Environment Committee on Feb. 13th, 2018

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

You're out of time. Sorry about that.

Go ahead, Monsieur Godin.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

In my opinion, the economy is very important. Help us help the cement and wood industries. I think these two sectors are here to stay.

My question is for Mr. McSweeney.

Let's swap roles. Imagine that you are the lawmaker. What measures would you take to ensure that the wood and cement industries operate in keeping with the goal of clean growth while remaining viable?

[Michael McSweeney]

First, if the government is going to choose winners and losers in the economy, that's a wrong fundamental premise. When you're funding hundreds of millions of dollars to the wood industry to promote itself and not the steel industry or the concrete industry, there's something fundamentally wrong there. You should not rob Peter to pay Paul. In every one of your constituencies, there will be a concrete facility, and in some of your constituencies there will be a timber mill. If you are going to favour wood and have “wood first” policies, you will bring unemployment to the people in your quarry, sandpit, and ready-mix facilities in your ridings. These things happen all the time. Governments fund things that they really shouldn't fund.

Treat all building materials equally. If there isn't a market for a product, don't support it. In the seventies, we were supporting the shoe industry in Cape Breton, and all of a sudden the government said, “If we can't make shoes and sell shoes, why is the government supporting a shoe facility in Cape Breton?”

Each industry should stand on its own. We're a small country. We have only 33 million people. We're not like California, which has that many people in one state. We're not like China, which has two billion people. The wood industry needs to look to export markets to try to sell its product, not try to put people in the concrete, aggregate, and sandpit industry out of business. That's not fair.

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

I will stop you there because we have very little time left.

You are saying that all activity sectors should be treated equally by the government. Do I have that right?

[Michael McSweeney]

Yes.

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

I'm looking at your website now. I will read a short excerpt from it and then ask you a question.

Your website says the following: Today, we are focusing on bringing lower carbon cements to market through two main strategies:

Substituting traditional fossil fuels, including coal, with lower carbon alternatives. In leading jurisdictions, some cement facilities have achieved carbon intensity reductions of over 50% in the fuels they use; if this were achieved at all facilities in Canada, it would yield GHG reductions on the order of 2-3MT;

What is preventing you from doing that?

[Michael McSweeney]

We are doing it. What's preventing us is our politicians and civil servants. We are working very hard in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia to try to replace coal, petcoke, and natural gas, and take those fuels and replace them with biosolids, which come every day and are greenhouse gas neutral; biomasses; and plastics that cannot be recycled. We do not want to take materials that could be reduced, reused, or recycled. Anything that goes to a landfill that will degrade and start to produce greenhouse gases or methane should not go to a landfill.

We are working very hard, but again, it's very difficult to get provincial civil servants, who have the authority over fuels and wastes in their province, to move. In Burnaby, for example, they're looking at doubling the size of the incinerator, which will then double the amount of greenhouse gases in the city of Burnaby. The Province of British Columbia is trying to tell metro Vancouver that it should be sending its biosolids to the two cement facilities there to lower greenhouse gases.

We really need to work more in trying to get the politicians and civil servants to understand that the fight against climate change is the biggest fight of our lives. We cannot wait around for 10 or 15 years until 2030 and still be at the same levels we're at today. It's an urgent challenge, and politicians and civil servants need to be seized with it at every opportunity.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

We have 50 seconds left. Go ahead, Mr. Sopuck.

[Robert Sopuck, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

I just want to challenge Mr. McSweeney. In a previous life, I was an environmental director at a paper mill. I want to assure you that especially our conifer trees, which are the majority of trees harvested, are used very efficiently. The best fibre in the tree is on the outside of the tree, so it's a rare mill that would ever burn those pellets.

How it works is that the inner core of the tree, the xylem, is what makes the lumber. The outer core, the phloem, is the high-quality fibre that is chipped and then sent to a paper mill to produce high-quality paper. To denigrate the lumber industry and say that they burn this high-quality fibre is completely untrue, unless a lumber mill is totally isolated. What we burned at our mill was the bark, and that's what happens in most mills. The entire tree is efficiently utilized in Canada.

Mr. Giroux, perhaps I'll let you have the final word.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

I think I'm going to have to leave it there because we're over time. We really do have a short period of time. I don't want anybody to lose their questioning.

Mr. Bossio, please.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Thank you, Chair, and thanks to all of you for being here.

I live in a 120-year-old home. I have installed geothermal heat to try to offset the footprint I have. I've put three feet of insulation in the attic and have replaced all the windows and doors and all the rest of it, but I still have this massive brick building that has heat bleeding out of the bricks, because, of course, the brick draws the heat out of the building.

I was talking to a friend of mine who said to forget about trying to create any more efficiencies in my home. He said, “You have to create green energy to offset whatever carbon it is that you're still emitting from the facility.” When do we reach that balance between where it's more efficient to invest in energy or fuel switching than it is to invest in efficiencies?

[Thomas Mueller]

I think the principle of energy efficiency is paramount, because you need to reduce the demand for energy that your house has on the grid or on fossil fuels, whatever it is. That's job number one.

The thing is that at some point it becomes uneconomical for you to become more energy efficient because the costs are going up, so you need to look at renewable sources of energy, as you pointed out, to replace your fossil fuels. You also need to look at that very carefully, because you can generate some of them on site, depending on where you live. If you have land area, you can use solar and you can use geothermal.

You're absolutely right. You need to balance that. It cannot be universally applied, but you know that energy efficiency is job number one, because otherwise you'll need to supply too much renewable energy and that might affect your operating costs: what you pay for the solar panels or if you get electricity. It's that balance between.... At the end of the day, it comes down to cost. It comes down to cost for the best solution that suits your needs and gets you a low-carbon building.

[Martin Luymes]

I would echo that. The obvious answer we always give is that energy efficiency is the first fuel. That should be your first investment, the lowest-cost fuel type.

Even when we talk about some of our contractors in our industry promoting geothermal, their first focus—it isn't always this, but it should be—is to seal up the envelope. Draft-proof the building or the home, insulate it to the maximum possible, and then invest in this replacement lower-cost heating technology. You start with the envelope and then work towards the mechanical system, but clearly there are limits, and those are the costs. The answer to your question depends on the vintage of the housing stock and a whole lot of other variables. In an older home—

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

It's an old house, so it's hard to stop any of the draftiness in such an old house.

[Martin Luymes]

There are limits. The right answer might be to tear it down and replace it with a super high-efficient home.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Part of the difficulty, though, with ground-source heat is of course that it's a 60-amp system, and solar can't feed it, right?

[Thomas Mueller]

There you go. That's your answer right there. That's why efficiency is so important and your envelope is important, because you cannot possibly—I mean, it depends on how deep your pockets are—expect the same service immediately from renewable energy that you get from fossil fuels. It's a different type of energy.

Now, when we look at cities, we want to electrify everything. We want to electrify our buildings. We want to electrify transportation. That speaks directly to energy supply. When that energy needs to be used by everybody—because everybody's going to come home and turn on the lights and the heat, and plug in their electric vehicle—that's peak demand. That's what you have to manage. You have to really look at efficiency as way to, first, reduce the demand, and then you have to look at your best sources of renewable energy to reduce the carbon footprint.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Luymes, last week we had BOMA in, and they gave a great presentation on energy efficiency and all the rest, through the retrofit, which is important, but what's even more important is the operational piece of it once you've completed all that and the training that needs to go into that.

Of course, coming from the industry that you're in, you feed a big component of the operational, the smart building type of infrastructure that's available now. Can you comment on what BOMA had to say there?

[Martin Luymes]

We've promoted, through what I refer to as good industry practice.... I think someone else on the panel has talked about the building code really just being a fairly low floor. The simple fact of the matter is that, in Canada today, homes that are built to building code aren't particularly efficient by any measure and we don't even have a way of validating the performance of that home. We have been promoting for a number of years creating a standard for the commissioning of homes so that at the end of the process, once the home is built, someone will actually go in and verify that the air distribution system is actually working the way it's designed to work. That's a comfort issue, but also an efficiency, a performance issue. It's not currently done.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

It's being done for buildings or any other type of structure.

[Martin Luymes]

It's being done more in commercial buildings, but it's almost not at all—

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

But it's voluntary.

[Martin Luymes]

Exactly.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

It's not in the code itself.