Government Operations Committee on Nov. 27th, 2018

Evidence of meeting #155 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 departments.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

Greening Government Strategy

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Carolyne Blain Director General, Strategic Policy Sector, Acquisitions Branch, Department of Public Works and Government Services

Nick Xenos Executive Director, Centre for Greening Government, Treasury Board Secretariat

David Schwartz Director General, Commercial and Alternative Acquisitions Management Sector, Department of Public Works and Government Services

Gérard Deltell Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC

Jean Yip Scarborough—Agincourt, Lib.

Sarah Petrevan Senior Policy Advisor, Clean Energy Canada

Denis Leclerc Chairman of the Board and President and Chief Executive Officer, Écotech Québec, CanadaCleantech Alliance

Jean-François Béland Administrator and Vice-President, Corporate Affairs and Strategy, General Fusion, CanadaCleantech Alliance

4:05 p.m.

Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC

Gérard Deltell

You say that major efforts were made. How many individual bottles of water were purchased for the G7? I never buy water bottles. I may have bought three of them in my life, but that is because I am cheap and don't like wasting money. I don't see why I would pay for water when it is free. In addition, three-quarters of the bill cover transportation costs. I will stop my personal reflexion here, but let's be clear: everyone is for virtue, but everything has become suspect. By the way, that's fine.

I would like to come back to the relevant question asked by my colleague, Mr. Drouin, about assessing the environmental footprint of the vehicles you buy. Are you taking into account the fact that a vehicle manufactured in Asia must travel half the globe on a ship, one of the most polluting modes of transportation that currently exist? We could buy vehicles manufactured in Oshawa, a few kilometres from Toronto, the largest urban centre in Canada.

Do you assess the environmental footprint when you make that type of a purchase? Do you think about purchasing Canadian goods first, and then purchasing green goods?

4:05 p.m.

Director General, Commercial and Alternative Acquisitions Management Sector, Department of Public Works and Government Services

David Schwartz

I will answer, if that's okay with you.

When it comes to green vehicles, I want to say that we are making real progress. We are in charge of vehicle purchases and the deployment of procurement vehicles. During the 2017-2018 fiscal year, 4.1% of new vehicles purchased for the federal fleet were green. Now, at the end of November, two-thirds of the way through the 2018-2019 fiscal year, that percentage is at 15.96%. Our purchases of green vehicles went from 4% during the last fiscal year to 16% two-thirds of the way through the current year. We see that behaviours are changing, and the trend is there. I would say that this is supported by—

4:05 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski

Unfortunately, I have to interrupt now, Mr. Schwartz.

We'll go to Madam Murray, for five minutes, please.

4:05 p.m.

Liberal

Joyce Murray Liberal Vancouver Quadra, BC

Thank you.

I want to congratulate the witnesses for all the work they've done and the progress they've made in such a very short time. It's been impressive. I think fundamentally the reason everybody here is supportive of what you're doing is that it's about protecting and restoring the fundamental earth systems on which life depends, and our atmosphere is a big part of that.

I'm interested in learning more about the data and reporting. That was a key thing that shifted from pre-2016, with the centre for greening government. Before that, I believe, there was much less data and reporting.

Nick, could you talk about the progress on that? What was it like? How is it working now? How do you interact with entities that are not yet required to reduce but will be reporting? How do you see that step-by-step expansion of the scope of both emissions and reporting entities working?

4:10 p.m.

Executive Director, Centre for Greening Government, Treasury Board Secretariat

Nick Xenos

I think the number one thing is that we're disclosing it publicly now. Since the greening government strategy, we've disclosed emissions by department, by region and by fuel type publicly. It's all on Open Data on the website, so it's very clear how departments are doing and how we're doing overall.

That is available to see. We also annually request departments to report to us on their emissions and their fuel. We update that annually, which didn't exist before. Before we didn't have a good sense of where the emissions are publicly.

This is helpful, I think, for departments. The first thing is we make sure we track and measure everything we can so that we have a better sense of the metrics. We will also know where we should target our efforts. There are a few departments that have bigger footprints and so we can work more closely. One of the questions was as to how we work with departments. We can work bilaterally with those departments on their particular situation and their circumstances. The better numbers and metrics gives us focused interventions, if you will, so we know how much emissions are from electricity and heating, how much in each region, and how much by department so we can focus on the facilities and areas that we need to.

It also allows industry to better target their solutions. When industry.... I think you'll hear later from some of the Cleantech Alliance folks. They can look and say, “I have a certain solution. Which department should I be looking at? What region of the country should I be targeting?” It allows them to do a little bit more targeting of their products instead of just coming generally and understand how the government works across it.

4:10 p.m.

Liberal

Joyce Murray Liberal Vancouver Quadra, BC

Speaking of companies, can you give us examples of what the government is doing with this very, I think, organized and measurable approach to reducing emissions?

How is that affecting the broader economy of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such as the innovation and the companies that are trying to get things into the market that will be solutions? How does it ripple out into the economy?

4:10 p.m.

Executive Director, Centre for Greening Government, Treasury Board Secretariat

Nick Xenos

I think in several ways.

For example, I co-chair a community practice with the B.C. government, with all of the provinces and territories. We're learning from each other as well. Different jurisdictions are doing different things and we can learn from each other. Again, that sends a signal more broadly than just the federal government, but it's working with provincial governments and we're sharing and accelerating.

At our last community practice meeting we had the folks from the City of Vancouver present some of the things they're doing. Of course, with any federal facilities in Vancouver we want to partner with the city and the province.

There is industry, as well. We're talking to industry associations about the cases in which the federal government's asking for something, for example, the Canada Green Building Council, which is the LEED certification guys. We're working with them. They now have a zero carbon standard so you can be LEED gold in your building, but you can also be following their zero carbon standard.

They're interested, of course, in working with the federal government and understanding where we want to go and how we can work together, etc.

What I've seen in a lot of conferences and meetings is that industry is quite innovative and doing a lot of neat stuff. Really it's just us being clear on what we're requiring.