Evidence of meeting #151 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was energy.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Again, it goes to my question about who is in charge, because if they're going out and buying—
Assistant Deputy Minister, Real Property Services, Department of Public Works and Government Services
My counterpart who runs the acquisitions and procurement services part of the organization has looked at 35 different commodities, and vehicles are certainly one of those commodities for which there are standing offers to purchase the type of vehicles you are mentioning.
For sure, that's available to departments, but ultimately, what departments decide to buy is a departmental decision.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Again, it goes to my question. We have this grand plan, but if departmental plans aren't committing to it, what is the point of spending so much taxpayers' money to create all of these great talking points. Someone can just turn around and say, “Well, I'm going to buy 631 cars” if a bunch of them are Nissan Rogues, which are small, tiny crossover utility vehicles whose job could easily have been done by a Prius or a Santa Fe hybrid. Again, it goes to my question, but I think I'm getting my answer.
In the short amount of time I have left, can you walk me through something? You've put in your departmental plans a 17% reduction of GHGs from buildings, which is great, and that's on top of 13% the year before, I think. Every year we're seeing good results from PSPC on that. Can you walk us through some of the ideas or the programs that we might be looking at to get to that 17% reduction?
Assistant Deputy Minister, Real Property Services, Department of Public Works and Government Services
Sure. As I mentioned earlier, one of the ways we're looking at doing this is by focusing on the 20% that are heavy emitters, which gets us the biggest bang for the buck in the investment side of it.
The other way of doing it is by looking at how we invest in real estate decisions a little bit differently. When we go forward and ask for permission from central agencies for major rehabilitation, you don't do those every 10 years. That is something you do maybe in the life of a particular building around every 40 years for an office tower, by way of example. What we do is to try to look at what the cost would be over a life cycle. I mentioned that we're adjusting our finances to an accrual-based budgeting methodology. That allows us to amortize investments over a longer period of time.
One of the ways we look at it is to look at what we could get to a LEED gold or silver standard. Then we'd take it to another GHG or net zero carbon-type facility, and then we look at a hybrid of the two from a cost analysis over a 25 or a 35-year period, depending on the asset.
What we're finding is that, for a small increase in initial capital cost, our predictions over the life cycle, which will have to be measured on the returns on investment, etc., can jump from, say, a 25% reduction in GHG to a 94% reduction in GHG with maybe about a 6% to 12% investment up front, and then—
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Do we have a sense of how many buildings we should maybe just sell or tear down because the cost to renovate them is going to be far too high for any possible return and we could be better off looking for other property?
Assistant Deputy Minister, Real Property Services, Department of Public Works and Government Services
Right now we own about 350-plus buildings, and we tier those assets based on a number of different criteria, but certainly greening capability, the ability to green that infrastructure, is one of those major factors that we look at in a future investment decision.
If a building that we look at is just impossible for us to rehabilitate.... Now, there are other factors around heritage, etc. that would have to be taken into consideration, balanced and weighed across those factors, but what we're finding is that we would move buildings that require a lot of investment, which are office towers that are available in the market, and would shed those assets or recommend that we dispose of those assets, but we don't make those decisions. We usually go to—
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
When you have them tiered, do you have a ballpark figure of how many are in the bottom tier?
Conservative
Jean Yip Scarborough—Agincourt, Lib.
Thank you for coming.
This question is for Mr. Xenos.
On page 2 of your remarks, what is meant by the life-cycle assessment principles in procurement policies and practices?
Executive Director, Centre for Greening Government, Treasury Board Secretariat
What we're trying to do is to take a life-cycle assessment of both the cost and the environmental impacts of anything we buy. For example, there is a certain cost to buying something, and then it will last a certain period of time. If you buy something, and it lasts 10 years, you may think about buying something better, which might be a little bit more expensive but lasts for 15 years, so you could do a cost assessment of that. You also want to look at the environmental impacts of those things.
You want to have a mix of best value, which includes the environmental impacts of that over the life cycle of a product, versus the cost of that product.
Scarborough—Agincourt, Lib.
Can you comment on how the integration of the sustainability and the life-cycle principles in the procurement policies is working, including in the government supply chain?
Executive Director, Centre for Greening Government, Treasury Board Secretariat
Sure. In procurement, what we focused on is the biggest areas of impact, for example, buildings, construction, and then fleet and energy.
Buildings are a good example. You take a life-cycle assessment of the building. What is the cost to build it? What is the cost to operate it? What's the cost of disposal or the full life-cycle cost? What are the environmental impacts throughout that? The commitment is to have net-zero carbon ready buildings, and low carbon for retrofits.
PSPC is a good example in that assessment. When they come forward to build or retrofit a building, they're looking at various options for what they can do and what the cost equation is for getting it to lower carbon. You determine what's cost neutral. What are all of cost-neutral things you can do to lower its carbon footprint, and what things might cost you a little bit more in capital, but make you money over the 30 or 40 year life-cycle of the building?
Buildings are a really good example of where we're first applying these principles, and we're pushing this because it is the biggest area that we buy.
Scarborough—Agincourt, Lib.
With respect to the greening strategy, is there any thought of your working with the provincial government, trying to reduce some of our costs?
Executive Director, Centre for Greening Government, Treasury Board Secretariat
Yes. One of the first things we did was to create a community of practice. With the B.C. government, I co-chair a community of practice of our federal and provincial counterparts. We share what each is doing in the buildings area, in the fleet area, in the procurement area and in adaptation.
We've produced a compendium of best practices in greening government, which is on the web and is a really good example of what different jurisdictions are doing in greening government and what the best practices are. If somebody were to start in any jurisdiction tomorrow, for example, they could look at this. It's almost a one-to-one in terms of what you can do in the buildings, fleet, adaptation, and procurement areas. The different provinces have different expertise in different areas, and we can collaborate in those areas.
Like my colleague, Mr. Radford, said, leasing is a really good example. We've been working together to develop green lease clauses for instance. We've also been in touch with cities like Vancouver, Toronto and so on. There are a lot of good examples where we can share and learn from each other, in terms of what everyone's doing.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
I'm going to take her one minute.
We were talking about inventory. In the past, we used to have all of our furniture and fixtures destroyed. It was a horrible thing to do, but with your constituency office, if you lost the election, that's what you did. I also find that you have a lot of real estate that has old furniture in it. How does that match with the greening government strategy?
Assistant Deputy Minister, Real Property Services, Department of Public Works and Government Services
We've started something called Government of Canada workplace solutions. I would invite you to come to see where I work. I've implemented that. I don't have an office. All of our environment is very modern, similar to this type of infrastructure. No one has an assigned seat. It's a balance of interactive space and autonomous space. People can put their heads down and work when they need to on a particular file, but we find that people don't work like that anymore. Work is something you do, not a place that you go.
I'd encourage this committee, if they would like, to visit our facilities. I could give you a tour. It's what a modern workplace could look like, and we're able to increase the capacity significantly and offer things like alternative working arrangements for people who work for us. The key is integrating your IT strategy, your HR strategy, and your real estate strategy on how people will work, and making sure that people have the tools.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Thank you very much, and thank you for the offer.
We will now go to our final intervention. It will be for three minutes by Mr. Blaikie.
NDP
Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB
I'd like to go back to the question on the vehicles that were purchased for the G7 summit, from the point of view of trying to get to the way you implement a plan like this.
I don't know whether it was Public Safety or somebody in the RCMP who did some of that procurement, but if I were the person who ultimately ended up charged with procuring those vehicles—we have an event, we've done the cost-benefit analysis, we think it's better to buy than it is to lease—is it up to me to know that there's a greening government strategy and to search my email? For example, I might say, I think I got something 10 months ago; maybe there are some best practices in there.
How do you make the link between the strategy you're devising for fleet management, for instance...? It would be great if vehicles were purchased that were part of a fleet renewal program, and then either you could use older vehicles in the fleet for the G7 and then get rid of those, or the new vehicles that you buy could then be integrated into the fleet and you could jettison some of the older vehicles that you wanted to jettison anyway.
How does that hook up, for the person who's in a department making those decisions? Or is it that we just issue an advisory and are really hoping that people are excited about it and remember it when the time comes?
Executive Director, Centre for Greening Government, Treasury Board Secretariat
No. We're working really closely with the acquisitions branch at PSPC, the vehicle purchase group, and we are looking at the various vehicles and classes of vehicles. In this particular case, it was national security-related. Obviously, there's a special consideration when they're national security-related vehicles.
With the RCMP, of course, we have ongoing discussions. We've actually had many discussions on their fleet and on what we do to green it.
NDP
Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB
If we were hosting a conference that didn't raise the same national security considerations the G7 summit did, how would the procurement process for those vehicles have looked different? What would have been different for the person doing the work?
Executive Director, Centre for Greening Government, Treasury Board Secretariat
We chair an interdepartmental committee of the fleet managers of the 23 fleet-managing departments that have fleets of more than 50 cars. We communicate the strategy, we communicate the way we're going to report on it, we communicate the way we're going to deal with particular challenges and different issues. Fleet managers will share their experiences. In that group, we also have the acquisitions branch of PSPC, which deals with vehicles. We definitely have that community and are working to be aware of any major purchases.