Human Resources Committee on Oct. 8th, 2024

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

With the remaining 10 seconds, I'm going to assume that because of these technologies, Habitat looks at that as an opportunity to get homes onto the market much faster and to provide people in need with real options when it comes to a home. That's the main advantage.

[Alana Lavoie]

That's it, absolutely.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Mr. Fragiskatos.

With that, we are suspending.

I have Ms. Zarrillo.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Mr. Chair, just before you suspend, witness Lapointe was just about to talk about employment insurance needing to be fixed, and I'd like to ask that the witness be allowed to send in a written statement about what needs to be fixed around employment insurance for construction workers.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Sure. Thank you, Madame Zarrillo. We will communicate that to the witness.

Clerk, with that, we'll suspend for a few moments while we transition to the next panel.

I want to thank all the panellists for appearing, both in the room in person and virtually, on this very interesting subject on housing.

We'll suspend for four minutes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Committee members, I call the meeting back to order.

We have transitioned to the second hour. We have two witnesses to welcome. They have been tested for sound, and we are okay to go.

I would like to introduce Patrick Chouinard, corporate citizenship, who is here by video conference.

For Habitat for Humanity Windsor-Essex, we have Fiona Coughlin, chief executive officer.

We'll begin with Mr. Chouinard for five minutes, please.

[Patrick Chouinard, Corporate Citizenship, Element5]

Thank you for the opportunity to appear today.

My name is Patrick Chouinard. I'm the founder of Element5. We are a large, highly automated mass timber manufacturer in St. Thomas, Ontario.

The IKEA effect has made its way to the construction industry. We manufacture buildings in our factory and ship them to construction sites where they are assembled quickly, efficiently and affordably, rather than being constructed in the traditional sense.

Despite Europe being 30 years ahead of us, Canada is incredibly well positioned to become the centre of the mass timber industry globally.

Four years ago, we turned our attention to addressing affordable housing. We thought that since we can manufacture buildings quickly, affordably and in volume, maybe we have at least part of the solution to Ontario's affordable housing crisis. In four years, we have delivered seven buildings in Kitchener, York Region, Hamilton, Toronto, Sudbury and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, ranging from 18 to 43 units and from two to eight storeys, providing supportive housing, temporary shelters and transition housing for single women, women with children, single men and indigenous women at risk of homelessness.

The affordable housing crisis is fundamentally a supply problem: Demand exceeds supply. Clearly, there are only two solutions to the problem, in my view: Curb demand by stifling growth, reducing immigration and limiting the number of foreign students, or enable growth by focusing on the supply side of the problem, investing in manufacturing and building housing quickly.

I agree with the housing motion. It refers to investing in homebuilding technologies and exploring emerging materials, construction methods, energy-efficient systems, and digital innovations.

The government has played a pivotal role in our success as a manufacturer and in our ability to supply housing affordably, provincially under the PC government and federally under the Liberal government. We have received significant grants from the Ontario provincial government to help fund our factory, create jobs and boost Canadian exports; however, 80% of the affordable housing projects we have delivered so far have been partly funded by the federal government's rapid housing initiative.

We are living proof of the value of private-public partnerships. By July 2025, we will employ over 170 people and will be North America's largest mass timber manufacturer. Most of our projects have been supportive housing, mainly because that's where we see the greatest need. None of those projects would have gone ahead without funding from the rapid housing initiative.

The technology that we're applying to supportive housing is also being applied to other forms of housing: market-rate housing, retirement homes, student residences, indigenous housing, hotels and beyond.

There are many things the government can be doing to foster this form of construction—too many to suggest in the five minutes allotted. Let me leave you with these few suggestions.

One is to invest in the supply side of the housing problem by investing in manufacturing, Canadian innovation, Canadian forestry, Canadian labour and Canadian industry leadership.

Second, municipal governments must abandon traditional procurement systems—in other words, the “design-bid-build“ tender process—and adopt a design-build approach, which fosters innovation.

Third, there's talk of the rapid housing initiative being expensive. We attribute most of our success in affordable housing to the federal government's rapid housing initiative.

Mass timber is important to Canada in many ways. Leverage it to achieve our national housing objectives. We're using it to build indigenous infrastructure and housing. Several primary sawmills from which we source our raw materials are partly indigenous-owned. Because of the thermal mass properties of mass timber, buildings perform better. We've just finished a six-storey version for CityHousing Hamilton that was designed to the passive house standard.

Use mass timber to hit our climate goals. When building with mass timber, we're systematically leveraging our forests' natural ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store carbon, ultimately in the form of these beautiful buildings.

Use mass timber to improve environment and occupant health and, lastly, invest in it to create jobs, build our forestry sector, boost Canadian exports and become global leaders in this emerging industry.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you.

Ms. Coughlin, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Fiona Coughlin, Chief Executive Officer, Habitat for Humanity Windsor-Essex]

My name is Fiona Coughlin, and I am the CEO of Habitat for Humanity in Windsor-Essex. We are an affiliate of Habitat for Humanity Canada, whom you heard from previously. We're basically the boots on the ground that get the houses built.

I've also built personally in Kenya, and I'll be building in Nepal later this year. While I was in Kenya, we learned about compressed soil blocks that were made of rammed earth. It was an innovative way to build houses using the limited resources in Kenya. That is core to what transformed my view on 3-D printing.

We took on a project, as I'm sure you've heard, that was initiated by Habitat for Humanity Canada in collaboration with our local University of Windsor, which has the largest structural engineering lab in the country, and a 3-D printer company. All were all seeking funding from CMHC. CMHC said they needed Habitat on this to make sure that the end result is affordable homes for people to live in.

We were successful in creating Canada's first 3-D printed homes that were permitted for residential use. There are lots of experimental builds that happen from time to time. If you're not working with your city officials, planners and builders, the end result is a structure that does not achieve occupancy. We were the first to achieve occupancy.

It was also the first multi-unit 3-D printed structure in North America. It was the first in North America that was built with concrete rather than a cementitious mortar. The concrete's slightly more environmentally friendly and structurally better. At the time of completion in 2022, it was the largest 3-D printed building in North America. We count this as a huge success.

I also noted that this committee is very interested in accessibility. One of the side benefits of taking on an innovative project was that local partners came out of the woodwork. Locally, we have a virtual reality cave that actually made a virtual reality model of the house before we even got it out of the ground. We tested a wheelchair through this virtual reality model, and it buzzed at you whenever you hit the walls. At the end of this project, we had four units in a self-contained home. The homes are fully accessible and net-zero ready, and they comply with all local planning and building regulations for residential use.

On the same site, our partners built modular construction. We found that our 3-D printed structures saved $5 per square foot, but we know that this is actually going to improve as projects like this scale up.

We also got from site plan to completion in seven months, and for those people who know anything about building, that's an incredible feat. A lot of people will chalk it up to 3-D printing being so fast, but I would say it was through the collaboration we built with our local municipality and the partners on the project that we got it done.

We're now researching and studying. At the exact same time as we built the house, we poured 3-D printed sample walls, and those samples are now being tested at the University of Windsor.

You can park 90 cars on these houses. If a tornado hits Leamington—or a hurricane, as is happening in the world right now—these houses will probably be the only ones left standing. We've had the houses in use for two years. As a builder, we have a Tarion warranty. Usually when people finish their first year, there are all kinds of deficiencies like nail pops and other things that they have to fix in the first year; there are no reported deficiencies in these houses.

The laboratory research is ongoing. There are some printed studies by Dr. Marcos Silveira on the sample components, but it's all very exciting.

We know that if we scale up, the printer costs can be spread out over more homes. If you think about a printer at home, instead of writing additional copies of something by hand, as we used to do, you now photocopy or you now print multiple copies. It's the exact same concept, but with houses. If you're using the same design over and over again, that's how you save money on these houses.

Our houses were also over-engineered, because we were trying to meet the building code that currently exists, and—

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Ms. Coughlin. You can conclude your comments in answer to questions.

[Fiona Coughlin]

Sure.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Now we will go to Mr. Aitchison.

You have six minutes.

[Scott Aitchison, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

Ms. Coughlin, I'll start by giving you a minute to finish your thought, if you don't mind.

[Fiona Coughlin]

I was just saying that we had to adapt to achieve the current building code, so we had to over-engineer the houses.

For example, on the houses, because of the way the code is written, you need to have fire separation on party walls between units. Common sense would tell you that concrete is a fire separation, but since no part of the code talks about 3-D printed concrete walls, we had to put out money to put fire separation drywall on top of the concrete walls.

That was just on the party walls, but these are the little things where, as the code improves and these technologies are accepted into the code, we'll be able to save money and time.

[Scott Aitchison, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

It's safe to say, then, that the code needs to maybe catch up to some of the innovations you're coming up with.

[Fiona Coughlin]

Absolutely, yes, that's right.

[Scott Aitchison, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

It sounds like an amazing collaboration with the University of Windsor and the city. As part of the collaboration with the city, did they assist with a piece of land for free, for example, or did they waive any of the fees, such as development charges and those kinds of things? Did they help in that way?

[Fiona Coughlin]

The land was actually provided by the Bridge Youth Resource Centre, which was another one of the partners. They already owned the land.

In terms of where the collaboration really came in, I listened to Kevin Lee talk earlier about municipal differences in how the building code and Planning Act are applied and how they work. We worked with the town of Leamington, because they have a really innovative mindset. We were meeting with them right out of the gate and talked about how important this project was. We had all hands on deck to make sure that this made it through. Building officials were out on the site regularly.

I think my point would be that if every project, every house, was approached with the same excitement that approached this 3-D printed home, we would be able to meet our housing targets. Things were streamlined from every level. Even in working with the innovation team at CMHC versus working with other areas of CMHC, everybody was so excited about this innovative project. They were working so hard to make it succeed. I find that when I'm building my traditional homes, you don't have that enthusiasm. The process is very bogged down.

Yes, 3-D printing is great, but I strongly attribute the success of this project to the collaboration we had with the town. That's what got this done and why it was done so fast.

[Scott Aitchison, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

That's an incredible story. I think the key word in all of that for me is “streamlined”. They streamlined the process and got it done. Everybody worked together and made it happen, which is amazing.

I'd like to switch to Mr. Chouinard for a moment.

Mass timber is a brilliant medium. I totally agree that we should be using a lot more of it. I appreciate your comments about using the rapid housing initiative through the CMHC. May I ask, though, about your dealings with the CMHC? We've heard mixed reviews about the CMHC and their ability to respond and the costs related to getting projects approved for funding. How has your experience been with the CMHC on your various projects?

[Patrick Chouinard]

First, I think without the CMHC, a lot of these projects would not have gone forward. However, it's true; we have had the same challenges in that it takes a long time for projects to be funded. That certainly doesn't facilitate the speed with which we're able to deliver our projects.

[Scott Aitchison, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

Okay. Thanks for that.

I'd like to ask you another question. I'm genuinely not sure about this. With mass timber, it's the lumber industry. Is there any impact on mass timber construction and the industry related to the softwood lumber tariffs that the Americans have in place? Does that impact the broader industry and make mass timber more expensive?

[Patrick Chouinard]

It doesn't, in that respect.

We are not selling softwood lumber in the U.S. market. We're selling a finished product that goes under a different category, so right now we are not impacted by that specifically.

However, the U.S. is starting to enact policies that promote American manufacturers over Canadian manufacturers or foreign manufacturers. We're affected by those laws and those policies, but not so much by the softwood lumber industry.

[Scott Aitchison, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

At the national level here, this is obviously one of those areas where we have some work to do to make sure we keep that market open to Canadian manufacturers.

[Patrick Chouinard]

Yes.

[Scott Aitchison, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

We only have 30 seconds left. I could take up all that time with a question, so I'll pass it on.

Thank you both for your time.