Evidence of meeting #130 for Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was industry.
A video is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Michael Coteau Liberal Don Valley East, ON
Thank you very much, Mr. Pascoe, and thank you for being here.
Did you start the company? Are you the founder as well?
Chief Commercial Officer, Flexobuild Incorporated
I'm one of the founders, yes.
Liberal
Michael Coteau Liberal Don Valley East, ON
What got you to this point where you decided one day that you're going to switch gears and go in this direction? What was the turning point for you?
Chief Commercial Officer, Flexobuild Incorporated
We discussed this among friends, of course. My co-founders are my friends. We were looking at how we could address this housing crisis. I don't mean from a business perspective, but just from an emotional aspect. Our largest inquiry base is from elderly people who live in very valuable homes in today's world. They used to be $100,000, and now they're about $1.5 million, or whatever it is. They're sitting on this equity. There are many methods of spending that equity or passing it down to their children. If they have a large enough backyard, they could build an ADU, as it was in our case. They can move in there, and the younger family, with grandchildren and so on, can move into the main house.
Chief Commercial Officer, Flexobuild Incorporated
Indeed. At some point, they're going to get the money.
Alternatively, of course, if they don't have a large enough backyard, they could sell their property, and their son or daughter may be able to add an ADU in their backyard. Just that emotional side of it, for me personally, I found very interesting. The speed with which we can develop empty ground to a finished building is very impressive. I'm from an engineering manufacturing background—not the construction industry, I stress—so I found the whole concept to be the product. That's the result, and it's done. There are no variables there.
Liberal
Michael Coteau Liberal Don Valley East, ON
I noticed on the website that there was one cost for the actual kit, and one cost for the construction. Is that correct?
Liberal
Michael Coteau Liberal Don Valley East, ON
Do people sometimes come in and say, “We just want the kit; we're going to build it ourselves?” Is it always a package that comes together? How does that work?
October 22nd, 2024 / 11:30 a.m.
Chief Commercial Officer, Flexobuild Incorporated
Flexobuild just supplies the kit itself. As you said, on the website, you have the two prices there.
Chief Commercial Officer, Flexobuild Incorporated
There's nothing worse than not finding prices on a website and having the daunting task of picking up the phone in this day and age. We wanted to make it as transparent as possible.
The second number there is a very good estimate of how much it would cost to employ a general contractor to install and finish the home in its entirety. No one cares how much the home kit is, because they're not construction people.
Chief Commercial Officer, Flexobuild Incorporated
We want to make that as transparent as possible. When you go to buy a car, it starts off at $45,000 and ends up at $70,000. No, ours starts and finishes with that number, and that's the whole point behind it.
Bloc
Louise Chabot Bloc Thérèse-De Blainville, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all the witnesses for being here.
Since the start of this study, we have seen that your sector is able to innovate. We know there has been a lot of innovation in the automotive sector, which is another important economic sector. Now we are seeing that in the residential, commercial and industrial construction sector.
I invited worker representatives from FTQ-Construction to appear as witnesses for this study. As you know, Quebec has its own characteristics, including the Régie du bâtiment du Québec, its building authority. The worker representatives made three very important points.
First, work has to be done with regard to skills. You talked about qualifications earlier. With your new models, including automation and robotics, there are challenges for workers. Secondly, attention has to be paid to workplace health and safety. Third, the culture or paradigm in the industry needs to change.
My question is for the three witnesses. What are the main challenges that your companies are facing with regard to the workers who contribute to construction and innovation?
Director of Engineering, Printerra 3D Construction Printing
Yes, that's a good question, especially when you start to use automation in construction. A 3-D printer is an automation system. It's a system that can deploy concrete or other material, but most of the time we are working with concrete. It can deploy concrete based on your 3-D model and, of course, the closed operation doesn't require too much human interaction when you're doing the printing itself, meaning that your workers are going to be far away from the concrete deployment itself when you're printing the deployment of the concrete.
I don't have any official research data to show here, but it is expected to improve the safety of the workers by using automation, as you're keeping them a little more busy with the automation side of things, the programming of the machines and operating the machines far away from the deployment of the material itself.
Executive Director, Canadian Roofing Contractors Association
When it comes to safety, there's nothing more important in non-residential construction than the safety of the workers, period, end of story. Safety adds to the bottom line. Safety is the culture of any organization. It's exceptionally important.
When it comes to the technologies and how they impact the workers going forward, our members see technology as a tool to enhance the efficiency, not just of the construction process but also of training the people.
We are constantly looking at our training. As we know, Red Seal in Canada is the recognized trade training across Canada. Roofing is a Red Seal trade. We have two associations in Canada that train at the Red Seal level in British Columbia and New Brunswick. British Columbia's is outstanding. They do an exceptional job.
The irony is, notwithstanding the technology that we're seeing advance and push industry from our manufacturers and others, the training you can get in British Columbia to be basically what we'd call a tinsmith back in the day still exists.
There is still necessary work to be done on a roof or a wall that will require a human to do something. Are we at a place in time where maybe there will be more robotics? There's a possibility that the answer is yes. There is some work being done by a professor at the University of British Columbia who is of the opinion that robots could go on a construction site right now. I don't know about that, but having said that, we don't see an outright replacement of workers with new technologies.
We do see, as my colleague mentioned, that there will be a need for different types of training of people, absolutely, but at the end of the day, you're still going to need someone like my son, who is a superintendent with a roofing company, to coordinate in advance the people to do the work that's required.
What you don't see, when you look at a job site, are the consultants and the engineers. You don't see the superintendents. You don't see the estimating that goes on prior to the job even getting started. There are a lot of professionals who do a lot of work, and, yes, they're using technology—they use artificial intelligence to help them do their job—but at the end of the day, the chief estimator still has to take responsibility for that work. Technology will make work more efficient, but will there be an outright replacement of people? We don't see that.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bobby Morrissey
Thank you, Ms. Chabot.
We'll now go to Madam Zarrillo for six minutes.
NDP
Bonita Zarrillo NDP Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I certainly have some questions for the witnesses, but before I do, I just want to recognize, Mr. Chair, that we experienced an atmospheric river in B.C. this past weekend. In my community of Coquitlam, a dearly beloved elementary school teacher died. Her home was swept away in the atmospheric river. Her name was Sonya McIntyre. I just want to recognize that today as we talk about housing and the need for safe, affordable, resilient housing.
I want to share with the panellists that, as a parliamentary committee and parliamentarians, we don't do operations. We do legislation and regulations.
I'm really interested in how the federal government can keep current and assist in getting affordable, accessible, climate-resilient housing built. I'm thinking right now specifically about remote and rural indigenous communities. We have an NDP member from Nunavut who talks a lot about the inability to get housing built quickly. I'm really interested in your knowledge, your skills and your experience around how we can access these remote communities and quickly get them housing that's going to be climate-resilient.
I'm going to ask everyone. Maybe I'll start with Mr. Pascoe, and then I'll go to Mr. Facette and then Mr. Silveira. You go to way more conferences than we do. You talk to way more people. I'm interested in what we need to know as legislators.
Chief Commercial Officer, Flexobuild Incorporated
Speaking from my experience with Flexobuild, building in a rural community is quite straightforward for us. Getting the product there is easy in the sense that, like I said before, it's a flat-packed, “panelized” product on a flatbed truck, so you can get to the site.
Having skilled labour on site, obviously, is required. That being said, Jim mentioned the Red Seal programs, and these need to be encouraged across our country for the construction industry, because you do need to have a good skill base to assemble our homes on-site.
Getting the products to rural sites or first nations sites in the outer reaches of Canada is not problematic for us, but it does require the skill base on site there to assemble our homes.
NDP
Bonita Zarrillo NDP Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
Thank you.
Maybe some investment in training and the ability to move—