Finance Committee on Oct. 12th, 2023

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, witnesses.

I guess my first question is for Mr. MacLean and Mr. Trent.

You mentioned to MP Blois that some of your eventual plan would come from offshore. When you do it offshore, that cable runs along the ocean bottom. Have you done any research in terms of the impacts on lobster and crab in the areas where you propose this happen?

[Trent Vichie]

I can begin.

I'll speak a bit about what is anecdotal around this. For example, there's a pipeline that was built from Nova Scotia out to the Sable fields. It has all of the types of issues that you would think of. I heard stories that, when they were doing the remediation, the fishermen actually didn't want it disturbed, because it created a great habitat for fishing, etc. This is just anecdotal and what I've heard from others. There's a lot of science around exactly these types of things from other fisheries around the world. My understanding, at least, is that it's very manageable and, in some cases, actually creates habitat for the fish that—

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

I'm not a scientist, but there is some sort of an electromagnetic field that can impact crustaceans and their migration patterns. Also, there are usually limits on allowing fixed gear to be placed anywhere near that, which then restricts fishing ability.

[Trent Vichie]

I think that's a fair comment. I'm probably a bit out of my field of expertise on that. I'm just sharing with you what I've heard.

What I can tell you is that there is a very large industry of offshore wind in Europe, where you could go and get data. I'd be happy to go and get data.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

I would encourage you to do so and to consult with the fishing groups, because the ones on the eastern shore of Nova Scotia are not thrilled with the plan right now. They have only a two-month lobster season, and you may be ending their ability to earn a living with what's being proposed now. I would encourage you to make sure it's done in a way that does not prohibit that from happening.

[Trent Vichie]

To be clear, we support the industry. We're focusing on onshore first. I believe in doing things systematically, but that's a fair point.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Mr. Kabalen, my understanding, from people who do development in the HRM, the Halifax area, is that when you put together all the building permits and the infrastructure costs the city charges, etc., if it's an individual residential unit, it's $150,000 per unit on average in HRM costs before you get going.

I don't know if that's been your experience. If it has been, how do you make something affordable when the municipality charges $150,000 in fees?

[Michael Kabalen]

I think the government's share, including federal and provincial taxes, is about 35% to 40% for market housing. It's a form of tax—other fees or taxes. I think we need to recalculate that since the discussion around HST waiving has come on. That's a number that came out of CBRE, which is a local firm that has a lot of expertise in this. I would say that number has gone down considerably since the recent announcements.

The HRM fees are actually less than Mississauga's or Toronto's. It's a talking point for developers, but they are lower.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

That's not the standard. For multiresidential units in Toronto—that's over four units—the building permit alone is $60,000 per unit, so I wouldn't hold Toronto up as the model of how to reduce the cost of developing affordable housing.

Four in 10 Canadians are relying on assistance from friends to help pay their bills. Four in 10 Canadians who rent say their finances are poor to terrible. We know from multiple surveys over the last few years that 50% of Canadians are living paycheque to paycheque. They're one paycheque away, I guess, from being on your list.

Have you seen more and more of that increase over the last three years, primarily caused, as you said, by most of the folks on the list now not having...?

[Michael Kabalen]

High acuity.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Yes. They do not have that. They have economic circumstances such as lost jobs and increased costs that have caused it.

Are you seeing those as the primary issues? Are you seeing people coming directly from owning a house to losing that house and being homeless because they can't find rental housing?

[Michael Kabalen]

Most of the people coming in on the data were renting and lost that rental, or when a relationship broke down, they could typically find another piece of housing, but because of the cost and the availability, they're now less likely to find it. That's what's happening.

I don't think you're seeing homeowners necessarily yet. I think the recent interest rate increases are starting to take effect only now, so we may see more of that. That's anecdotal, but as it stands now, the renters are going to feel the shock first, and then we'll see what happens with homeowners in the next eight months as the interest rates pick up.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, MP Perkins.

Now we go to MP Thompson, please.

[Joanne Thompson, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you.

For clarity, I'm the member of Parliament for St. John's East in Newfoundland and Labrador. I'm so pleased to be here as part of this Atlantic conversation.

Welcome to all the witnesses.

If I could just make a quick note, the accelerator fund was introduced in March 2023, and the application process ended in June 2023. I'm pleased to say that in September, London, Ontario, was awarded 2,000 units. I wanted to start on that note to say that number is really where we need to be in terms of looking at our housing challenges.

Mr. Kabalen, I'll begin with you. Thank you for the work you're doing. It's really quite tremendous. However, if we have a crisis situation, and we know that we do, I think we need to look at our housing needs along that continuum. I spoke about this briefly yesterday.

From that entry point to the place in the market where the housing needs need to be market-driven, in their understanding you need supportive housing. You need to have affordable housing. You need rentals. You need all players at the table, including the universities—I'll link you into this—because it's all interconnected.

How do we begin to break down those silos—the levels of government and the community—to max out and quantify what the need is along that continuum, so that when we roll out solutions like the project in London, Ontario, which is significant, we're able to do that?

I can tell you that in my riding, zoning approval is an issue for larger projects. It's over to you on that, please.

[Michael Kabalen]

The housing system is messy, isn't it? You have homelessness and shelters. You have the people who are homeless and it goes all the all the way up to the “big REITs”, which still only represent less than 20% of the whole housing system. It's a lot of small players, whether not-for-profits or the private sector. It's really hard to bring everyone together. I think the intention is that the policies incentivize people to work.

Your first question, I think, was on how you map it. It's already been mapped. We know where different solutions are needed. I think the “by name list” is intended to serve people all the way from homelessness into supportive housing. We're very focused on that. We have a community organized around there. We're investing federal dollars through Reaching Home, on your behalf, to resolve that.

The challenge is resources. There's not enough being invested. In Halifax, or in rural and remote Nova Scotia anyway, it's not that we don't know what we need to invest in. It's that we don't have enough to make the material impact to house those 745 people who have been homeless for the last six months.

I think we like to dehumanize homeless individuals as well, but when we do our work, we talk about how we need to see their faces. We need to remember who they are. Most of the folks are not what you think. They're not stereotypically there because of their choice. They're there because life has been tough on them. They've fallen into homelessness.

To answer your question, we know what we need to do. It's about resources and it's about the speed with which we can deploy those resources.

[Joanne Thompson, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you. I really appreciate your comments.

Perhaps I could quickly turn to Mr. MacLean and Mr. Vichie.

Could you speak in a little more detail about hydrogen storage? How does that storage really allow for the ongoing capacity? How does it fit into the picture of greening the economy? Where are we in our capacity for significant amounts of storage?

[Paul MacLean]

I'm actually happy to comment on it. It's the third leg of the stool that's often ignored. Electrolysis and ammonia production seem to captivate attention.

We're pursuing a number of storage strategies almost as a portfolio to offset the variability of wind production, including battery storage, as Trent referenced earlier. We're also looking at the potential in the long term for long-term thermal storage and other opportunities.

We're also trying to develop underground salt cavern storage for hydrogen in the area. We're blessed in Cape Breton. We not only have access to fresh water for our projects; we also have significant salt deposits directly in the region that would allow us to store large volumes of hydrogen, which is very important for the opportunity to offset that variability of wind production.

Believe it or not, in Newfoundland and Cape Breton the wind doesn't always blow. It's important to have storage as backup.

[Trent Vichie]

I have a few other things I've learned along the journey here. There are ways you can manage through that. Hydrogen is tricky to store. It's a very light element, and in heavy air pressure it takes a lot of energy to liquefy it and so on.

I've picked up along the way that if you are making hydrogen, for example, and then green ammonia, ammonia can actually be used quite effectively in a combustion turbine. You can be storing it and also providing peak load. There are companies in Japan that have been doing that. It's actually easier to combust than hydrogen. Hydrogen burns so hot that it melts the injectors. A lot can be learned there on that front.

There's also just the outright design and how you design things. If you use a better spread of catalysts, you can actually manage pretty easily through the flow of those things. We're certainly very keenly aware of that. Even with pipelines themselves, we'll get to good answers on that front. We are very focused on that.

There's one other thing. You didn't ask a question on this, but as we do a transition, where, for example, you transport.... Take renewable diesel. That is something we can do today. Sitting with our facility, where we have 7.5 million barrels of storage, we'd like to try to bring in renewable diesel so that at least we can get it from a 100% CO2 impact down to 20%. It's not a permanent solution, but we have the assets there and we're working on it.

This is a holistic solution. It's going to take time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, MP Thompson. That is our time.

Before we suspend and transition to our second panel, we want to thank our first panel of witnesses. You've been excellent. We've talked about energy, housing, academia and our universities and colleges. This will help inform our study and our report that's done in advance of the 2024 budget. Thank you on behalf of the committee.

We're suspended.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Members and witnesses, we're going to get started.

We just heard from our first panel, and now we're on to our second panel on our cross-country tour on the pre-budget consultations. We're here in the Atlantic provinces. We've been to P.E.I. and New Brunswick. We're in Nova Scotia now, and from here we're headed to Newfoundland.

We're delighted to be here in beautiful Halifax.

With us today as witnesses, we have, as an individual, Norman Nahas; Nourish Nova Scotia, with Lisa Roberts, executive director, and Lindsay Corbin, coordinator of the Nova Scotia chapter of the Coalition for Healthy School Food; Nova Scotia Community College, with president Donald Bureaux; and from Syria-Antigonish Families Embrace, retired school board superintendent Jack Beaton.

Welcome, everybody. We are going to our opening statements.

We are going to start with Ms. Lisa Roberts from Nourish Nova Scotia.

[Lisa Roberts, Executive Director, Nourish Nova Scotia]

Thank you so much for this opportunity.

Nourish is a provincial non-profit and registered charity that partners with schools and communities to promote the healthy nourishment of children and youth so they can live, learn and play.

Over the last 10 years, we have been instrumental in extending universal and healthy daily breakfast programs to most public schools in Nova Scotia, but in the current context of dramatic increases in housing costs and food inflation, we know that school lunch is needed to improve attendance, behaviour, students’ ability to focus and learn, and their sense of belonging in their schools. It is past time that the promise of a pan-Canadian school food policy and investment be made good.

I will share just one brief story from our work with a school that serves a community of diverse but predominantly lower-income families. We partner with community organizations around the school to help the school provide food access to improve the quantity and quality of their contributions. This is a school that doesn't have a kitchen or a cafeteria. Most schools in the Halifax region do not.

A local restaurant owner is willing to cook lunch each week for about 150 students for the cost of the ingredients—about $1.50 a portion—but the school administration is not confident that they’ll have enough budget for breakfasts for the school year, so they can’t authorize spending on a low-cost “from scratch” healthy lunch. A federal investment in school food could be transformational, and our kids deserve it.

Nourish is a founding member of the Coalition for Healthy School Food, and I’m glad to turn the rest of my time over to Lindsay Corbin.

[Lindsay Corbin, Coordinator, Nova Scotia Chapter, Coalition for Healthy School Food, Nourish Nova Scotia]

Good morning.

As you may know, Canada lags behind as the only G7 country without a national school food program.

The Coalition for Healthy School Food is a Canada-wide, non-partisan network with more than 270 non-profit organizations and over 130 endorsers. We advocate for public investment in a universal, cost-shared nutritious school meal program with consistent standards.

The coalition has consulted widely with members, supporters and stakeholders to develop its pre-budget submission, which your committee would have received, but today I would like to focus on Nova Scotia's needs and our readiness to work with the federal government to implement such a program.

Based on new data, we know that one in four children under 18 in the 10 provinces lives in a food-insecure household. These rates increased 27% from 2021 to 2022. Families in Nova Scotia are especially affected. A recent report from Food Banks Canada gave Nova Scotia an F on poverty and food insecurity. We are the only province to receive this grade.

Inflation and affordability pressures mean that more and more children don't have access to nutritious food at home. However, we also know that school meals can take the pressure off household budgets. One study found that grocery bills could decline by as much as 19% for families with two children if they participated in a universal program.

School food programs have strong support from the majority of Canadians. A recent Breakfast Club of Canada omnibus survey found that 84% of Canadians want a national school food program, and 77% are upset and disappointed in the government's inaction.

I recently had the opportunity to reach out to Nova Scotia's Minister of Education, the Honourable Becky Druhan regarding this issue. She has written an excellent letter to Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland expressing her province's readiness to partner with the federal government to work towards a national nutritious school meal program. She states that, apart from the nutritional value, programs provide students with opportunities for nutrition education and leadership and a chance to connect with friends, classmates, teachers and volunteers. Federal funding would have a positive impact in addressing system challenges and expanding offerings to children and youth, such as a healthy lunch program.

Nourish Nova Scotia and the Coalition for Healthy School Food call on the Government of Canada to include a minimum of $1 billion over five years, starting in budget 2024, to establish a national nutritious school meal program as a key element of the food policy for Canada. This $200 million per year would be allocated to provinces, territories and first nations, Inuit and Métis partners to fund their school food programs. This would match the approximately $200 million already being invested by provinces and territories and provide much-needed nourishment to support children to live, learn, play and reach their full potential.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Ms. Corbin and Ms. Roberts.

Now we're going to hear, as an individual, from Mr. Norman Nahas.

[Norman Nahas, As an Individual]

Good morning. Thank you. Welcome to Halifax, all of you who don't reside here.

My name is Norman Nahas. I'm an engineer by profession. I'm involved in the food and beverage industry and also in the construction industry. As well, I head up the Lebanese Chamber of Commerce in Nova Scotia. It's quite interesting to be sitting beside Mr. Jack Beaton, who heads up the Syria-Antigonish Families Embrace association at the other end of the province.

As an association, we believe in entrepreneurialism and removing roadblocks to enable business to thrive, because that in itself will allow for employment and the additional tax base to help fund many of the great things that are being proposed here today and across the country.

When it comes down to development in Halifax, we have a housing crisis, which is similar to those across the country. We aren't immune to any of these things that are happening. We've been big advocates for removing roadblocks, enabling development to happen and supporting those who are willing to take the risk to build—especially in uncertain times, with interest rate creep and the lack of tradespeople, which is a big problem here. I know there's a big announcement coming in 11 minutes, which we're all looking forward to hearing, but we still need to continue to incentivize and promote entrepreneurialism and development. At the end of the day, that is the only way the housing issue is going to be taken care of, because I don't believe we can rely on government to take it upon itself to fix every issue that's in front of us, especially the housing one.

I was born and raised here. My father came to Pier 21 on a boat in 1967 and married a local lady, my mother. I'm the product of a Canadian and Lebanese put together. I'm a proud Canadian. I'm also proud of my heritage and lineage, but I believe we need to continue to promote an entrepreneurial spirit and enable that to thrive so that employment can get more in check and the other issues we need to fund will be helped along the way as well.

That's it for opening statements. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Mr. Nahas.

Now we'll go to the Nova Scotia Community College. We have its president, Donald Bureaux.

Please, go ahead.