Government Operations Committee on Nov. 6th, 2018

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Did I hear correctly that it was 57 electrical vehicle charging outlets that we've installed? Was that through PSPC?

[Kevin Radford]

Yes.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

How many cars are those 57 servicing? How much was the cost to install those? Do you know?

[Kevin Radford]

I don't know that offhand—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Do you know how many cars they're servicing?

[Kevin Radford]

Sorry?

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

How many cars?

[Kevin Radford]

On how many cars, I don't know offhand the number of vehicles, but certainly one part of our efforts is to move to electric vehicles. We can find out for you.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Yes, please do, if you don't mind getting back to us.

[Kevin Radford]

Okay.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

We've heard that DND, of course, is the largest emitter. We tried to have DND included in this study, but our government friends here actually blocked that.

Who is overseeing the reduction from the government side for DND on their reductions? I looked at the departmental plan. It's not mentioned once, yet we see that they are by far the largest emitter. Who's coordinating that? Is it just left solely to them?

[Nick Xenos]

No. We're working very closely with DND as the biggest emitter. They're on my speed-dial, if you wish.

They have an energy and environment strategy. Also, if you look at their strong, secure and engaged defence strategy, you'll see a lot in there on carbon reduction. Again, the DND energy and environment strategy is on the web. It has a long outline of the projects and the plans they have to reduce emissions. It includes many different things, including energy efficiency projects, buying renewable energy and greening fleets.

There's a long list of what they're doing. They're hiring energy managers at the different bases to look at where they can get savings from better tracking their energy use and where they can use less energy in getting better metrics. They have quite a bit in there, including their heat plant upgrades, etc.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Okay. I'm out of time. Thanks.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much.

We will now go to Madam Ratansi for five minutes, please.

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

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

I just want to confirm with the environmental commissioner—I was going to say “the Auditor General”, but you're not the Auditor General—that you have not done an audit of the greening of government. Is that correct? That's because it's a new program. This program is new and you have not touched it, but you have given some suggestions, and I think that would be applicable throughout if somebody took on a new program.

My question is for the Treasury Board, perhaps. What sorts of challenges have you faced or are you facing in terms of implementing this greening strategy and what have you done to mitigate that? I think the Auditor General's office has given us some very interesting venues in which to mitigate risks and do adaptation. I'm wondering whether you have taken those things into consideration.

[Nick Xenos]

The first challenge that we found was that we wanted departments to take a whole-of-department view on the most cost-effective and most impactful actions by first getting a good sense of the metrics, a good sense of where the emissions are per department, and then what actions they can take.

Usually, it's like three buckets of goods.

One is what spaces you don't need. As Mr. Radford said, if there's a floor or a building that you don't need, then you can consolidate or operate differently, and you don't need to heat and cool it. There's that component. The second component is how you make the buildings that you have as energy efficient as possible. The third is how you fuel-switch if there are still remaining carbon emissions and costing that out and getting a sense of what actions you can take.

As opposed to taking individual actions, what you can do is take a comprehensive approach to where your best emissions and impacts are. Departments are working on that in that kind of an approach, where they're looking at the whole of their portfolio. Mr. Radford talked about the work at PSPC.

The second thing, then, is that there are things like aging buildings and aging infrastructure. That's where we're looking at it over the next 30 years and saying, “Okay, what's our real property plan?” Then, how do you integrate that analysis into the real property plan so that when you do a retrofit you're thinking of these things, as opposed to having to redo the retrofit a second time? It's really integrating it there, I think, generally.

The other thing is that different departments are at different places. Some of the larger departments have more expertise and some of the smaller departments have less expertise, and then it's about sharing best practices and expertise from expert departments that have a lot of knowledge, buildings and fleets, etc., with departments that are working in a different area or have a smaller footprint. We're also sharing practices with the provinces, for example, and other partners.

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

In terms of the PSPC, you have buildings that the government owns and buildings that it leases. How do you ensure that both are following the strategy? Is there an educational component that you have to put into place? Are there people who are resistant to change? Normal...?

We call you the “permanent workers”, and we call ourselves the “temporary workers”, so how will you ensure that strategy is sustainable?

[Kevin Radford]

Thanks for the question. I think we need to lead by example.

One of the questions I was asked earlier was about a Pareto type of approach. When we did our Energy Star ratings on all of our owned assets, we found that about 20% of our facilities were actually contributing about 80% of the GHGs, so that allowed us to take our capital program and refocus it on that 20% of the heavy emitters, etc., and to develop and learn from those programs that we were putting in place and apply them to the rest of the owned environment.

In the leasing environment, it is a little different. We need to work with the markets in the various urban centres. About 56% of public servants reside in the national capital area, and about 44% are out in urban centres. About 80% of public servants are in the eight other major centres, Calgary, Edmonton, etc., if you go east to west, and the markets are very different in those locations. Vancouver and Toronto are very different from, say, Halifax.

Our approach on the leasing environment is to work very closely with the landlord community to show and demonstrate in an open way the work we're doing on our owned inventory and to try to work with them on introducing some clauses into our leases such that we will give preferential treatment to leasing organizations that are actually taking steps forward around infrastructure. That's the approach we're taking.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much.

Mr. McCauley, you have five minutes.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

That was a good question, Ms. Ratansi.

Mr. Xenos, who from DND would be the best person to appear before us to chat about their efforts, assuming we'll be allowed to do it?

[Nick Xenos]

The ADM of infrastructure and environment would be my counterpart.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Okay. Thank you.

Maybe this is for Mr. Radford, because it's regarding PSPC.

Of the 631 cars the government bought for the G7 meetings—of course, that's been mentioned in the newspapers—only 51 of them could be repurposed. Is that because we bought 631 that weren't—

[Kevin Radford]

As the the real estate guy, I wasn't really heavily engaged in the G7 procurement activity, but I can reach into our department and find out some information for—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Do we have directives when we are buying cars on a temporary basis that they should be either EV or like a Prius so they fit within the government plan?

[Kevin Radford]

Certainly—