Evidence of meeting #12 for Natural Resources in the 40th Parliament, 2nd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was communities.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
David Anderson Conservative Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK
Have you any comment on the rural communities?
Consultant, M.K. Jaccard and Associates Inc.
Chris mentioned energy cascading. The integrated energy isn't about the same kind of integrated energy in every community, so the rural example would be cascading with local agriculture. There is energy opportunity in local agriculture. Whereas in a city with a light industry you might get heat from a factory, with agriculture you could use animal waste or other products to generate energy and create fuels. In a large city you would have nodes with a large-capacity public transit. That wouldn't be a part of the solution in a small community, so there are aspects of it that apply.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Leon Benoit
Thank you, Mr. Joshi. Thank you, Mr. Anderson and Mr. Hiebert.
I go to the official opposition for five minutes, to Mr. Val...?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Leon Benoit
Chariot, Valeriote. Okay, I've got it. Thank you.
Go ahead, for up to five minutes.
Liberal
Frank Valeriote Liberal Guelph, ON
I come from the community of Guelph. We've adopted what we call the “community energy plan”, and we're very proud of it. Some of you are nodding, to suggest that you might be aware of it. We're tapping into methane from former dump sites. We're planning on harnessing heat that's otherwise lost into the atmosphere at the Owens Corning plant and pumping it to other industry or housing. Better transportation programs...all of those things that I know you know are necessary to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. We're taking our lead from communities in Europe, Scandinavian countries.
From my understanding of the issue, and indeed, following Places to Grow, the Ontario program, in fact intensification--to allay Mr. Hiebert's concerns—leads to less crime, increased efficiencies, more jobs, fewer greenhouse gases. That's my impression.
First of all, is my impression, or that premise, correct? And how do you assess the energy performance of Canadian communities in comparison to those of Europe? Is it something we should be afraid of? Should we be afraid to pursue those models?
I'd like to ask all three of you, starting, perhaps, with Mr. Bataille.
Director, M.K. Jaccard and Associates Inc.
I think you want an urban planning expert here, to be honest, to answer that.
I'm an energy economist. I can see the benefits when you run your models--what happens to personal kilometres travelled in transportation, what happens to energy burn in buildings. But running good cities, you want good urban planning experts, and there are people who know how to do this. There's been a revolution in this in terms of having multi-use, lots of people, eyes on the street, that kind of thing. But I'm speaking totally from a layperson's perspective.
Professor, Université Laval and Imperial College London, As an Individual
Incidentally, Mr. Hiebert, I live in a rural community with a population of 1,100 people, and I would like to emphasize what Mr. Joshi has said about the possibility of doing some very intelligent energy efficient things even if you're in a small community. It doesn't mean that you will have, perhaps, as many systems working in tandem, and you won't have a lot of buses, but by golly, my extended family—and maybe it's a good thing I married into a big Quebec family: the carpooling logistics are incredible.
But to come back to your question, sir, I think it's a little bit false to make a direct comparison between Canadian communities and European communities that have centuries of fairly organic development under very different sorts of constraints.
As I said earlier, I think we have a great deal that we can do to be more efficient than what we have already, as well as trying to place new construction in the right place.
All I would want to say is that the sort of leadership that Guelph has provided is not just about one set of cookie-cutter solutions that's going to work in all communities. It's about a process of getting on with the job, of finding out how we set our priorities, depending on the scale and the size of the community we have.
The experts have their role to play, too.
Professor, Economics, McMaster University, As an Individual
One of the major problems of small communities, rural communities—Guelph probably is not too small—is that they import a large proportion of the requirements, and this represents a leakage. It represents a loss to the community.
If you get an integrated energy system, the savings you make on importing from outside the fossil fuels, or whatever energy, creates quite a bit of an advantage and would retain income within the local economy, and this by itself is a very positive thing.
The other thing is that the availability of this energy—and probably at a scale where it probably may be lower priced than what you have to import—itself becomes an inducement, an incentive, for other activities to capitalize on these savings. In that respect, what we're talking about here is a net advantage to even small communities, rural communities.
You mentioned one thing that is something I've done some research on, where violence—at least, nine Criminal Code violences—seems to be highly correlated with unemployment. So if you create jobs, you create opportunities, and these tend to ultimately reduce these occurrences. In that respect, it may be a balance from the increased intensification of urban living against the fact that you're creating savings and generating surpluses and opportunities, which tend to depress it. Those are the facts that would really count, and I would venture a guess here to say probably around the positive side.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Leon Benoit
Thank you very much, and thank you, Mr. Valeriote.
Thank you very much, gentlemen, for your presentations and for answering the questions. I think the information we've received here today will be very helpful to us in our study.
We are now going to suspend for a minute or so to go in camera. Then we will come back to discuss committee business for about 25 minutes.
[Proceedings continue in camera]