Natural Resources Committee on Nov. 1st, 2018

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you, Mr. Falk.

Mr. Serré, you're next.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Mr. Chair, I move that debate be now adjourned.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

All in favour of Mr. Serré's motion? We will have a recorded vote.

(Motion agreed to: yeas 6; nays 3)

Thank you.

We go back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mr. Cannings, the floor is yours. You have seven minutes to ask our witnesses questions.

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

Thank you, Ted, for giving me that time.

Thank you all for being here and waiting patiently while we went through this.

Again, I wish we had all day here, because this is very interesting. I want to thank you for your presentations and recommendations. It makes it really easy for us in a way, when we can see what clear recommendations you have.

I want to start with Mr. Mueller. I'm sorry you're not here face to face, but it's always good to chat with you and get your wisdom. I'm very glad you had a slide here that mentioned Okanagan College, which is of course in my riding and home town of Penticton. You had it as 80 kilowatt hours per square metre per year, though, and I always thought it was 65, which would have made it the best in the country. Maybe that was what they were hoping for.

One of your main recommendations was about training the construction workforce on green buildings. As you may know, Okanagan College has a sustainable construction management technology program. I'm not sure how familiar you are with that.

Is that the kind of program you think is needed? How can the federal government incentivize or promote those kinds of programs across the country, if that's one of the real stumbling blocks to this?

[Thomas Mueller]

I think what we call the technical colleges—as you said, Okanagan College in British Columbia, the British Columbia Institute of Technology, the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, and so on— play a very important role in training the workforce. If you look at the one slide that I had, 55% of the workforce in the construction industry are in trades. The trades do everything from installing lighting to equipment to all kinds of things. They are the ones who need to be trained, so the technical colleges are very well positioned not only to bring the new workforce on as well as the existing one but also to upgrade the skills in this workforce. It's very important.

I think the government has the opportunity—I apologize because I don't recall the exact name of the department that looks after investing in education and training and so on—to support that in identifying what those gaps are, and then investing in the curriculum that could be developed depending on the types of trades involved. I would suggest that the unions, and also the associations, need to be involved as well. Then they could deliver and support training consistently across the country, because it's not only about specific knowledge; it's about skills.

Also, I think people with new skills, more advanced skills, can also make a way better living in that profession than maybe they could have before. "Sustainability" is a term we use for buildings, as is “high performance”. How do you design high-performance buildings? The trades play a critical role there.

Yes, invest in colleges, technical colleges, and use your federal departments for human development and resources to meet the challenges in that area.

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

Thank you.

I'll quickly move to the other witnesses here.

Ms. Leach, you mentioned, I think, some of the wasted energy in communities. I think that was part of what you said, and also that personal transportation had the highest percentage of waste at 75%. Is that something that can be remedied, for instance, by a move to more electric vehicles, more zero-emission vehicles? Do they waste less energy than the internal combustion engine does? Is that something that would fit in there, so we would be saving energy as well as creating energy that is non-polluting?

[Tonja Leach]

I think that number is not just looking at the personal transportation but at transportation as a whole, from a systems perspective at the community level. There is an immense amount of inefficiency in that system, so we have to look at it from the personal-vehicle side, from fleets, from the sort of return-to-base-type vehicles, and then from the sort of inside-one-city goods movement as well. We need to look at it from all of those different perspectives. Electric vehicles do have a role, but I don't think that's the only solution for that sort of transportation, from a systems perspective at the community level. I think we need to look at what the opportunities are with public transit systems and how they interrelate with personal vehicles, and we also need to look at the fleet opportunities as well.

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

Okay.

Mr. Bradley, I think Mr. Whalen was questioning you or talking about the fact that, as we electrify our energy system to achieve our climate goals, electrification is necessary. There were questions around how we would provide all that electricity, and you mentioned that we would need more electricity as we save energy. Instead of having these single utilities that produce electricity all in one place, whether it's a dam, a nuclear power station or whatever, is there a role for the distribution of that energy source so people could have an electric car that's fuelled at least in part by solar panels on the roof? I assume that's something that the utilities are considering very seriously as a possible scenario for the future.

[Francis Bradley]

Yes, and not just considering—there are a number of pilot projects across the country precisely in this space.

If we are considering what our climate change goals are and what the impacts will be on the economy writ large, I've mentioned to this committee before about some work done by the Trottier Energy Futures. They did a study that attempted to model what our energy system would look like if we attempted to meet our 2050 goal of an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. That is in a world where the demand for electricity will be two or three times what it is today.

In that instance, it really will be a case that all options will be required: central plant, absolutely; energy efficiency, absolutely; distributed energy resources, absolutely. All of these things will have to come into play if we're going to look at making significant reductions to our greenhouse gas emissions.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

I'm going to have to stop you there, unfortunately.

Mr. Serré, you are going to finish this off. You have about two minutes.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you to all the witnesses.

You've brought a lot of good insight for our study—from the Infrastructure Bank to skill development.

I guess, just because of limited time.... I know we have a political party that doesn't believe in climate change, that is constantly....

Mr. Mueller, I just want to ask this. We talked about this earlier—about buildings and carbon-free—and we've had testimony in the past from a political party that is against changing the building codes because the sky is going to fall, there are going to be job losses and no more construction. However, in your deck here, you show that this is going to be a benefit. There are going to be a lot of new jobs created, not only for the environment but also from a small-business perspective.

I just want to ask you to talk, in a minute or so, about the need to look at carbon-free, zero emissions for homes, and how important that is.

[Thomas Mueller]

I think, transforming the whole building sector to zero carbon is really important. We have to start it now, because as you know, buildings last a very long time. It's very important.

I would say that, when it comes to homes, it is a bit more challenging because there is a different economic model. Developers have a different economic model. You really need to look at things like district energy systems, systems that tie homes together and supply them with clean, carbon-free sources of energy.

On the building sector, I think there's a better model there. As we said, we have a standard. We already have a number of buildings that we have certified under that standard as zero carbon right now, so we can do this right now. Some of them—actually, two of them—are private sector buildings, commercial developments that have found a way of doing that to get a good return on their investment. This is already happening.

I think the codes play a very important role in that as well, particularly for the residential sector because of the different economic model. As far as I know, there are plans under way to develop a near net-zero code by 2021 or 2022 for Canada, as well as a retrofit code by around the same time frame. I cannot overemphasize the retrofit code, because all net reductions in carbon between now and 2030 have to come from existing buildings.

Any new buildings, no matter how effectively you build them and how low-carbon you build them, will add carbon to the atmosphere through the building materials and through the carbon that is emitted through construction. It's the retrofit of buildings over the next 10 to 15 years that will reduce carbon emissions from the buildings. These are the net reductions.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to stop you there. We're out of time.

To all of our witnesses, thank you very much for joining us, and a still bigger thank you for being patient for the late start and the disruption during the meeting.

The meeting is adjourned.