Evidence of meeting #95 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was buildings.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Director of Programs and Relations, Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Institute of Canada
We would look for a code-driven commissioning process and similarly for commercial buildings.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
Excellent. Sorry to cut you off. There's so much to say.
We have three minutes with Ms. Duncan.
NDP
Linda Duncan NDP Edmonton Strathcona, AB
I'm going to take things in a different direction, and it's back to Mr. Mueller because we had the pleasure of you appearing before our committee in, I think it was, 2012. You gave some very valuable testimony, and by the way, you spoke to LEED and we have not had LEED here.
What you testified to our committee was that large commercial landlords use pension funds to invest in buildings and the rates of return on those investments exceed 10%. A couple of years ago I met with the realtors association in Ottawa that actually leases the major commercial buildings, and they've shown a much greater demand for the buildings that have retrofitted and gone energy efficient.
Could you speak to this issue? I'm wondering if this is not a huge potential for the Infrastructure Bank. We keep thinking about building freeways, LRT, but given the potential for rate of return on investing in retrofitting commercial buildings, is there not huge opportunity there?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Green Building Council
I'm really glad you asked that question. There is, and that's why we're having the discussion, because pension funds across this country have been investing billions of dollars in green, energy-efficient buildings and so on, LEED, gold LEED, platinum buildings. Any new office building in Canada now is built to LEED gold or platinum because it generates return for the owner. For the pension funds, they have to be very conservative because they're generating pensions for municipal workers, for hospital workers, for nurses and so on, so they figured out that this is actually very good business.
That's why we suggested that, and are currently working with Infrastructure Ontario and with NRCan—we're actually holding a round table with Minister Carr at the end of this month—that the Infrastructure Bank would be very well positioned to underwrite investments like that into building retrofit, bundled building retrofits that are assessed consistently to achieve a certain level of performance, 20% to 40% ideally, that will generate a return for the investors and will generate a return for the owners.
NDP
Linda Duncan NDP Edmonton Strathcona, AB
We talk about affordability, too, so it's fine if we have a good income and we're going to retrofit a nice heritage house we own or we're going to build a new building.
What about the big demand and need for affordable and social housing? Don't you think we need to have guidelines or rules for that kind of housing?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Cement Association of Canada
I'll tackle that one because we're working with the City of Vancouver, the Province of B.C., because they're building 2,000 homes for homeless people. They're going down the road of wood modular homes.
We're trying to say you need to use a building material that's going to last for a long time, you're going to need to pair that building material with smart technologies like geothermal and solar, because the poorest people cannot afford the energy costs to live there, and you want to successfully integrate them back into society so that they move on, but the building is still there to serve someone else for the next 200 years as we work on a national housing strategy that housing is a right for everybody.
It's very important that we try, when we build homes for poor people, for the indigenous communities, to build homes that are very energy efficient and will last forever.
February 13th, 2018 / 12:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
We're going to end it at that point. Thank you so much. I know we have much more to say. What I wanted to say is that you've heard the questions. You heard what we're trying to get at. If you would like to send us any comments later, we would welcome them. If there's anything you'd like to add, or you didn't get a chance to chime in on a question that you'd really like to inform us on, we would love to hear that response. We have a short study period, so it would need to come in fairly quickly, but we would welcome it.
Thank you very much, all of you, and especially Landmark for just being on the phone. It's very difficult to do that, and we appreciate your being there and hanging in with us. I also want to congratulate you on your Order of Canada for the work you're doing.
Thanks, everybody, and we'll be back at this on Thursday.
The meeting is adjourned.
