trying very hard to grow a brand outside so the next time you ask a question of stakeholders, our brand will be there too. We have many thousands more certifications than our quasi-competitors. We are a made-in-Canada answer, and that's unique. We are the only made-in-Canada answer to the question that you're posing, and we're an answer that truly is by the industry, for the industry.

We overhauled our program a couple of years ago. We had over a hundred industry volunteers going through it comma by comma, quibbling over how many points for this question or that question, and really making sure that it meets the needs of the industry that has to run these buildings. I think that's why we've been so successful. We've been so successful, in fact, that we have all this third party data that shows we are driving continuous building efficiency. In fact, our data shows that while building efficiency improves at certification, it actually gets even better at recertification. Again, these are not static entities; these are ongoing challenges.

We're fully integrated with the Energy Star program, which NRCan has licensed from the EPA. We actually just won an RFP from NRCan.

You mentioned net zero, Mr. Hill. We have a net-zero challenge coming up. If there's time, I can talk about that. The objective behind it is to nudge the commercial and institutional industry towards net-zero performance, and we're leveraging our BOMA BEST platform to do that.

As I said before, there are thousands and thousands of buildings, and there's lots of scope for federal buildings to enter the program.

[Randal Froebelius]

Both climate and carbon footprint of predominant energy sources vary among provinces, territories, and latitudes in Canada. How can federal policy and program investments be regionally targeted to yield the greatest return in emissions reductions?

Cleaning the grid is obviously the way to reduce emissions, but energy efficiency is too, irrespective of grid. Government should incentivize energy efficiency in commercial buildings, again through technology training. Regional targeting could work as well, but also yield perverse results.

We know Alberta has a significant percentage of coal-powered power in their province, and it powers most of the commercial buildings. In Quebec it's more hydro-based, obviously. Each area will alway have regional differences in what programs can target different uses of energy sources. We recognize each region is going to have unique programs or unique responses to the issue, but again, we are a broad-based organization across all provinces, so we're here to help.

[Benjamin Shinewald]

Actually, I was thinking about this slide in front of us. Our answer is that energy efficiency is energy efficiency, irrespective of whether the grid is cleaner or less clean.

Actually, one thing missing from the slide is incentivizing on-site production of energy through solar and other innovative things. That will obviously also help, particularly in a less clean grid, and we should have had that on the slide.

The last question you posed to us was on how we can further accelerate net-zero energy housing becoming market-feasible. We heard a lot of that from Mr. Hill. It was terrific.

Our industry represents commercially owned and professionally managed assets, a significant portion of which are multi-unit residential buildings, commonly called apartment buildings, so we don't look at the single family detached house that I and many Canadians live in. I think the others on the panel could probably help us there. We are increasingly in condominiums. Student residences are a huge, booming area too.

Frankly, it's the same message again: driving energy efficiency, driving building operations efficiency, and investing in the people who are running it, as well as investing in technologies and providing the right kinds of incentives. The one difference is that it's a much different relationship to engage with a residential tenant—my mother-in-law, who lives in an apartment in Toronto, for instance, or my grandmother in Winnipeg—than it is to engage with a commercial tenant, where there is a different kind of relationship.

I'm out of time. I'll put that slide up and leave it at that.

Thank you.

[Randal Froebelius]

I'll just add one thing from the residential side, though.

As increasingly more housing stock is going back to rentals, especially in our major cities where the cost of housing is becoming so high, a lot of our landlords are very sophisticated. Because utilities are often included in gross rents, they are a good place to start with respect to pursuing net zero.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

If the committee is willing, we could go through that last slide and go over.

Are you okay with just carrying on, because we were short on the first one?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Carry on.

[Benjamin Shinewald]

The yellow card is already up. I feel like I'm playing soccer.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Sorry.

[Benjamin Shinewald]

Thank you very much for the extra time.

[An hon. member]

Time.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!