Actually, I'm going to start. I'm the architect from L'Office de l'éclectisme urbain et fonctionnel. I'll present in English, but I certainly welcome questions in French.
It's a real honour to be invited here today.
Benny Farm was a project built in Montreal in 1946-47, just after the Second World War, with over 300 original units. Over the last 15 years, our firm, along with many social activists in Montreal, fought to recycle the buildings at Benny Farm. Today we're here representing Green Energy Benny Farm, which came out of that fight and is a partial success in recycling the project.
One hundred and forty units were renovated for affordable housing. A special strategy was put together as a pilot project, funded by the Green Municipal Fund, a very generous donation from many levels of government. This project was to be a pilot project to look at community energy services.
The lessons learned are quite vast and wide-ranging. Alex Hill, the project manager, who's been looking after the construction over the last few years, will talk about the details. I'm going to try to talk about the larger-scale issues.
The first issue is the lack of our projects across the country understanding the notion of resilience. Thomas Homer-Dixon, a well-known writer here in Canada, talks about the importance of dealing with the disastrous situations of the extremities of weather. Right now, the notion of having a central energy loop possibly allows a project, on its own, to be resilient against large disasters. So it's not simply a question of energy savings; it's a question of understanding not to count on grids and on transferring energy thousands and thousands of kilometres away.
This central energy loop has also a capacity to make sure projects always stay up to date. Right now, we don't have proper sources of energy such as hydrogen energy, let's say, and because of this, they cannot be added later on to projects that don't have a central loop. The majority of our projects have no resilience in order to be able to change as the technologies change.
One of the key components that we're learning lessons from, in Europe especially, in the concept of co-housing, a component very specifically related to housing, is that at some point, if a project's profits are taken out by an ESCO, an energy services company, then really long-term people, appropriators in the project, lose their connection to a project.
The perfect example is Benny Farm in Montreal versus Regent Park in Toronto. In Toronto, none or almost none of the units are being renovated in a project two and half times the size of Benny Farm, because no one could renovate the image of the project. At Benny Farm, because the veterans always stayed present, there was always a strong idea of the image of the project. Therefore, we can go in with technologies and modify it technically, but you have to understand the socio-cultural component as well.
Another important lesson learned is that affordable housing projects in Canada need more help on central district energy systems in the private market. As taxpayers, we pay for them when we put in short-term goals of energy systems that can't be retrofitted over time and when we don't understand the cost increases. When affordable housing is no longer affordable because energy costs are higher than inflation, then the people living in the project no longer can live in the project. By going to geothermal, to solar hot water, we're giving a notion of economic resilience to the people we're actually housing.
The other issue is that you can't simply look at energy. You must look at the air quality in the envelope. They go together. I think that right now there's an interest in moving energy, not understanding that our base budgets in affordable housing don't properly cover the envelope.
Finally, I think one of the key lessons is that everybody to date who I've seen present in front of this committee has talked about new construction and district energy systems in new construction. Benny Farm is an example of how to do it in renovated and new housing combined. If we're to count only on the new construction going forward, we will come nowhere near meeting our goals for greenhouse gas emissions across the country. We have to come up with strategies on how to partner different owners and get over the legal challenges that are related to this. That's probably one of the biggest problems we have.