Natural Resources Committee on Oct. 30th, 2018

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

That's why I was letting him talk but not letting you talk.

I can give him a brief moment to finish.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

It was just a supplementary.

[Michel Dumoulin]

Well, the best bit was coming. I was going to say that when we issue new national model codes, we also ensure there's a training aspect to it. We do seminars across the country and webinars, and we go out. For example, for a building inspector, we make sure they understand the changes to the codes and what that implies. There is a training aspect to make sure we touch across the sector.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you. I have to stop you there.

Mr. Schmale, I'm not sure whether you're planning a career change or you're doing home renovations.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Hopefully there won't be a career change.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Mr. Cannings, over to you.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you.

Thanks to both of you for coming here today.

Monsieur Dumoulin, you were here before the committee a while ago, speaking about my private member's bill on the use of wood in government infrastructure. The way that ended up was more broadly a life-cycle analysis of materials used in buildings.

Mr. Nightingale, you were talking about some more recent developments. I wonder if you could expand on that and on the importance of the NRC's work on these life-cycle analyses. How could that help us move forward in Canada to meet our targets and just improve the environment of the country?

[Trevor Nightingale]

As part of one of the initiatives coming from the Treasury Board's centre for greening government, they are now asking that federal infrastructure projects submit a life-cycle analysis and a total cost of ownership assessment of the asset. It's not going to be used in the bid selection. Essentially, it is to raise awareness and capacity, and the Canada Green Building Council in their net-zero standard also requires submission of those two items.

We found in the development of this is that we do not now have sufficient maturity right now, and accuracy in the LCA, to embark upon a competitive bid analysis, where we're looking at the total cost of ownership and the total carbon footprint. The problem was traced back to a lack of a national database for LCI and LCA materials.

About two weeks ago, Treasury Board and NRC hosted a joint workshop where we brought together government departments and industry leaders and associations to look at what the next steps should be in developing a national database whereby the inputs are regionally specific, validated, open and transparent. This database would allow us to engage in more accurate LCA and LCI evaluations and ultimately get to the end state of adjudication of bids where some of the KPIs are total cost of ownership and total carbon footprint over the entire life of the building—embodied carbon, operational carbon and end-of-life carbon.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you.

To change gears for a minute, I have a constituent I met with perhaps a year or so ago who was one of these real idea guys. He started off in computers and then got into energy-efficient heat pumps and designed a new kind of enclosed heat pump that was highly efficient. I think he was speaking with NRCan and they brought him up to the Arctic to look at communities there. He looked at the buildings and said that there was no point in putting a heat pump in these buildings because their energy efficiency was so bad. He went back home and designed a new building. That's the kind of guy he is.

I haven't talked to him recently, so I don't know where he is at that level. I'm just wondering at what level NRC gets involved in helping businesses like that, helping innovators who have an idea. Does NRCan send them over to you and tell you that these guys have an interesting idea? Do they ask you to help them test out these products? What level do you get in on?

[Michel Dumoulin]

The simple answer is all levels. If I may be a little bit simplistic, I'll tell you that a strong difference between NRCan and us is that we are sort of the operational arm. We don't do policy and regulation. We don't enforce. We do actual work, and we work, as I mentioned in my opening statement, with thousands of companies a year, from the entrepreneur who knocks on our door with an idea he wants to test, to the multinationals and global giants of this world.

To be more specific, we often work with small companies such as entrepreneurs where we actually go in the lab and do pilot testing or scaling up with them, testing to see if the invention obeys the laws of physics, the first few tests, and/or we can also use IRAP, the industrial research assistance program, which is for companies with 500 employees or less. IRAP funds the development of small or initial projects, which are actually fairly large sometimes. Our IRAP network will support finding the right resources and it will open doors.

So absolutely we do.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

I know NRC has done some work in studying building technologies for the north.

Could you tell us a bit about that and the energy efficiency in those communities where it's so important?

[Michel Dumoulin]

We have worked with local Inuit corporations in transferring some technology or testing some heating ventilation assets, for example, in housing in the north. We've done some specific projects, but we also are working at updating the national model codes to make sure that they will be adapted to the north.

I don't know if Trevor has specific examples.

[Trevor Nightingale]

No. I think one of the areas that NRC excels in is a multidisciplinary approach. Often when we look at energy efficiency, we can realize collateral benefits. We also need to ensure we don't bring along unintended consequences. Increased air tightness means fewer air exchanges, which can mean reduced air quality.

Where NRC is engaging specifically in the north in one collaborative activity with our colleagues at NRCan is in looking at the air quality inside highly energy-efficient homes and looking at ERVs and HRVs—energy recovery ventilators and heat recovery ventilators. We're making sure that the technologies that were developed for the south are applicable in the north and that there's a northern solution that works for the northern people, given their unique set of cultures and needs.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you.

Mr. Whalen.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you very much. That's really interesting research you're doing there.

A lot of what we're trying to do in the climate plan is to allow Canadians, either homeowners or building owners or the contractors who are trying to help them, to make better decisions. It's all about decision-making and having a standard in place so that everyone is comfortable that decisions can be made.

I'm looking at this great big data analytics program that you had for the PSPC, the 11 buildings and all the different technologies that were piloted there. If a Canadian wanted to find out what the different technologies were and the benefit each of those individual technologies had, would they be able to find that simply online, to figure out whether or not they could adapt some of those technologies for their buildings?

[Trevor Nightingale]

That's a really good question.

It all boiled down to the national master standing offer. If they were to adopt and use the national master standing offer, they would be able to procure the exact same technology that is being used in the Government of Canada buildings right now and is realizing those energy savings and cost benefits to the Government of Canada.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Great.

Regarding the national standing offer, is there enough information there for a layperson to determine what, if any, aspects of those technologies might be of interest to them, or is this really a technical document for contractors to understand? Would they have to go further and reach out to the individual suppliers of each of the technologies to determine appropriateness?

I'm not saying that you guys should have done this. I'm just trying to think of recommendations, how we can leverage the full potential of this project.

[Trevor Nightingale]

Maybe an analysis of what's required all the way through the procurement chain would be really good to make sure we have all the i's dotted and the t's crossed, and where we can help, we'd be very glad to.

That would complete the technology transfer, I would think.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

It looks as if it's going to be about 111 buildings totally within the PSPC, which is a minuscule proportion of the number of square feet of buildings in the country as a whole that could benefit from the technologies that are suggested in the national standing offer.

If someone were to build to one of those standards, how would they know they've attained the benefits they were expecting? Do you also set or help in the development of standards for energy efficiency auditors to make sure that people are receiving the bang for their buck that they're expecting to receive from adopting these national standards?

[Trevor Nightingale]

We do not develop standards. We develop information that others can develop standards from. Energy professionals now have accreditation. Engineers do that service as well. We feed into those groups so that they can develop the documents they need for their members, and they can ensure that they have the right training to do the work in the field.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Presumably, with this data analytics project for the government buildings, some type of energy audit must have been done. Are the details and the scope of that energy audit available online for other professionals to use to adopt the same standards and procedures?

[Trevor Nightingale]

The answer to that is that it's probably too recent.

We've submitted the reports to PSPC. What NRC did, was a very detailed pre- and post-energy audit. We looked at the delta in the energy consumed and the cost. We are working with PSPC to make those data publicly available in a generic form. That's one thing on the to-do list. It's so very recent that we haven't gotten to it yet. I'm sorry.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Going back to Mr. Cannings' question about life-cycle analysis, I think of the massive undertaking that redeveloping the parliamentary precinct has been.

I'm wondering if there has been any engagement of NRCan or your group in determining what the best materials are to use to provide some energy efficiency within the parliamentary precinct while maintaining the historical character. How would Canadians find out what types of technologies are being used to make the parliamentary precinct more energy efficient?

[Trevor Nightingale]

NRC was engaged by PPB, the parliamentary precinct branch, at the very early stages of developing the work plan for the parliamentary precinct, including the Centre Block.

We developed a report for them that outlined innovative technologies that could respond to use cases that were identified through ongoing and historical engineering reports. Not only was it energy, but it could be seismic. It could be a number of things that those buildings had issues with. We mapped those issues, or use cases, to innovative technologies. We made that report available to PSPC, PPB and their consultants.

I think at this point it's not in the public domain. Again, that report was handed in only a few months ago.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Is there any reason, from a confidentiality or intellectual property standpoint, that this information should be confidential?

It seems to me that anytime the Government of Canada creates information to allow Canadians to make better, more energy-efficient decisions, that information should be available to Canadians by default.