Transport Committee on Feb. 16th, 2017

[The Chair (Hon. Judy A. Sgro (Humber River—Black Creek, Lib.)), Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Welcome, everyone, to meeting number 46 of the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities of the 42nd Parliament. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), the committee is continuing its study of infrastructure and smart communities.

The witnesses today are Travis Peter, director of the Alberta Smart City Alliance, and Cathy Heron, co-founder and councillor. Appearing as individuals, we have Kevin Quigley, from Dalhousie University, and Sehl Mellouli, full professor, Université Laval.

Mr. Quigley, you can start, please. We have about five minutes for your opening remarks.

[Kevin Quigley, Scholarly Director, Dalhousie University, MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance, As an Individual]

Good morning, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the committee for inviting me.

I'm before the committee today to talk about infrastructure planning from my position as an academic and researcher focused on infrastructure and risk governance.

Infrastructure spending on transportation, energy, and telecommunications, for example, is not always the sexiest topic, noted John Ivison, but historically these investments have changed our society. Indeed, new technologies offer similar promise. Infrastructure investments in wireless technologies, high-speed commuter trains, and driverless cars, for example, will not just accommodate the needs of future communities—they will shape them.

But this is largely an expression of hope over experience. In fact, many infrastructure projects fall short of expectations. They run late and overbudget. They are incremental, not transformative. The decision-making process is opaque, and policy decisions are not well coordinated. Infrastructure projects are subject to considerable market, popular, and interest group pressures, which influence the outcomes.

Market pressures will emerge due to fluctuations in economic forecasts and competition over available capital and between different technologies. There's also a disparity between large urban areas and everyone else. While some well-populated regions have considerable transportation infrastructure, less populated areas of the country simply don't have the population or means to build the transportation infrastructure they need.

There are also market failures, which governments should address. Climate change and security concerns, for example, cannot be justified in a private sector cost-benefit analysis. There are also popular pressures. How to pay for the infrastructure will raise controversy on the role of user fees and tolls, and on the role of the private sector in managing, financing, and, in some cases, owning the infrastructure.

These aren't strictly market considerations. They are normative ones. People don't like tolls and user fees, and they look with distrust at P3 arrangements, despite the opportunities they might offer. Moreover, there is always popular pressure to create new infrastructure. Maintaining assets gets less attention despite the cost, and retiring assets can be unpopular despite the savings. Regrettably, our political arrangements can limit co-operation between parties, districts, and orders of government.

Here are some suggestions.

First, we need to get better at regional planning: longer term, more nimble, and better coordinated. For example, New Zealand has a 30-year infrastructure plan. Canada has no such plan. Longer-term planning opens up the opportunity for markets and policy entrepreneurialism, seizing opportunities as they present themselves. It also encourages better coordination between the private sector, government agencies, and all orders of government, taking trade, security, and environment into account.

Second, we need better public engagement and education. We need to build communities that people want to live in. Infrastructure investments are not strictly economic investments carried out by large and at-a-distance multinational corporations. There is an aesthetic aspect. We must also be confident that people will use the technologies we are introducing, which may be a challenge in certain demographics. At the same time, people need to understand the trade-offs and choices between hockey rinks and commuter rail.

Third, we need better asset management. This requires better data collection and more research capacity. Here, Canada is falling behind the U.K. and Australia, which have established multidisciplinary research centres of excellence that don't yet exist in Canada. We should support a research network that includes researchers in computer science, urban planning, public economics, trade, security, environment, and so on.

Finally, we also need clear accountability and transparency with respect to the decisions, and reasonable performance measures. This is particularly so due to the high-level distrust of P3s. Interestingly, according to polling data, people trust small and medium-sized enterprises more than they do government and the finance sector. The government should build on this by including SMEs in its planning.

Ivison notes that infrastructure is not the sexiest topic, and I agree. This is what concerns me most: that its failure to capture the popular imagination in today's media culture means that it might be overlooked. In fact, as we know, infrastructure spending can be in the billions, it can take years to plan, and, for good or for ill, we will all have to live with the outcome for generations. It's worth trying to get it right.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much. We appreciated that.

Ms. Heron.

[Cathy Heron, Councillor, City of St. Albert, and Co-Founder, Alberta Smart City Alliance]

Thank you.

Good morning. First I'd like to introduce Travis Peter. He's also presenting with me. We're from the City of St. Albert, and we're representing the Alberta Smart City Alliance. We're both pleased to be here. Thank you for this opportunity to address you on behalf of the alliance. We're really hoping that we can add some value to this topic, and we'll offer some suggestions near the end.

In my opening comments, I would like to discuss Alberta's current context, share a few examples of communities actively engaged in smart city projects, comment on some broad challenges we see, and offer our recommendations for your consideration.

In Alberta today, despite economic conditions, many communities are growing rapidly, and infrastructure continues to be a key priority. A strategic approach may not often be there, but communities are adopting technologies to improve efficiency, to have better services and quality of life, and to make economic development gains. We also see promising academic activity in pure and applied research, and we're very pleased by the recent interest from Alberta's provincial government.

We have communities such as the City of St. Albert, which my colleague and I are proud to call home, that are acting as demonstration sites. St. Albert is a mid-sized community of 65,000 residents but is considered a national smart city leader. The city realized that its future competitiveness was connected with its ability to innovate and therefore developed a unique Smart City Master Plan, with over 70 strategies to guide and align its efforts into the future. In doing so, city officials engaged over 2,000 residents, community groups, and other stakeholders. St. Albert has built a strong foundation for the future, with dozens of completed smart city projects, and it co-founded the Alberta Smart City Alliance, along with academia and industry.

Some of the specific projects that St. Albert and other Alberta communities are pursuing are quite exciting.

For example, St. Albert is working to install intelligent transportation systems to optimize travel through the community, integrate controls and sensor arrays to assess and manage infrastructure in real time, and build and expand its municipal fibre optic network.

The City of Edmonton is also working in some of these areas. In addition to leading Canada in its open government and analytics programs, Edmonton is partnering on regional transit digital payment services and is offering new digital public services and applications.

In a rural context, Parkland County is aggressively expanding broadband connectivity to all parts of its community through wireless tower infrastructure. Even a small community such as Nanton is working with industry to ensure door-to-door fibre optics connectivity.

These and many other examples demonstrate the great potential across Alberta. We have included St. Albert's Smart City Master Plan in our written submission to provide additional context if necessary.

Notwithstanding examples such as these, the Smart City Alliance sees three key challenges for broader adoption from a smart city perspective.

First, we feel that we have a lack of digital infrastructure. We believe that Canada's economy requires borderless and contiguous connectivity, with national attention not only to rural broadband issues but also to urban areas that require significant improvement to ensure global competitiveness. We also cannot afford to be building core infrastructure without future-ready technology components.

Second, we see that smart cities suffer from fragmentation. We believe that collaboration and partnership models in this area are inconsistent, that investment planning and execution are tactical and siloed, and that slow rates of technology adoption can be attributed in part to low understanding or low capacity to advance these projects.

Third, policy and support frameworks are missing. There is currently no national strategy on smart cities. There is a lack of long-term and dedicated funding to support integration and infrastructure, and incentives for regional and shared applications are missing. The interests of the private sector do not always align with those of the public, and we believe that policies could help change that paradigm and recognize the social capital advantages.

To address these challenges, we have identified three recommendations.

First, we believe that amendments to the Canadian digital strategy are required. This strategy should cover all sectors and focus on digital economy readiness, ubiquitous and borderless connectivity, smart cities, and the Internet of things. In doing so, the strategy should also have a sensitivity to the realities of communities of all sizes.

Second, we recommend the incentivization of a regional smart city strategy focused on solving problems rather than just putting the technologies in place.

Finally, we would encourage long-term and dedicated funding for reliable and connected digital networks, technology integration with infrastructure, local test beds, and applied research in the municipal context. These supports, potentially through the expanded national smart cities challenge, in addition to other municipal infrastructure programs, are critical to address the capacity and infrastructure issues we have noted above.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Mellouli, go ahead for five minutes, please.

[Sehl Mellouli, Full Professor, Université Laval, Faculty of Business Administration, As an Individual]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and good morning, everyone.

Today, I will be presenting the findings of some research conducted by Université Laval, but first of all, I would like to thank the committee for this invitation. I'm very pleased to participate in your work.

I will briefly present a study on smart cities that was conducted in some of the cities around the world and in which I participated with a view to understanding the concept and adapting it to the Canadian context.

This study has shown that smart cities revolve around eight key concepts: technology, organization, politics, economy, governance, natural environment, existing infrastructure, as well as people and communities. My presentation will focus on this last aspect.

Today, we have many questions about smart cities. Earlier, we talked about citizen participation or civic engagement by explaining how citizens become co-creators of this infrastructure.

In co-operation with Quebec City and a non-governmental organization, we have tried to see how we can be more responsive to citizens. To this end, we have tried to develop smart tools. This is one area where investing in artificial intelligence would be beneficial. These smart tools are enabling the city to find out and analyze the needs of its citizens. The information is posted on Twitter, Facebook, dedicated platforms or discussion forums. This allows everyone to understand what people want without having to read the documents.

Today, citizen participation is problematic because people don't know whether they have been involved in the process, whether their opinions have been heard, and whether they have been taken into account.

If we are to build a smart city, not only is infrastructure necessary, but we must also place the citizens at the centre of this development. By so doing, people would express themselves and see that their opinions were considered. This would improve social life and also allow our cities to have local and international leadership. Our cities would become examples on the world stage. Their entrepreneurship and leadership would make them attractive.

Canada could take steps to strengthen co-creation with citizens so that the cities meet their needs and expectations. Technological infrastructure should be developed by integrating people of all ages and all social categories. This would require a change in governance. This would result in cities that listen to citizens, not cities that give orders to citizens.

In our research, we have noticed some barriers in this regard, both in Canada and around the world.

There is the issue of the digital divide. In some cities, 30% of people do not use digital platforms. There are also ethical issues with respect to the use of technologies, such as what people call tracking. Other obstacles are linked to a lack of political will. I turn to citizen participation again. So you have to get people involved in the process and some political will is needed to get there.

Measures that the federal government could take include support for the existing IT infrastructure. It must encourage innovation and co-creation while supporting civil society in its efforts to build smart cities that meet the needs of their citizens.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

Before we open up the floor, I'd like to acknowledge Marc Miller, the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Infrastructure, and Karen McCrimmon, parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Transport.

As a visitor today, we have with us Lesley Hogg, who is from Northern Ireland. Lesley is the Clerk of the Northern Ireland Assembly. She is visiting Canada for a few days.

Welcome. We're very happy to have you with us.

Now we'll go to Mr. Rayes.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My thanks to the witnesses for the time they are devoting to the committee today and their help with its work.

My first question is for you, Madam Heron.

I would first like to congratulate you. I am very happy to have heard what you said. To my knowledge, this is the first time we have heard a witness express such concern about small and medium-sized municipalities.

In this study, we have only heard from representatives of large cities. The situation of the smallest communities is one of my personal concerns. The fact that a municipality of 65,000 people was able to propel itself to the level of smart cities is very interesting, I think. I would like you to tell us more about how you did it in your municipality.

One of the important issues is Internet connectivity. The government has a budget of $500 million for that. I think that's peanuts, given that we are talking about connecting all the regional municipalities in Canada.

What can we do if we don't have access to that connectivity? Do you think municipalities can manage to connect without federal support?

[Cathy Heron]

Thank you for that recognition of our size. We're now at 65,000, so we actually consider ourselves mid-sized.

We're fairly urbanized, as we're just outside of Edmonton, but we have developed this master plan very locally. We call ourselves the Alberta Smart City Alliance, and we've recognized a couple of things through the foundation of the alliance. We've recognized that the smaller municipalities of 1,000-odd people, which have only one administrator running the entire municipality, do not have the capacity for some of the interesting technologies that are helping to improve the efficiencies of the larger municipalities. That initial recognition made us understand that we need to do it in partnerships and with collaboration. Through the alliance, we can share our ideas and share our capacity with administrative staff, etc.

We recognize that broadband is a huge focus in Canada in connecting the very small rural communities, but as a mid-sized community, we were also feeling that while the big cities have the capacity and the smaller and rural municipalities are getting a lot of help from the federal government, the mid-sized ones were getting lost in the conversation. We have taken the approach that we're going to work with both the big and the small and, in that way, we're all going to benefit from the final outcome.

We were really happy to hear about the CRTC ruling about providing broadband with download speeds of 50 megabits per second for everyone in Canada. Even though St. Albert is fairly urban, we don't have that in every corner of our municipality, especially in some of our business parks. If we want to remain competitive in our region, we need to be able to attract businesses, and they need that heavy speed—up and down—to be attracted to our community. In many ways, we are struggling to provide that to them. We feel that the federal government needs to recognize the mid-sized cities as well.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Has your municipality, which has 65,000 inhabitants, had access to federal programs to carry out its smart city project, or is it a local initiative, carried out by people and organizations that have taken charge?

[Cathy Heron]

We have the gas tax, like every other municipality in Canada, but we have not been directing any of that money toward smart city technology. This is really about the grassroots trying to push this forward from our local level.

While I don't like the word “trendy”, smart cities are becoming very elevated in priority in municipal magazines, etc. I've been going to conferences and trying to learn what I can. We did this essentially on our own, without the help of the federal government or even the provincial government. In our alliance, we have had collaboration from IBM, Cisco, and also the University of Alberta. It's really grassroots.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Okay.

In my view, there will never be enough money to solve society's problems, particularly in terms of infrastructure. I have a strong feeling that, in large municipalities, population density means that it would be profitable for private companies to invest in digital infrastructure or projects, but that would be impossible in small municipalities. As you rightly said, a municipality of 1,000, 2,000 or 3,000 people has only one or two employees. The same person acts as secretary, treasurer, general manager and the one who supports the municipal council.

Should the government give priority to funding small and medium-sized municipalities in order to build infrastructure in places where the private sector has no interest in doing so?

Should it, at least, support the private sector to generate a certain profit, so that municipalities can access the infrastructure and then develop smart city projects? If not, do you think there should be a bigger project where the best one wins?

In that case, we know how things tend to unfold, given that big cities have resources, are faster, use their contacts and their lobbyists, and get a bigger piece of the pie. As a result, the regions are again left to their own devices.

[Cathy Heron]

First of all, I would agree that there's never going to be enough money. Even as a municipality we're being asked to make decisions on where to direct funding, just as the federal government is, so I recognize that.

I think we've talked a lot about how the federal government can support us. One of our recommendations is that if there were to be a dedicated funding stream recognizing smart city initiatives, we would like to see preference given to applications submitted in partnership as a region. St. Albert is part of the capital region, which includes 24 municipalities. We plan together. We have a growth plan together.

The provincial government has started to recognize granting applications that are partnership-based and collaboration-based. If we were looking for money to broaden the fibre optic network in the region, for example, I think it would be beneficial for the federal government to be able to say, “Look at Edmonton, St. Albert, and little Morinville, all working together to get the highway of fibre done as a team instead of individually.” Because—

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Ms. Heron, I have to interrupt.

[Cathy Heron]

That's fine.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

I try to be generous to my colleagues, but sometimes....

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Mr. Fraser.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Thank you very much.

I think you'll find that my questioning picks up right where Mr. Rayes left off.

Ms. Heron, I also come from an area that's characterized by small towns and rural communities. One of the challenges we have is that we have multiple municipalities. They recently underwent a referendum. They have no interest in amalgamation, but there seems to be an attitude of willingness to co-operate.

Do you have any suggestions as to how municipalities could get together to form a regional strategy for smaller municipalities that would apply across the board?

[Cathy Heron]

I mentioned our capital region board. There was actually a ministerial order by the province that we had to work together. That's in the Edmonton region. Further south in Alberta, the Calgary region does not have that same ministerial order, and they have struggled in trying to find that collaboration.

I guess that I almost would want to point to the success of the capital region board. We have developed this growth plan. The board voted unanimously for it. We are talking about doing economic development as a region instead of as individual municipalities, etc., so maybe pointing to successful examples of regional collaboration is the way to go.

Eight years ago, it was mandated by the province. There were a lot of negative feelings about that. There are still some residual feelings there, but the successes and the benefits of belonging to a region far outweigh the local autonomy losses.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

With the smaller municipalities that make up a region like this, I find that a lot of them don't necessarily have the capacity individually to do more than what they need to do. That's because a lot of people are doing this part-time, or maybe as a retirement hobby. They're still doing great work, but do you have suggestions for how the federal government potentially could help build the capacity to design a smart city plan for the long term?

[Cathy Heron]

I think that even just having this conversation is helpful.

As we mentioned earlier, one of our recommendations is to amend the digital strategy to include a national strategy on smart cities. A lot of this, as was mentioned by one of the previous presenters, is a matter of political will. What I see is that around the table you will have two mayors of different municipalities of the same size, where one is very actively engaged in the regional collaboration aspect and one has their hand up and is not buying into it.

There's a lot of political will that needs to change. I think that needs to come with an understanding of the benefits. They're not just on infrastructure. The benefits are just so broad. There are social capacity benefits as well. Earlier, we talked about digital inclusion. If we're moving at such a fast rate of speed towards a digital world in which there might be online voting and you can pay for your dog licence online and so on, if somebody doesn't have access to that, they're excluded, and they're not participating in our society. We need to make sure they are.

I also think that one of the successes of our master plan was the huge uptake by our residents. We had a committee. There were two city councillors, staff, and residents on the committee, and we engaged with many citizens.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

That's a good segue, as I have a question for Mr. Quigley as well.

You discussed during your remarks the need to effect a culture change to get the public to buy into infrastructure as a sexy topic, which quite honestly is not when you're talking about water pipes. How can we get that level of engagement with the public to create a smart city strategy?

[Kevin Quigley]

I would suggest the point I raised as one possibility, which I think maybe picks up on the point that Cathy was making as well about how you engage people. I think one of the ways might be to get better data.

There's a really great research centre at Cambridge, which is a smart infrastructure centre, where they're thinking about all the technology that's available for us to use to get better data to show what assets we are using and which ones we are not. If we can get better data, we might be able to actually expose the data that some of the assets and some of the infrastructure we have, we don't need, and they're very costly to maintain.

If we could put that kind of data in front of people and say that we're spending a lot of money maintaining assets we don't need and here's where we're going, and that we could be investing in or repurposing infrastructure for these reasons, I think that might be quite a seductive argument.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Mr. Mellouli, thank you for being with us today.

I have the same question that my colleague asked earlier. How can we engage people to develop a smart city strategy that meets their needs?