Evidence of meeting #97 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 statistics.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Marc Serré Liberal Nickel Belt, ON
Thank you.
According to the reports or studies that you have submitted, there are no more smog days in Ontario. Smog has been completely eliminated because Ontario has eliminated coal. In 2013 or 2014—I do not recall the exact year—, there were 54 smog days and now there are none.
In the studies you have conducted, have you looked at the impact of the elimination of smog on the health of low-income residents or the benefits seen in Ontario since 2013 or 2014?
Executive Director and Counsel, Canadian Environmental Law Association
No. That would be a great question to analyze, because the Ontario Medical Association was the leading organization that had analyzed the health effects in Ontario of the coal use and the number of deaths that were happening with those smog days. That's a great question to follow up, about the low-income component of that.
We do know that low-income families, and consumers generally, who have less access to air conditioning often have poor indoor air generally. We do need to watch out as we're working on retrofits and tightening up buildings that we pay attention to things like indoor air quality. This is another issue my organization works on: making sure we're still dealing with radon ventilation and not increasing that source of lung cancer, not increasing tight buildings and having mould as a result, and those kinds of things. These are very intersectional problems.
The City of Toronto, for example, has been working on heat island effects—even since the coal phase-out, we still have hot days here—and working on a bylaw that would ask landlords to make sure units are never more than a certain temperature during the day. Unfortunately, we sometimes do see heat-related deaths from those high-rise buildings.
It's a very intersectional problem and a good one that would be good to ask about the coal phase-out.
Liberal
Marc Serré Liberal Nickel Belt, ON
I believe the Canadian Medical Association said the health system will save about $1 billion because of those changes.
Executive Director and Counsel, Canadian Environmental Law Association
Overall, I would—
Liberal
Marc Serré Liberal Nickel Belt, ON
Like I said, it would be very costly—millions of dollars—to set up a national energy data centre. That's kind of the “Cadillac”, or the preferred option. If we were to go to plan B and look at enhancing, for example, Stats Canada—enhancing the department and the collection of data within Stats Canada—what specific recommendations would you have on the approach to enhance the data collection for Stats Canada?
Executive Director and Counsel, Canadian Environmental Law Association
They would basically be the same. I'm not advocating for a new institution for the sake of a new institution. The question that I'm trying to answer is, if there's going to be a new energy collecting institution and analysis organization, it needs to not forget about low-income issues and energy poverty issues. For sure Stats Canada already collects a lot of appropriate information and could be enhanced in terms of a direction to do this kind of cross-country comparison of energy poverty analysis, access to climate change mitigation, and differential impacts on pricing in the different provinces. All of that kind of thing can be done in an objective way to help policy-makers right across the country.
Liberal
Marc Serré Liberal Nickel Belt, ON
If you have any reports, especially on the cap and trade model versus the pricing on pollution, and the model that you would recommend specifying to help low-income families and individuals, could you provide them to the clerk and the committee?
Executive Director and Counsel, Canadian Environmental Law Association
Yes, we'll do that.
Liberal
Conservative
Bob Saroya Conservative Markham—Unionville, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for giving us a perspective from your side—especially from Ontario's side.
Do we have year-over-year data collected on the cost of energy going up versus the income?
Executive Director and Counsel, Canadian Environmental Law Association
I was just looking at the Financial Accountability Office's analysis and that was particular to 2014. I don't know if we've summarized that anywhere. I think that's the kind of thing that could and should be summarized. I'm not totally sure. The Ontario Energy Board might have done a little bit of that here, but I'm not positive.
Conservative
Bob Saroya Conservative Markham—Unionville, ON
When we talk about more vulnerable people, those are the people we should be looking after. Do we have any percentage or number for families, people, whose houses have the energy disconnected, or who are in trouble or behind? Do you have any sorts of numbers?
Executive Director and Counsel, Canadian Environmental Law Association
We do now. Unfortunately, I don't have the number off the top of my head. There were some inquiries by media last year and the year before, and the Ontario Energy Board is now collecting and publishing the number of disconnections from different utilities across the province here. I don't know whether that's true elsewhere in the country.
What I do remember, which is probably unfair to say, is that I was quite shocked by the numbers, and they highlighted the necessity to have better programs for terms of service and rate support and better emergency programs. What had been happening before, just to give you a better picture, is that if a family got into financial trouble and received a disconnection notice and was unable to access funds and make it up and their power was disconnected, they were then receiving, in most cases, a disconnection fee from the utility. Then when they had the resources to get their power back on, often with social service agency help and otherwise, they were also paying, in many cases, a reconnection fee.
What's happened here, because of shining a light on this issue, is that some of those fees are no longer being imposed on families who qualify as low-income families. Then there are other programs to make sure the disconnection doesn't happen in the first place, such as better access to equal billing across the year, and other programs to help them with conservation, retrofits, getting insulation into that house if it is a really leaky house, and those kinds of things.
Conservative
Bob Saroya Conservative Markham—Unionville, ON
Are most of these vulnerable people renters? Are they tenants? Are they seniors? Do they live on a fixed income? Do we have any stats on whether they are more seniors versus renters?
Executive Director and Counsel, Canadian Environmental Law Association
Definitely more of them are renters, because more low-income families are renters in the first place. In a lot of non-urban areas, definitely a lot of the seniors on fixed incomes will also not necessarily have good insulation in their housing and that kind of thing. I don't think the percentage is higher for seniors, but it's quite significant when it happens because then you have a lot of other health effects coming from the seniors not having a healthy temperature in their homes, and then there are also choices around medication.
In Ontario, again, we have a program now that gives a better electricity credit for families and individuals who are low income and who require medical devices that use electricity or who heat with electricity and these kinds of things. By understanding these demographics better and understanding who is getting into trouble, we're trying to then advocate for the programs that will specifically target and help them the most.
Conservative
Bob Saroya Conservative Markham—Unionville, ON
You mentioned in your presentation that the Hamilton, Toronto, Niagara Falls, and Kitchener areas have cheaper energy than do other parts of the province. What are you comparing those with?
Executive Director and Counsel, Canadian Environmental Law Association
No, it wasn't that they were cheaper. It was that they're using electricity and natural gas, and almost no other fuels like heating oil and so on. I was just making the point that when we're looking at energy policy and the data we need for energy policy, we need to take into account that in a lot of non-urban areas people aren't necessarily relying on just their local utility. They're relying on fuel delivery, propane delivery, fuel oil delivery, wood, and those kinds of things, and those are costs to them as well. We have to think about the differences between urban and rural Canada.
Liberal
Liberal
Mary Ng Liberal Markham—Thornhill, ON
Hi there. Thank you so much for joining us today. I have a couple of very, I hope, simple questions. We've covered a lot today.
As we are looking at what a national data strategy would look like, you said that StatsCan already collects a bunch of data, and that the work that needs to be done has an intentional focus so that analysis is done from a low-income point of view. Can you tell us whether or not there are any data indicators that you think are not covered right now? You've said that there are a lot, but could you give us any advice at all about which data indicators might be helpful, that should be collected but aren't now, that will actually help towards that analysis?
Executive Director and Counsel, Canadian Environmental Law Association
Yes. I'm not the best person in our network, and I can get more information to the committee, for sure, from the person who is. The reliance on other fuels is something we should check and make sure data is being adequately collected. I haven't seen any data—probably because the programs are so new—about the differential impact of the climate change policies, so there would need to be some work to analyze what those possible differential impacts are and then collect that data and attribute it to low-income families versus non-low-income families.
I know they do collect things like age of appliance and age of house. Whether they collect information about the state of the housing would be important to double-check. I know that's something that, for example, the utilities here in Ontario had to delve into when they were developing some of the natural gas insulation programs. A lot of the housing was surprisingly poorly insulated. I don't think that was really on people's radar before they actually started going into the houses and trying to work with homeowners to improve their energy efficiency.
It's a question of specifically looking at all the factors that impact low-income energy consumers' use of energy and whether that data is being collected and is being associated on an income level and a demographic level.
Liberal
Mary Ng Liberal Markham—Thornhill, ON
Are there any jurisdictions that are, first, doing this at all, and second, doing it particularly well? You referenced California, but is there anywhere where there is both the data collection and then that cross-intersection to help understand what the implications are or to help policy-making focused on low-income individuals or families?
Executive Director and Counsel, Canadian Environmental Law Association
When I mentioned California, I said they took a number of different approaches to even address this problem, so even though I have referenced that jurisdiction they didn't think that their normal statistics and data collection would get the answers they needed about the barriers to accessing clean energy and this kind of thing.
The kinds of things I mentioned around structural barriers, access to capital, home ownership rates, and complex needs, it's a question of whether the data is being collected in sufficient detail so that you can do the cross-correlation between the demographic and the factor you're interested in. Yes, we might have overall numbers on home ownership. Have we got good numbers tying that to not only low-income families but also to how that is translating into their energy cost? It's this kind of multi-layered analysis.
Liberal
Mary Ng Liberal Markham—Thornhill, ON
Thank you for that.
Can you talk to me a little about your network, the Low-Income Energy Network? You're sharing some very helpful information that comes from a set of work that focuses in on this, but what is that capacity across the country? Who are the people who actually would be able to look at the data and then do that kind of cross-analysis so that there are outcomes or recommendations that actually arrive from the analysis of this data? What kind of expertise do we have in Ontario and across the country for the use of the data in that way?
Executive Director and Counsel, Canadian Environmental Law Association
To be honest, we don't have a ton of expertise in Canada in that, although it's improving as different utilities adopt these programs, for sure, and they start to develop in-house capacity. The Low-Income Energy Network has access to an expert named Roger Colton, who has actually been used by a number of utilities both in Canada and the United States as well as by advocacy groups like us. For example, I know he's done work in Nova Scotia, in Manitoba, and elsewhere.
It's because there aren't a lot of people with the capacity to do that analysis. I'm not aware of a huge number of people doing analysis at an academic level either. There was a lawyer named Adrienne Scott who did a master's degree on rural energy costs in Ontario and made her information available to the Low-Income Energy Network, and just spoke at our conference this past month, but that isn't her day job. There's little entrenched capacity, and that's why we think this question of a national institute or a national focus would be quite important to add to that capacity.
In terms of Canadian NGOs, for example, there has been work done by the clinic at Dalhousie University law school in the past. Green Communities Canada has done some work in the past. They were the hosts of the energy poverty conference I mentioned. There is a little bit of work being done by the Assembly of First Nations and Chiefs of Ontario on the indigenous side, but I think it's a very ripe area for more work.
