Evidence of meeting #48 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was building.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shannon Miedema
Thank you very much.
Finally, we will turn to Mr. Malette for five minutes, please.
Liberal
Chris Malette Liberal Bay of Quinte, ON
Thank you.
First, quickly, Mr. Dicaire, can we have you submit the study that you just referenced to the committee for our use?
Senior Manager, Conservation and Sustainability, Ottawa Community Housing
I would be thrilled to.
Liberal
Chris Malette Liberal Bay of Quinte, ON
Thank you. We would be thrilled to receive it. I appreciate that.
My first question is for Mr. Haley.
Mr. Haley, home energy labelling is sometimes compared to nutritional labelling because it makes energy performance visible to homeowners. How widely used are home energy labelling approaches in Canada today, and what evidence do we have that they influence consumer decisions or even reduce energy consumption as a result?
Senior Director of Policy Strategy, Efficiency Canada
In Canada, it's not very widespread. Under the EnerGuide system, when you had an audit done, you would get a label, and if you wanted to, you could stick it on your electric panel.
However, the key moment when you should understand the performance of a building is often when you're purchasing a building or you're purchasing a home. It should be part of the information you get. There's no province right now that is mandating that transparency when a home is sold.
Liberal
Chris Malette Liberal Bay of Quinte, ON
Is that something we could possibly consider? Would it be seen as usurping various jurisdictions?
Senior Director of Policy Strategy, Efficiency Canada
There was a promise to do this federally. I think it was a couple of mandates ago, and I'm trying to think of when, but the federal government had trouble finding the jurisdiction to do it.
Senior Director of Policy Strategy, Efficiency Canada
It has opted for trying to enable it by providing a common platform for things like virtual energy labels to happen. There are places I would look. It might be hard to mandate across the board, but CMHC provides mortgage insurance, and if you were to provide a mortgage insurance product, as you did that you could say that you should also have a label.
Again, through these platforms that I'm suggesting, we could also say that when someone gets a retrofit, we want to make sure there's a label and we want to make sure that label is available if someone were to purchase your house.
Liberal
Chris Malette Liberal Bay of Quinte, ON
You get one for your car.
Mr. Lockhart, what would it take to move Canada from individual retrofit projects to a permanent natural retrofit industry, in your estimation?
Director, Buildings, Pembina Institute
As mentioned, there are initial steps that we need to take, such as support for the deep retrofit accelerator initiative and the greener neighbourhoods pilot program, which are developing the mechanisms for how those projects get delivered but are also working through important challenges in things like panelization, the sweater around the building, that allows tenants to stay in place.
Those are good technologies. They've been proven in other countries. We have a slightly different building stock. It is not as homogenous, so demonstrating that those approaches work can help us reach scale.
The next challenge would be how we unlock private capital. How do we bring private capital into the retrofit equation? Largely, as mentioned, it is through things like PACE financing and clean tax building credits but also, and I think most importantly, by demonstrating that there is value beyond energy. It could be resilience or avoided losses. It could be the addition of things like distributed energy assets that allow buildings to participate as both generators and consumers of electricity. How do we achieve that?
Liberal
Chris Malette Liberal Bay of Quinte, ON
Mr. Lockhart, in your estimation, what is the biggest constraint currently to that strategy? Is it money, skilled labour, materials, contractor capacity, demand or a combination of the above?
Director, Buildings, Pembina Institute
A combination of the above is a good answer, but I will point to the regulatory path.
There is no mechanism to point to a performance standard for existing buildings. For new construction, at the time of construction we have the building code. If we had something like a building performance standard that set that threshold for performance across all the building sector, then behind that, finance, workforce, supply chain, manufacturers and more could all set a target and work through ways to meet that target.
Liberal
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shannon Miedema
Thank you very much, Mr. Malette.
That concludes our time with the witnesses.
Thank you very much to all three of you for being with us this afternoon. We really appreciate it.
Because we approved the motion by Mr. Bonin today on carbon capture and underground storage, it will be pretty important for us to get the list of witnesses as soon as possible if we want to start scheduling those meetings this fall. If possible, get your witnesses to the clerks by the end of the day on Thursday of this week, which is October 8. That would at least allow them to get going with the scheduling. That's the end of the day Thursday for witnesses for CCUS, if possible. That's perfect.
Our next meeting is on Thursday at 3:30 p.m.
We are adjourned.