Evidence of meeting #89 for Natural Resources in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was material.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
You don't have a specific organization like FPInnovations that would receive millions of federal dollars every year?
Vice-President, Environment and Sustainability, Cement Association of Canada
No.
Vice-President, Environment and Sustainability, Cement Association of Canada
Yes.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
Okay.
Can you tell this committee a little about the challenges your industry is facing?
Vice-President, Environment and Sustainability, Cement Association of Canada
We are in the process of some significant regulatory developments provincially and federally on the issue of climate change, carbon pricing being the centrepiece of those efforts. There are others, for example the clean fuel standard that's being developed right now at the federal level. They all place cost pressures on our industry.
For the most part, governments have worked very hard to try to design systems that protect the competitiveness of energy-intensive trade-exposed sectors like cement, but they have not always been successful. B.C. is our case study for what happens when those systems are—I would say in the case of B.C.—incomplete. They've missed a couple of things that normally go along with carbon pricing systems.
As I mentioned in my remarks, we've seen about a 40% loss in market share to imports that come from facilities that are not subject to the same environmental regulatory requirements that we are, and which we would suspect, in many cases, have much higher emissions on the manufacturing side. In any case, this concept of leakage generates additional GHGs from transportation, for example. This is all while simply shifting production to other jurisdictions.
That's one very concrete, if you will, example of what happens when these policies are not designed correctly.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
You also made reference to that report from the Bureau of Land Management or the State of Oregon.
Can you expand a bit on that briefly?
Vice-President, Environment and Sustainability, Cement Association of Canada
I don't know the methodologies that were used to calculate that number. As I said, it's a study that was done by the Bureau of Land Management, which tried to capture some of these uncertainties that exist in the life-cycle assessments around wood products, in particular trying to capture some of those upstream impacts.
One of the concepts is a notion of a carbon debt, for example. If you cut a primary forest and replant it, even if we assume that you get 100% regrowth, you're not returning to a primary forest and you get a net loss of carbon. There's a carbon debt there, and that debt has to be calculated within the overall life-cycle profile of the wood products that come from that harvest.
They've tried to factor in some of those considerations—soil, carbon impacts, that sort of thing—to come up with a more realistic account of carbon impacts that doesn't just assume that every tonne of carbon you take out is going to be replaced by a new tree that grows in its place.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
Right, okay.
One thing I've noticed in my area is that even in a lot of the residential construction, Styrofoam block building is replacing traditional wood construction.
Do you have any comment on why people would be doing that?
Vice-President, Environment and Sustainability, Cement Association of Canada
I think you're referring to insulated concrete forms, which are a highly energy-efficient and very durable form of construction. In particular, as there is more emphasis on developing high-efficiency buildings, net-zero buildings, we're seeing more and more interest in that concrete technology because of its performance.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
Okay, very good.
Thank you for that, and thank you for the work you're doing as an industry in innovation and contributing to our infrastructure.
Vice-President, Environment and Sustainability, Cement Association of Canada
Thank you.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
Ms. O'Connor, you talked a little about life-cycle analysis. Do you have any data on life-cycle analysis comparisons between wood and concrete?
President, Athena Sustainable Materials Institute
It's a comparison that we certainly could do, but I would want to emphasize that it's not particularly of interest to us as an institute to compare materials. One form of the engagement that we get from industry is that industries are looking to make improvement within their sectors. The Cement Association is one example of an organization that has done that.
The point I'd like to make is that all materials have impact. We build with all materials. They're all critical to construction. What is more interesting to us is how we encourage improvements across all those sectors, so that we overall have an improvement and a reduction in environmental impacts.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
Wouldn't you do a life-cycle analysis on various building products?
President, Athena Sustainable Materials Institute
We do. We create the data for the products, and that serves two purposes. It helps those industries understand where the impacts are happening and so where we can look for improvements, and it also allows us to roll all that data up to the impacts for a whole building. Yes, we have the data on the products.
Conservative
President, Athena Sustainable Materials Institute
We can do the comparison. I'm just suggesting to you that we don't necessarily find that useful.
Conservative
Liberal
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
Thank you, all, for being here today. I have questions that will last all day, but I'll just try to get through things quickly.
I'll just start with Ms. O'Connor here with the Athena Institute. Thank you for the history of your organization. I remember when the Technology Enterprise Facility was built across the street from my office at UBC. It was probably back when Adam was a student of mine way back in the distant Pleistocene or whenever. I'm just wondering how things have progressed since then. We've heard some back and forth here today about concerns that Mr. Auer mentioned about how, when we go in and log an area, there is an initial carbon debt. I see that reflected in FPInnovations documents.
I'm just wondering how close we are to an LCA that, if this bill is passed, we could use to assess projects and give comfort to concrete, forest, and steel industries that it was a level playing field and that we were really assessing things properly. As an ecologist, one of the reasons I'm putting forward this bill is to make sure that we are reducing greenhouse gases. Could you comment on that? How close are we to that?
President, Athena Sustainable Materials Institute
I'd be happy to do that, and maybe I can simultaneously rescue my answer to Mr. Falk.
I really think that the focus here is on what you've referred to as a carbon test in your discussion. You've heard that, I think, from many of the experts who have come to you in committee. The focus would be on what is the performance target. When we have performance-based objectives, we set the target and we allow ourselves to find our own way there. It's not comparing one material to another, like a wood beam compared to a steel beam. When I say that it's not of interest, it's because it's out of context. We need to have it at the level of the finished product—the whole building or the stretch of roadway or whatever it is that we're working on. It really comes down to what your mechanism is for applying that test, and have you put together a robust, fair, transparent system to do that testing? That would be my answer to your question.
NDP
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
Okay. Thank you.
I'll move on to Mr. Auer. We have a couple of jurisdictions in Canada that do have “wood first” or charte du bois policies. I'm just wondering if you could comment first on how those policies might have affected the cement industry in those areas. Do you have any indication of the direct effect? You talked about the effect of foreign competition within the concrete industry, but how might those wood first policies have affected your industry?
Vice-President, Environment and Sustainability, Cement Association of Canada
There are two impacts. One is the direct market impact in terms of projects that may switch over to wood. I can't say we've seen an enormous amount of that happening yet, but it's still pretty early, despite the fact that this policy has been around for a while. Our other speaker from the wood industry talked about the educational catch-up component of a lot of these proposals. I think we're just starting to see an industry now that is a little bit more capable in the area of wood construction. We would expect to see some direct market impacts from a “wood first” policy that requires wood over other materials.
I think the more important impact is that we think it takes some of the sophistication out of the conversation around reducing carbon from the built environment. There is now this message out there that wood is by default the optimum choice if you're worried about climate change.
We contest that notion on a number of bases. Our product is moving very quickly in the area of low-carbon innovation. I firmly believe that in my lifetime we will have carbon-neutral concrete. We don't want to do anything to disrupt that, and we want people to understand that it's a process that's going on. We also want people to understand that it's not simply a matter of materials; it's a matter of materials, design, and all sorts of considerations that have to work together to give you the optimum carbon outcome. That might look different depending on whether you're building a house, a multi-residential facility, a commercial facility, an industrial facility, a school, or a hospital. A whole bunch of things need to be considered. To try to turn this into a black-and-white issue is a real disservice to the broader effort that we're trying to build. We really need to build a low-carbon and climate-resilient built environment. It's complicated. It's not as simple as material choice.
