Environment Committee on Feb. 13th, 2018

[Michael Giroux, President, Canadian Wood Council]

Good morning. My name is Mike Giroux. I'm the CEO of the Canadian Wood Council, as you mentioned.

My background is varied, and it includes working in entrepreneurship, building houses using light gauge steel. I've worked in the cement industry, and I've now been in the wood products industry for eight years. I also spent a little time with the National Research Council.

That's a little about me, but now about the Wood Council itself. The Wood Council has one mission but two elements to the mission. The first is to ensure the fair recognition of wood products and building systems in the national codes of Canada. That's very important because what gets recognized gets built. I'll make the point with respect to green sustainability in a minute.

The second area we're engaged in is in the education of the construction sector itself, everybody from architects to engineers to builders to students. We provide tools and software for this clientele.

In doing all that we invest heavily in the codes development process. We are engaged not only in Ottawa with the National Research Council at the model level, but we are also engaged at the provincial levels where these national codes are adapted and adopted. We are also engaged very much in demonstration. We work with both our funding partners and our R and D partners to demonstrate buildings built with wood in this case, and the idea is to de-risk these buildings so they or their elements eventually can be introduced into building codes.

That's what we do. I'm a little worried about some comments about the building code itself. You probably all know this, but developing building codes and the standards related to them is a five-year cycle. It's a long period of time. In the U.S., it's three years.

In doing that, we might say that's an innovation killer. It's arguably not because they focus very much on their core objectives in the code and these need to be protected at all costs. These stand-alone objectives, which all the technical requirements point to, include energy and water use, fire and structural protection and safety, and health and accessibility. You'll notice there is no core objective in there for sustainability, energy, or CO2. These have been discussed but they have been determined to be complicated. It would really take political drive to have them introduced into the codes.

That is my introduction, and I would like to comment on some of the key points here. I'm not necessarily an expert in them.

First, with respect to greenhouse gas emissions, the reductions in the building sector, and how they can be accelerated prior to the next building code, obviously it's too late to get an objective into the code. Second is that public sector leadership is really helpful and it's also necessary. We can look at real property practices within governments at the federal or provincial level. They need to be less prescriptive, more material neutral. They need to go beyond the first costs to consider life-cycle analysis impacts as these are environmental impacts.

In our case, this is important because we not only look at the operational and sequestered nature of our product. We can make any building the same if we want to. In the end, you look at products that can sequester carbon. Concrete is one of them. There are other products where the embodied energy is interesting. If you make your decisions in part based on the embodied energy of the product you end up with reducing immediately the carbon content of that building and it's really important that be considered.

In Quebec there's la charte du bois, and in that policy they look at wood equally. They don't say “choose wood” or anything. They say that you must consider wood equally to other materials. That's very interesting for me and it provides an opportunity, but you shouldn't even have to use the name “wood” in the policy. You should say, “You should be considering all materials.” What's really interesting about the policy is that they go to this next level where they say there should be a carbon metric associated with the policy. Then they introduce the need for a tool that is being developed in Quebec right at this very moment and which is now being partnered in Ontario as well, and will be partnered in B.C.

This tool will help at the LCA life-cycle level to determine the actual carbon metric for those buildings, in particular at the body level now and then operationally later, and should allow proper decision-making. Carbon avoided now has this tendency to accumulate or to be a better story over time, because if you avoid it now it's avoided impacts in the future as well. That said, there's no use having that type of program if you don't monitor and enforce it.

There's another opportunity here and that is to adopt an industrial vision, a vision to where we want to go. If you look at the opportunity, you have existing products, you have new products, and they're going to blend into the buildings of the future. For those buildings of the future we don't have a lot of R and D in that area. We don't do any sort of life-cycle impacts. We have no real idea if these new products, or those new buildings, are an improvement over the last generation of buildings. I think Thomas's group and some of the other programs that we have are starting to lead towards that, but we need to really look at this in terms of an overall vision that includes industrialization in terms of pre-manufacturing of these buildings. That way then that vision can be one of CO2 reductions, or it could be of energy reduction.

At the end of the day it's the environmental impact. The flavour of the day could be water in the future, but when we know what the vision is then industry can go along and follow along in that area. What I find interesting is that once you know that you're going to do this, you can also report on it. You can put out sustainability reports that show that you've improved it and show the audience that you're interested in improving this too, that you've proven this direction.

Retrofits are huge. Like Thomas said, it's probably a bigger market than the new building market in the future. I don't have very much more to add than what Thomas added except perhaps with the carbon taxing that's being considered one of the advantages is that, because it impacts product level and makes some products more expensive than others, as a result of that it might drive a behavioural change. I think that's very interesting, and I would encourage that we continue along that way.

The other thing in the retrofit market is adaptability. At the end, if a new building is not made to be adaptable—you can use the word “durability” in this as well, the longevity of the building—if it's not designed to be adaptable then the costs of the future will be greater. That is an opportunity for building codes.

How could we further accelerate net-zero energy? There's a lot of work being done in that area. What I find very encouraging is that companies like Landmark and others are not only looking towards what we're doing in Canada, but they're looking offshore. I'd like to say that a lot of what we do in terms of our R and D is that we try to invent things here when there's really no necessity for it. In the end we can achieve an awful lot by becoming very expert at adopting and adapting innovation from elsewhere. There is marvellous technology available from Germany, Austria, and offshore that we could bring to Canada.

Those are the points that I'm interested in making today.

Thank you very much for allowing me to speak.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Thank you very much, Mr. Giroux. That was great.

From the cement association, we have Michael McSweeney and Adam Auer.

[Michael McSweeney, President and Chief Executive Officer, Cement Association of Canada]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair and members, for this great opportunity to address you today on what our industry feels is society's greatest challenge, which is the fight against climate change and how we tackle that through reducing greenhouse gases from the industry building sector and the transportation sector.

The cement and concrete industry represents a direct and indirect economic contribution of about $73 billion to Canada, and we employ about 151,000 Canadians. Our industry supports strong action on climate change, including putting a price on carbon. As of this year, all cement facilities in Canada but one operate in a province that already has a price on carbon.

As governments move towards carbon pricing, they have had to consider the impact of carbon pricing on competitiveness, especially for energy-intensive, trade-exposed industries. Cement is among the most trade-exposed, energy-intensive industries in Canada, and we are very vulnerable to our competitors in the import and export markets that do not have similar carbon-pricing systems, such as almost the entire United States, with the exception of California.

Thankfully, though, with the exception of British Columbia, carbon-pricing systems across Canada, including the federal backstop carbon-pricing system, on the whole strike the right balance between incentivizing emissions reductions while introducing other measures to protect and even enhance Canadian industry and competitiveness as we transition to the low-carbon economy.

Why are carbon pricing and energy-intensive, trade-exposed industries important to a discussion about climate change and the built environment? Because, while well-designed carbon-pricing systems can foster low-carbon innovation in industries that support Canada's built environment, these innovations cannot flourish in a policy environment that does not actively pull them into the built environment decision-making discussion.

Consider that, on aggregate, all three levels of government purchase, directly and indirectly, some 60% of all building materials consumed in Canada, and concrete makes up the majority of those building materials. Further consider that our building and energy codes are minimum codes. Our building codes are not the gold standard that you or most Canadians believe them to be, and unless they are significantly changed, they will serve to impede low-carbon innovation, not accelerate it, as Michael Giroux mentioned in his comments.

Procurement decisions made by governments in general emphasize low-cost tenders. We always award tenders to the lowest-cost bidder, and only rarely do they ever consider GHGs or climate adaptation. When governments have considered climate change in a built environment, they've done so with prescriptive policies—for example, policies like “wood first”, rather than leveraging markets towards comprehensive and systemic clean energy or clean growth innovation.

Let me offer an example. Our sector recently came together in total across Canada to promote a new cement, portland-limestone cement, as an opportunity to reduce greenhouse gases from concrete. Portland-limestone cement will reduce the GHG footprint by 10% at no cost. If adopted as a full replacement for all cement sold in Canada, portland-limestone cement could yield annual CO2 reductions of almost one megatonne and, as I said, at no additional cost.

While portland-limestone cement meets the same performance standards as general use cement, has been used in Europe for decades, and is recognized in the 2010 national building code of Canada, it does not enjoy deep penetration across Canada. This is because construction industry codes and standards bodies in the public procurement agencies responsible for planning and commissioning infrastructure projects do not yet value or incentivize new innovations in the low-carbon construction materials and design industry.

Governments, as purchasers of more than half of all concrete produced in Canada, with the stroke of a pen could make portland-limestone cement the default cement in the majority of all projects across Canada, yet our industry's efforts to get this done are inexorably rebuffed. With this one innovation, we can address about 2% of the emissions gap that this government has identified and needs to fill to realize our 2030 target.

Pavement infrastructure offers an important example. Robust third-party life-cycle assessments irrefutably demonstrate the cost and climate benefits of concrete pavements over asphalt pavements. Asphalt pavements last seven to 12 years. Concrete pavements last 40 to 50 years, cost less over their life, and can actually improve fuel efficiency by 7%. These properties alone could result in savings of up to 12,000 tonnes of GHGs per lane kilometre over a 50-year lifespan, compared with a typical asphalt road.

Contrast those two examples with the incessant political interventions in building codes across Canada and the hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars spent by federal and provincial governments, being poured into championing wood products, especially tall wood buildings, as a significant carbon mitigation strategy. You can then see where our exasperation lies.

The implications of such policies on the built environment, including the prospect of a robust, open, and competitive market-driven clean growth strategy for buildings and building materials, are profound, yet the underlying assumption that wood buildings yield net carbon benefits over alternatives has never, ever been fully articulated, let alone subject to a comprehensive peer review. This is all the more troubling considering the increasingly well-documented shortcomings with the current understandings of the carbon profile of wood products.

Research on GHG impacts of commercial logging suggests the effect on the carbon profile of wood products is significant. A Bureau of Land Management report in western Oregon proposes that when land-use change impacts of deforestation are taken into account, even accounting for regrowth, some 13 tonnes of greenhouse gases are lost to the atmosphere for every tonne sequestered in a wood product. That's a far cry from the carbon neutrality claimed by the wood industry and federal and provincial natural resource ministries.

You can therefore understand our frustration when we saw in budget 2017 that this government is spending some $40 million to support preferential treatment of wood building materials at the expense of other building materials across our country, or recently, your vote on Bill C-354, which has passed second reading, attempting to tilt the playing field towards wood in government infrastructure despite a growing body of evidence that this in fact may increase greenhouse gas emissions and make our buildings more vulnerable to climate change.

In Canada, the most significant carbon impacts from buildings relate to heating and cooling. These operational energy needs account for over 90% of the global warming potential for buildings. Even if the claims the wood industry makes that they are carbon neutral were true, and they're not, the impact that the substitution of wood for steel or concrete would have on the life-cycle emissions of a structure would be marginal. In fact, concrete's thermal mass capabilities can play a significant role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions by reducing operational demands. Today, the strategic use of thermal mass has reduced operational energy needs of large commercial buildings, such as Manitoba Hydro Place, by over 70%.

We need stronger building codes. We need stronger energy codes, and concrete can play a significant role in affordable strategies to meet the much sought-after net-zero building target. Only a robust cradle-to-cradle life-cycle cost and life-cycle climate change assessment can draw out these GHGs and cost-saving performance attributes. Policies by politicians that favour one building material over another without considering the whole are definitely not in the public interest.

More exciting but less understood is the role that concrete will play in the emerging game-changing class of technologies known as “carbon dioxide utilization”. Concrete is a critical source and sink for captured carbon. By virtue of the sheer volume of concrete consumed every year, more than any other material on earth with the exception of water, our sector will be pivotal in developing technologies that will ultimately reduce carbon.

Canada's clean growth strategy for the built environment must look to the future it wants, a low-carbon climate-resilient future, and make space for transformative innovations that will get us there.

Let me be clear. We're not asking for government to mandate concrete roads or buildings, nor are we disparaging the competition from other building materials. We are simply asking that government take a sector-neutral approach to planning and using tools focusing on GHGs as we transition to low-carbon and climate-resilient economies.

In conclusion, our primary request is that you recommend that the Government of Canada mandate the use of full life-cycle and environmental assessments for all federally funded infrastructure projects at all three levels of government.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Thank you very much. That has given us a lot to think about.

Next up is Martin Luymes. He is with the Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Institute of Canada.

Welcome.

[Martin Luymes, Director of Programs and Relations, Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Institute of Canada]

Thank you, Madam Chair and the committee, for providing this opportunity to speak to you and be part of this important conversation.

I will not be talking about building materials. I'll be shifting focus to an equally important, if not more important, segment of the climate change solution, which is the HVACR sector. I want to talk a little bit about the role of the HVACR industry in promoting energy efficiency and mitigating climate change.

First, just to be clear on the scope of the HVACR sector, HVACR is heating, ventilating, air conditioning, and refrigeration. I know most of you know that. The scope of our organization is the space heating and cooling of buildings through various methods—hydronic or air systems—which obviously is an essential service in this country. It includes domestic hot water, ventilation, indoor air quality products and services, and refrigeration processes that serve the needs of industry, grocery stores, institutions, hospitals and schools, ice rinks, and various other specialty applications.

Building controls is part of our sector as well. It ties all of these systems together. It's a roughly $7 billion a year activity in Canada, and as I mentioned, it's an essential industry in Canada given our climate. Our members and the industry in general are active in every corner of the country, wherever it's a home or a building, yet our industry is largely hidden from sight because we're behind the walls and under the floor providing these essential services. We're mostly out of sight and out of mind for Canadians.

HRAI, the organization I'm representing here, has been around since 1968. We have roughly 1,350 corporate members. That includes 90 manufacturers, 60 or so wholesalers-distributors, over 1,000 contractors across the country, and a number of associates: utilities, colleges, training institutes, consulting engineers, and so on. Across the country, we have 28 staff, a dozen instructors who are very active in training, five regional managers, and 20 chapters.

Our primary services, like any industry association, mostly have to do with industry advocacy, but we are also heavily involved in industry training, including technical design and business management. The technical design courses that we offer are primarily designed to help technicians meet building code requirements. There's a very heavy energy-efficiency component to that.

We own a trade show that's held every two years called CMPX 2018, which is running in about a month from now. We are also actively involved in environmental stewardship programs. We run a number of programs that the industry manages, taking back products of the industry that have harmful environmental impacts, such as mercury thermostats and spent refrigerants, which are no longer allowed, per regulation.

I want to talk a little about the role of our industry in relation to the pan-Canadian framework. Under the PCF, as I'll call it, there's a significant emphasis on GHG reductions. I think you're all aware that the most significant contributor to greenhouse gas reductions, not only in Canada forecasting into the future but also globally, is investments in energy efficiency. Roughly half of the expected goals will be achieved through investments in energy efficiency. That's significant for our industry because that's where our members live and breathe.

Federal government consultations are well under way now on a variety of issues that affect our industry. There's a consultation that we're participating in called the “market transformation for space heating and water heating equipment in Canada”. We're very happy to be engaged with that.

The PCF acknowledges that space heating is an important part of the solution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the building sector and also in relation to water heating. Heating on average represents between 56% and 64% of energy use in homes; in buildings, it's the single largest source of direct-sector emissions. Therefore, improvements in the performance of space heating technology can reduce energy use significantly for a typical residential home or building. As per NRCan, if all residential heating systems were replaced with heat pump technology by 2040, for example, this would reduce residential energy use by 25% and greenhouse gas emissions by 24 megatonnes.

A variety of measures related to buildings have been contemplated under the PCF. They include net-zero energy ready building codes by 2030, a model retrofit building code by 2022, labelling and rating requirements as early as 2019, and setting standards to the highest level economically and technically feasible for heating equipment and other technologies. Our industry, I want to emphasize, supports these measures but with a number of important caveats, which I'll come back to shortly.

Just to illustrate, some of the technologies we're talking about include commercial gas furnaces, cold climate air-source heat pumps, gas-fired heat pumps, ground-source or geothermal heat pumps, micro combined heat and power, and integrated systems building controls. This is the tool kit that our industry works with.

The government's plans include what the government has referred to as strategic interventions in the market to accelerate the adoption of high-efficiency space-heating technologies between now and 2035. The government has what has been defined as aspirational goals. A lot of our members have difficulty with the term “aspirational goals”, because they're very hard to pin down, but they include such things as that by 2035 all major space-heating technologies for sale in Canada will have an energy performance of more than 100%. For those who aren't familiar with heating technology, that essentially means that all technology for heating homes will be electric by 2035 because there is no gas-powered or oil-burning technology that can beat 100% efficiency. If that's the goal, that has important implications for our industry.

The plan will also identify barriers and challenges to achieving these goals, and those are part of the big discussion we're having with NRCan and others right at this moment. We'll be looking to implement a variety of measures to overcome barriers using all available tools.

The pan-Canadian framework and all of the things that spill out of that present tremendous opportunities for our industry. As it happens, HVAC unitary products are becoming more and more efficient. The transition to heat pumps presents an opportunity for all of our contractor members across the country. It's a job-growth strategy in a sense, because heating systems will have to be converted in existing homes and buildings. Building smart building controls and implementing systems that will allow better management of buildings creates all kinds of opportunities for our industry. An emphasis on not just product innovation but also building-systems innovation focusing on best practices and enhancing trade skills is very important for our sector. All of that is to say there are tremendous opportunities for our sector. As I mentioned, the industry has a variety of tools in its tool kit to help achieve the goals that the government has set out.

I'm not going to talk about those right now. In fact, I realize I left you at a disadvantage, because I'm looking at a presentation that you don't have. I will make it available to the committee if there's interest in having it. It includes some references to these technologies. The challenge the industry has around the pan-Canadian framework and the transition to a low-carbon economy is the need to adapt. The changing energy mix and transition from oil and natural gas heating to electric pose challenges for many of our members and participants across the country.

Production innovation is feasible, but the reduction of per unit cost for equipment in the context of increasingly stringent performance standards is a challenge. The growing sophistication of codes and building systems poses additional challenges for our sector. In terms of transition to who's going to do the work and how they are going to do it, there's a need for emphasis on skilled labour transitions, which means training.

The HVAC industry is prepared to engage with government at all levels to assist in meeting the challenges of the Paris Agreement. I want to make that clear, but there are some really important principles that need to be seen or adhered to if we want to have constructive engagement. The first is that manufacturers of products that are brought into this country need a runway. There's a product cycle, a time frame to develop and refine products in relation to standards and regulations, and they need time. They need to have foresight on where the regulations are going with time to adapt. Industry consultation is paramount to good program and regulatory design. Knowledge of products comes from our industry and knowledge of our customer base. Consultation facilitates advance preparation for the industry.

We have a strong consultative relationship with NRCan, especially the office of energy efficiency, and with NRC, CanmetENERGY labs, and so on. I want to emphasize that we do have that positive relationship.

I also want to emphasize, however, that the support for climate change needs to be tempered by the need for regulatory harmonization for products coming into Canada and into provincial and territorial markets to keep costs manageable both for industry and consumers. Therefore, we support the work of the regulatory co-operation council and are very interested in the NAFTA renegotiation process and in making sure the recently adopted Canadian Free Trade Agreement can be supported.

I'll leave it on the note that we have a number of other policy priorities and there are a lot of specific policy ideas that come from our industry, but the message I'd like to leave you with is that it's important, from our perspective, to consult early and consult often with industry to achieve effective outcomes.

Thank you for your time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Thank you very much.

I see that you have more there that you might want to share with us, so we would very much appreciate having the presentation. I know there were other documents that were provided as well, but if they're provided in one language only we can't distribute them until the translation is done. If you have your presentation already translated, that would be great, as it will get to us faster. We are looking forward to quickly absorbing the material you're providing, so the sooner we get it, the better. Thank you.

I'll turn it over to questioning now, but first, I want to welcome Mr. Webber.

Welcome to the committee.

[Len Webber, Conservative, Calgary Confederation, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

I do want to remind you that we have witnesses on the phone, so don't forget them. I know we often do when they're not in front of us.

Mr. Fisher.

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

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much to everybody and the gentlemen on the phone. There is an incredible amount of expertise on this panel. Sometimes we get two people on a panel, and sometimes we get four or five. There's so much that I want to ask. I'll start off with a little bit of a general question. I'm going to lean towards Mr. Mueller on this one, even though I could ask any of you.

We've talked about retrofitting and about transitions. We've heard that federal codes are a guideline for provinces and territories to follow minimum standards; some match it, and some exceed it. We know that the private sector, certainly in the innovation sector, exceeds federal codes.

I always bring up the return on investment—the right thing to do for the environment versus the cost of retrofitting or building versus the payback. I know this is an overarching question, but how do we get there? How do we encourage reaching up to do better than those minimum standards? Is it with grants? Is it with rewards? I want your thoughts and recommendations on how we could proceed in order to do better.

[Thomas Mueller]

That's a really good question.

The Canada Green Building Council is in the business of setting higher thresholds and driving this forward. I'll go back to when the council started 15 years ago and what happened then.

There are three areas. One is that you're in charge of the code, but we have to keep in mind that the code is back-loaded. You first have to develop it. Then it comes in, and it takes years before it takes effect in the marketplace.

Your question is really on how we can move faster and be more ambitious. These volunteer systems have a big role to play. I would like to re-emphasize that the federal, provincial, and municipal governments have tremendous procurement power. In the early days of LEED, it was the federal government and some of the cities that de-risked the approach for the private sector. Even though you need to be responsible with taxpayers' money—I'm a taxpayer too, so absolutely—there's no doubt, and the business cases are so many now, that there is a positive return on your investment if you build to high performance. It's energy savings, water savings, and it differs by building and by owner. If government is procuring buildings, if you build yourself or you renovate or you lease space, it's hugely important.

The other part is just the fact of policy. When this government came into power, just due to the fact that there were policies about carbon, there was a 180-degree change in the industry. That was just from knowing that government was going in this direction and the industry needed to respond to that.

That goes beyond the code. It is more aspirational, because it's not an easy path. It's the combination of procurement, policy, and code, and they need to work in tandem. You need to attack this problem from many different areas.

But the business case is clear that there is a return on investment in this area.

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

I want to talk about concrete for a moment, but I love wood as well.

There's major innovation in the production of concrete. I'll give you a couple of examples. I went to Dalhousie University during a regional chairs session, and we saw that you can take the columns of concrete that you see holding up overpasses in Canada and make them half the size, wrap them in Kevlar, and they actually have more strength. It's incredible.

You've probably heard of CarbonCure, Mr. McSweeney, which is about capturing greenhouse gas emissions. They're reducing costs, they're increasing the quality of the product, but they're also promoting environmental sustainability. I'm certainly proud that the government is investing in innovation.

What else is out there for concrete, for innovation? It is such an important thing we use every day. We use it in industry and buildings. What else is out there? What's the next big innovation for concrete?

[Michael McSweeney]

I'm going to let my colleague, Adam Auer, answer that one.

[Adam Auer, Vice-President, Environment & Sustainability, Cement Association of Canada]

Probably the most exciting, forward-looking innovation is an extension of the kinds of technologies that CarbonCure is exploring, which is the beneficial use of captured carbon in concrete as a material. As Michael noted in his remarks, the cement and concrete industry together is both a source of carbon dioxide that can be captured and used, and also a potential sink.

There are literally dozens of different technologies exploring how to take captured carbon and put it into concrete as a material. Concrete is the most used material on the planet after water, so just by volume that means that concrete represents an enormous opportunity to take carbon from the atmosphere and permanently sequester it into our built environment. I see that as the most exciting space in terms of innovation.

However, you're right, there's a menu of strategies that our sector is exploring to get toward that Holy Grail of carbon-neutral and even potentially carbon-positive with some of these carbon capture technologies. There's material efficiency, which is what you're mentioning in the context of that bridge example.

We're looking at substituting the use of fossil fuel in the manufacturing of cement with lower carbon alternatives. That is a nearer-term technology that's already well deployed in a lot of places around the world, and we're working very hard with governments in Canada to facilitate that here as well with some recent successes with the attention on climate.

The two most important messages are yes, there's a ton of innovation happening in this industry, but much like your iPhone, it is not one technology. It is the synergy between hundreds of technologies working together that's going to get us to a very exciting place, not just in our industry but where our industry interfaces with the HVAC industry, for example, and other folks working in the built environment space.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Monsieur Godin.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Gentlemen, thank you.

I also want to thank the people on the phone. Are you still there?

[Bijan Mannani]

Yes, we are.

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

Excellent.

My first question is for Mr. Mueller from the Canada Green Building Council.

You presented four important elements to consider for improving sustainable development, which is a goal shared by all. Could you rank those elements in order of importance? They were listed on slide 3 of your presentation, I believe.

[Thomas Mueller]

Thank you for the question.

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

I am asking because we can't focus on all of them at once.

[Thomas Mueller]

I have two slides with four areas there. Is it with regard to the retrofit, or zero carbon?

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

It had “GHG” in the title.

[Thomas Mueller]

Retrofit, very well. These four areas are actually established practices in the industry. We rank them in terms of the percentage of buildings, or the number of buildings, that need to pursue these practices. In the next slide, you'll see where these buildings are located.

It is really important that it's not just a discussion about energy, but that it's also a discussion about carbon.

The recommissioning is something that industry is already doing, but it needs to be expanded. It just means that the system in the buildings work well and they work as they're intended. There's an instant savings for anybody who pursues that.

What we're really looking for, which needs to be incentivized and drawn forward, is retrofit. We say deep retrofit because these are savings of 20% to 40%. It's not just what we call a shallow retrofit, where you just replace the lighting and make a little bit of an improvement. It needs to be a deeper retrofit that looks at the building's systems, not just the lighting but all the building's systems, which, eventually, looks at the building envelope and looks at the energy source.

You could improve a building by simply switching to improve energy efficiency, but also, as the gentleman Mr. Luymes has said, switching from fossil fuel to a heat pump, for example, that uses electricity. They're highly efficient now. You can achieve a lower carbon building that way.

What I'm trying to say is that it really depends.

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

I'll stop you there, if I may.

In the table on slide 3, under the heading “Pathway to Improved Performance in Existing Buildings”, you suggest working with “jurisdictions and the private sector to switch fuel sources in 20% of buildings”. We know that there is an impact of about 65% on heating and that heating has significant effects on greenhouse gases, or GHGs, and you suggest a reduction of 20%. That percentage may be for buildings alone, but shouldn't we prioritize this 20% if we want a greater beneficial impact on the environment? Do you follow me?

Heating has a huge impact. I see from your table that these elements are not ranked and that you want to work on all four solutions at once. However, I would ask you to rank them in order of priority. My own opinion is that we should tackle heating fuel sources first.

[Thomas Mueller]

Exactly.

You're right. These are not priorities. These are four strategies that need to be applied to all buildings. It depends on the building and where the building is located.

If you're in Quebec, fuel switching makes a lot of sense because you have clean electricity. In Alberta, fuel switching doesn't make a lot of sense because you have a dirty grid that still uses coal to generate electricity. These strategies need to be adapted depending on where you are. You need to pursue all four of them. However, on the next slide, you see where the priorities should be, depending on the location.

Does that answer your question?

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

That doesn't quite answer my question, but it is a possible solution.

My next question is for Mr. Giroux from the Canadian Wood Council.

I'm not sure it was a good idea to seat the representatives of the cement and wood industries right next to each other. I sensed a bit of rivalry during your presentations earlier.