Evidence of meeting #57 for Transport, Infrastructure and Communities in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was projects.
A recording is available from Parliament.
President, Canadian Public Works Association
We have 2,200 members across Canada.
Conservative
Peter Braid Conservative Kitchener—Waterloo, ON
You talked about the importance of asset management with respect to helping to meet, to manage, and to monitor infrastructure needs. Clearly some municipalities are better equipped and further advanced with respect to their asset management and their asset management plans.
Do you have any thoughts or recommendations for how we can move the yardstick on this, how we can help, in your words, build capacity in municipalities so that they can improve their asset management capabilities?
President, Canadian Public Works Association
The 2012 infrastructure report card that was referred to earlier identified that there are pockets of brilliance across the country with regard to asset management practices. There are still quite a few municipalities, typically the small and the rural municipalities, that...it's not that they don't have the wherewithal, but that they don't have the internal capacity, the staff resources and the financial resources, to undertake real-time evaluations or assessments of the infrastructure state and performance.
We see a role for the federal government in taking the lead by providing dedicated funding for building that capacity across the country and within the municipalities.
Conservative
Peter Braid Conservative Kitchener—Waterloo, ON
Thank you very much.
Mr. Carlton, thank you for being here from the FCM.
You mentioned in your opening presentation that every dollar spent on infrastructure has an impact of $1.20 on our GDP. Are you familiar with any formulas that exist to translate investments in infrastructure into jobs or job creation?
Chief Executive Officer, Federation of Canadian Municipalities
When we were having discussions with the government around the economic action plan, we were working with one of the consulting firms in town, and their research had come to a formula that $1 billion of investment in infrastructure would create jobs on the order of 11,000.
Conservative
Peter Braid Conservative Kitchener—Waterloo, ON
Thank you very much.
Mr. McGuinty was asking about federal government investments in infrastructure. Now, I can understand why Mr. McGuinty may not have read every page of the budget, but there is a page with a graph that clearly indicates that this year the federal government will spend $5 billion on infrastructure. That grows over the next 10 years to an average of $6 billion over those 10 years. It's between $5 billion and $6 billion on average every year over the next decade, just for clarification.
Mr. Carlton, you spoke about the waste-water regulations, saying that some municipalities may have some challenge in meeting the regulations required by either 2040 or 2020 for higher-risk infrastructure.
Are you aware of any municipalities that have met the requirements thus far? If so, how have they done it?
Chief Executive Officer, Federation of Canadian Municipalities
Yes, there are municipalities that have. I can't say that they have acted to meet the standards since the regulations were brought in, but they happen to have waste-water treatment systems that meet the new standards. They've done that through their own investments, through investments using the gas tax and possibly the previous building Canada fund.
Just to quantify your “some municipalities”, 25% of the municipalities in the country require water system upgrades to comply with the new regulations.
Conservative
Peter Braid Conservative Kitchener—Waterloo, ON
Thank you.
You also spoke about the impacts of changing weather, climate change, and severe weather events. Disaster mitigation is an eligible category in every component of the new building Canada plan. To my frustration, this is a category that remains undersubscribed. The plan has only been open for business for a year, but that's still a fair statement.
Do you have any comments or suggestions on how we can promote this and encourage municipalities to apply for the money, for the funding that's available to them right now?
Chief Executive Officer, Federation of Canadian Municipalities
Specifically for disasters or generally?
Chief Executive Officer, Federation of Canadian Municipalities
I would say encourage a disaster, but that would be rather inappropriate.
I think part of the problem is that it's unclear at the provincial level how municipalities access money. It varies across the country in terms of the ways and means for municipalities to access building Canada funds.
There's a lot of uncertainty about access, levels of funding, and the criteria being used at the provincial level to determine what projects are eligible or are going to be accepted. There's some work to do there at a communications level between the feds and the provinces and territories on how to make it crystal clear to our members how to access that money and what the specific criteria are.
Conservative
Peter Braid Conservative Kitchener—Waterloo, ON
All of the information is available on the Infrastructure Canada website in terms of the various eligible categories. There are business case guides that outline how municipalities can apply and what criteria we're looking for.
Conservative
Peter Braid Conservative Kitchener—Waterloo, ON
If certain jurisdictions are still confused, I seriously am concerned about those jurisdictions, quite frankly.
Chief Executive Officer, Federation of Canadian Municipalities
Well, if you look across the country at the story on the building Canada fund to this moment, in a lot of provinces and territories there are great difficulties in getting the money moving. Manitoba is an example of a success. Saskatchewan is an example of a success. In many other provinces and territories—
Chief Executive Officer, Federation of Canadian Municipalities
Yes, some have figured it out. I'm not going to point fingers at one order of government or another, but there's clearly a problem in some of these jurisdictions where the money is not moving.
The other problem is that it's not always clear, and it's hard for municipalities to understand how their projects are approved or not approved, who is making the decisions, and what criteria are being used. I could give you examples of smaller municipalities that have submitted proposals. In one case I know of, four proposals were submitted to the building Canada fund. None of them were approved.
They're puzzling over how it is that this project that's there to support them is almost like a crapshoot. They have to put all their money into preparing an application, and then it's kind of like it's out there in the ether somewhere, and they don't know if they're going to win the lottery or not.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Larry Miller
I'm sorry, but you're out of time, Mr. Braid.
We'll now move to Ms. Young for seven minutes.
Conservative
Wai Young Conservative Vancouver South, BC
Thank you again for being here and for these very interesting presentations.
I'm from the city of Vancouver, as Mr. Carlton noted earlier. I do have a couple of questions, just to follow up on what Mr. Braid was asking about.
We have a project in my city that was approved in 2013. The City of Vancouver is now saying that they cannot build until 2018 on a piece of land that was pre-selected, that's already there, etc. Can you explain the local processes and why cities would choose not to move forward with a project that is completely funded and approved?
Chief Executive Officer, Federation of Canadian Municipalities
No. I'm not involved, or we're not involved, in specific situations in a place like Vancouver or in one particular municipality. There would be variables and circumstances there that we would not know about. It would not be beneficial for anybody if I were to guess at what those might be in that particular case.
Conservative
Wai Young Conservative Vancouver South, BC
You briefly touched upon the process for applications, etc., when you were being questioned by Mr. McGuinty. Could you describe that process for the record and for some of us who are new to this committee or don't know about the process?
Manager, Policy and Research, Federation of Canadian Municipalities
Very simply, there are three separate components to the building Canada fund.
There's a national infrastructure component whereby proponents can apply directly to federal government. That's one pot of money. That's $4 billion of the $14 billion.
There's a small communities component, which is $1 billion of the $14 billion total. There are contribution agreements, framework agreements, between the federal and provincial governments for that. Municipalities apply directly to the province, and there's a clear intake process for that fund.
For the remaining $9 billion of the BCF, which is the provincial-territorial component, it's up to each province to decide how to prioritize applications. Each province has set their own way of going about it. The federal government didn't prescribe one model, so we see different approaches.
Mr. Carlton spoke about how Manitoba had a clear intake process and how Saskatchewan has prioritized 50% of their projects for non-provincial projects. It looks different in every province and territory.
Conservative
Wai Young Conservative Vancouver South, BC
Does the FCM have an advisory committee or some such body where municipalities or provinces can come to you and get this kind of advice?
Chief Executive Officer, Federation of Canadian Municipalities
No, we don't have an advisory body of that nature. What we do have is that in our membership, each of the provincial and territorial municipal government associations is part of our network, part of our membership, and as a lot of this is being driven through the provincial and territorial governments, a lot of the dynamic plays out at that level.
We're working very closely with the provincial associations in each of the provinces and territories so that our understanding and their understanding can be aligned, and so they can do the work they need to do to guide our members in the provincial jurisdictions in which they reside, in order to help them understand the process and the ways of working with the building Canada fund in that particular province or territory.