Environment Committee on Feb. 8th, 2018

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Yes.

[Duncan Hill]

We realize that regions are different. They have different priorities and different challenges. We'll be there for them.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Over and above the 25%, do you know of any other loans or grants through CMHC that would bring that total over 25%?

[Duncan Hill]

Not directly, other than, as I mentioned, through the national housing strategy.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Okay.

To BOMA, I don't have enough time to go over all the things I wanted to—

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Linda Duncan]

You still have two minutes.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

I have two minutes?

Is your motivation with your organization based on a return on investment first, or is it a bunch of environmentalists who want to do the right thing? I'm not going to get to Rob, but we heard him talk about that sweet spot. As I mentioned at committee a couple of days ago, there are people out there who want to do great things for the earth. Then there are people out there who want an energy-efficient home, but if there's no return on investment, they're not going to do it.

You have an association of 3,000 building owners. Are they motivated by a return on investment? I assume the answer is yes.

[Benjamin Shinewald]

The answer is yes and yes. The industry is motivated. It's a for-profit industry, so they want to get the highest financial returns. It is an extremely engaged industry on sustainability. I didn't come from the industry. I was wowed when I first came into it. They really live it. Part of it is because at the end of the day a lot of pensioners are demanding it.

It's a wonderful industry, in part because, unlike some other industries, there is often a straight-line correlation and causation between energy efficiency and financial efficiency. It's a very easy—

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

It's starting to happen.

[Benjamin Shinewald]

Yes, for sure.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Have you heard of Green Power Labs in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia? They go to a business, basically align the system so that it will save the business a lot of money, and then they take their pay out of the savings. You should check out Green Power Labs. They do some amazing things.

[Randal Froebelius]

I would just add, though, that the other motivation for us is frankly very basic. It starts at tenant satisfaction. Many of our owners are renting out their properties. Again, tenants demand sustainability, so we are responding to tenant demands. A happy tenant translates into renewals, which translates into a better bottom line. We are very service-focused, and—

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Is that my time, Madam Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

You're done. Thank you very much.

Go ahead, Mr. Viersen.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thanks to our guests for being here today.

I come from northern Alberta, where the Town of Valleyview is building a new town hall or office building. It's net zero, and they're really excited about that. However, if you go just down the highway to Fox Creek, 10,000 people sleep in Fox Creek every night, and yet they cannot.... They have to bus in people to work in the hotels. They bus people in to work at the gas station. They bus people in to work at Subway. It's a common problem.

If you build a house in Fox Creek and you follow all the guidelines—the building code, the zoning requirements, and everything like that—you cannot produce a house for less that $350,000 in Fox Creek. The people who are working at Subway don't make enough money to be able to pay for that house. That's a frustration of mine. The mayor says, “How do I attract people to come and move to my town?” I say, “You have endless forests in any direction. Give them an acre of land and tell them that as long as the sewage doesn't land on their neighbour, they'll be okay.”

The zoning restrictions and the building code and all of this just make the houses so expensive. How do we bring that down? I want to hear a little bit more about that sweet spot thing you were talking about in terms of how we get there.

[Rob Bernhardt]

Buildings do cost money. Different forms of buildings will cost different amounts. I don't know how to make them cheap according to the standards you may be referring to, with the land and the servicing and all these costs, but they're real.

Our expertise is not in the built environment, not in urban design, and not in land use decisions. What we can offer, and what this building standard offers, is the cheapest option if you're going to build. If you're going to build a house, if you're going to build a high-rise, if you're going to build whatever it is you're going to build, on any sort of reasonable life-cycle analysis, these buildings will be the cheapest option. Once the market matures—even now the incremental cost is tiny—the savings are very, very quickly recouped. That's what we can say.

I was sitting on the City of Victoria's housing affordability committee earlier. There are big factors there around transportation. You're building parkades, and people need their own cars. That's a big piece of affordability. There is much more to it than the building itself. That's why I kind of defer to the people who are in the urban planning field. That may be a bigger piece of the answer.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

To BOMA, on the affordability side of it, one of the things I have noticed is that when somebody owns their own home and they pay the gas bills, they close the door and those kinds of things. In other places, where they don't necessarily own their home, that becomes a bit of a challenge. I see it in my own riding. With all-in rent, the building manager suddenly becomes part of that equation. How do you guys deal with all of that?

[Randal Froebelius]

A big trend is right now is metering. In a commercial building, the trend is to try to get as many suites, as many spaces, as possible within a building metered so that the occupants can see for themselves what their energy costs are. That's the easiest way to start getting your energy costs under control without changing to LED lights or upgrading your HVAC systems or anything.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

But often they don't care. They just say, “Hey, I'm not paying for it. It doesn't matter to me.”

[Randal Froebelius]

Most of our industry has moved to what are called “net leases”. The electricity is extra. The janitorial is extra. You pay a base component of rent, but then you pay an operating cost component. That includes a myriad of things, one of which is your electricity, but it's reconciled. We meter it and then we reconcile it. Measurement Canada has a whole regime for making sure you're metering fairly and things like that. That's a big part of it.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Benjamin, you talked a little bit about how stuff that's existing is more valuable than future stuff. We see that all the time. My brother is a plumber. He talks about how the older furnaces last longer and the newer furnaces last three years. We put them in the landfill and then we put in new ones. He says that yes, with the total energy cost saving over the life of that new one, you're probably paying for half of the newer, more efficient one just by the reduced energy costs, but you're replacing it every three years. The old one we were replacing once in 15 years. He says the cost-benefit analysis on that doesn't necessarily line up, just in terms of filling the landfill with these old devices that wore out, broke, or whatever the case may be.

Can you comment on that a little bit?

[Benjamin Shinewald]

I see we're low on time.

I think it's a question you should put to the manufacturers and distributors of those devices. We buy them, and we buy the best ones we can. I'll be doing it in my own private home pretty soon, as I was saying before.

My point about the existing building always being the greenest is just that if you want to solve the problem, you can't just look at future buildings being built. Whatever metric you use—the number of buildings in five, 10, 50, or even 100 years—almost all of them are already built, so you have to look at the operation, maintenance, and retrofit of the current stock as well.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Thank you.

[Randal Froebelius]

Can I add one little thing just very quickly?

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Very quickly.