Industry Committee on May 4th, 2021

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

When it comes to public buildings, and I'll use the example of school buildings across this country, in many cases, they seem to be quite old. Municipalities and school boards might need financial support to do that kind of work on them. Are there gaps along those lines or would you say it is uncertain at the moment?

[Mark Zacharias]

It's uncertain at the moment. There is a lot of evidence that building retrofits are high cost and have lower GHG benefits, on random.

There is an employment component that is very important to it. There is also a jobs and training component that's very important. Again, we'd be happy to follow up with you on that.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

With the remaining time I have, can you tell me where the key gaps would be? If you say “uncertain” as it relates to training and “uncertain“ as it relates to buildings, what is the missing piece in the healthy environment, healthy economy and the updated budget 2021 plan that builds on past work from the pan-Canadian framework? What is missing that we need to tackle going forward?

[Mark Zacharias]

Right now, transportation is 25% of Canada's emissions. They are going up as more Canadians buy larger and heavier vehicles. SUV sales are going up. There is an opportunity there first to look at light-duty vehicles. We believe there would be great value in having a light-duty vehicle sales mandate across Canada, much like they have in Quebec and B.C. That would be a huge first step.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Would this mean moving from a voluntary to a mandatory system?

[Mark Zacharias]

Yes, it would be much like California, most of the countries in Europe, British Columbia and Quebec have already done. It becomes mandatory. You would have sales targets that scale up over certain years.

The next move would be into the medium- and heavy-duty vehicle space. We move a lot of goods across Canada with fossil fuels and there are huge opportunities for electrification. California is also starting to lead North America in terms of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles.

Canada has the added advantage, potentially, of building them here. Zero-emission vehicles are already being built in Canada. More could be built. A mandate would help that.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

I was going to ask you what you might do to tackle the 26% that is oil and gas, but you have 15 seconds and I expect the answer will take a little longer than that.

I appreciate your comments and your time.

[Mark Zacharias]

That's great. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sherry Romanado]

Thank you very much.

That ends our third round for today. I know we are a little bit before time, but we've been really good on time today, so I'd like to thank all of our witnesses for being with us today. It was excellent testimony.

For the members, if you haven't had a chance, on Friday you received a working paper from the analysts, “A Mineral Intensive Future: Challenges and Opportunities for Canada”, which highlights a little bit of what we heard at the last meeting as well as this meeting. I highly recommend you give it a read. I think it will be very helpful with respect to this study.

With that, I want to thank the witnesses again for being with us, as well as our analysts, our clerk, our IT crew and, of course, our incredible translators, without whom we couldn't be doing what we're doing. Thank you, everyone, for an excellent meeting.

With that, the meeting is adjourned.