I'll take us back to the study, which is housing innovation and how the government can assist both public and private partners with incentivizing new supply and getting us the units that we need to get us out of this housing crisis.

Mr. Pascoe, I'll start with you.

I've always found, through my time representing my constituents at two levels of government, that when all three levels of government work together, we find a greater success in whatever problem we're trying to tackle. In this instance, it's housing. We could certainly sit around the table today and call out municipalities and mayors across the country who we feel maybe aren't doing their part. However, that doesn't get us any further along the way in terms of getting us new supply and driving innovation in the housing sector.

Our government's taken a bit of a different approach. We created the housing accelerator fund, which speaks to many of the issues that you raised in terms of the delays there can be in the municipal process. We don't control municipalities. They fall under the jurisdiction of the provincial and territorial governments. However, we do play a role in the housing sector.

The housing accelerator fund seeks to incentivize municipalities to change the way they do business in terms of possibly creating a red-carpet process to incentivize new supply.

I know that in your area of the country, the City of St. Catharines has created a grant process for accessory dwelling units. They're using federal resources to provide those grants to your customers.

How do programs like that, along with those grants and the incentives, assist in terms of driving customers through your facility or to your door, and also how do they help in terms of driving innovation in your plant and in the industry?

12:10 p.m.

Chief Commercial Officer, Flexobuild Incorporated

Daniel Pascoe

Certainly, we've had direct involvement in the housing accelerator fund, in the sense that St. Catharines was awarded some $24 million, I believe—don't quote me on that—to offer homeowners who want to put an ADU in their backyard up to $80,000. This is tremendous. It's absolutely fantastic. We're quite close to St. Catharines. Since then, we've had numerous inquiries. We're very active right now in the building process for those ADUs.

However, if I had to criticize the fund—this is based on my personal knowledge—St. Catharines has $80,000 to give out until the pot is empty. That is fine. It has to empty sooner or later. It has to end. However, neighbouring municipalities like Thorold, Pelham and so on get nothing. Rather than giving it to an individual municipality, I think a regional approach could possibly be much more effective. I can say that Thorold, which is quite near St. Catharines, has a much higher ADU uptake per head of population than St. Catharines, but they receive nothing.

Although the housing accelerator fund is excellent, obviously, a better understanding of how it could be distributed would certainly be more effective.

12:10 p.m.

Liberal

Chad Collins Liberal Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON

That's a great recommendation for the study.

There is some question, of course, about next year, because different governments have different priorities. There'll be some question as to whether programs like that should stick around.

Can you provide recommendations on how the federal government can further incentivize or expand upon, as you just referenced, the current programs we have?

12:10 p.m.

Chief Commercial Officer, Flexobuild Incorporated

Daniel Pascoe

Absolutely.

I keep coming back to tradespeople. You know, we can give out money left, right and centre, to be perfectly honest. “Here's all the money in the world.” However, if you have no one to build them, that's when it stops. Again, the incentivization of apprentices in the Red Seal trades, or of the employers of those apprentices, is something that should be discussed at some level to at least acknowledge it is problematic.

It's not because people don't want to go into the trades. It's because the jobs may not be there when they finish their training.

12:10 p.m.

Liberal

Chad Collins Liberal Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON

Mr. Silveira, I attended York University to see what you have, in terms of the program you offer and some of the innovation you're driving on site.

One of the questions I have is this: How do we bridge the gap between the innovation you're driving—your process—and the traditional homebuilders who have their own blueprint that's worked for many decades? Some of those processes haven't changed for almost 100 years. They're doing things today the same way they may have done them decades ago.

How do you introduce your innovation to the industry, when some might feel a bit of discomfort adopting that as the new way of doing business in their realm, municipality or part of the country?

12:10 p.m.

Director of Engineering, Printerra 3D Construction Printing

Dr. Marcos Silveira

It comes down to two components: training and research.

In order to better know about the technology, we have to invest in research. We need to have a guided research plan in order to identify the gaps we have from the industry side of things. In the industry, we're going to see exactly what the gaps are. That covers research. Then, the research data are going to inform the development of standards, which is a very important component for the large-scale adoption of additive construction as a whole.

The second and probably most important one is training. You need to have the available workforce. I already said that the available workforce is hard to find. Everyone agrees on that, at least most of us here. The available workforce is already decreasing. Training the tradespeople who are already in the industry, especially the concrete industry, for example, is going to be much easier than training people from outside the industry. This applies to the robotics industry as well. The auto industry uses a lot of robots already, so getting those people and bringing them into construction is something we also see as possible.