Evidence of meeting #73 for Transport, Infrastructure and Communities in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was infrastructure.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Karen Vecchio Conservative Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON
Thanks so much. I absolutely agree with that.
Have you also taken into consideration, in ensuring all the facets and everything.... Have you increased what you're using when it comes to products to ensure that they have reached that research and development level to make sure wind...?
Yes, the steel roof is there, but are you ensuring the roof doesn't come off? What are you using to ensure it is attached properly?
Director and Chief Executive Officer, Horizons Group
When it comes to very technical stuff, to be honest, I don't know. Usually we have an assigned architect in Windsor who does the design in terms of cover and architectural, mechanical and even structural aspects. I count on them to do that for me.
Conservative
Karen Vecchio Conservative Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON
That's okay. I'm very fortunate because I am surrounded by some incredible home builders who are doing a lot of research, so I may have a bit of extra knowledge through them. They take me through the sites all the time.
I also want to ask you about charging the cars.
I know one of the greatest challenges we're hearing, from many home builders, is that yes, people want one car charger, but they also want two. What they're finding is that there isn't enough power. Sometimes, if they're at the end of a road, there isn't going to be enough power for them.
Have you come across any of those challenges? If so, how have you addressed them?
Director and Chief Executive Officer, Horizons Group
So far we are pretty lucky, in that our garages are basically two-car garages. We have sourced a supplier that can do an EV charger, and therefore two EV chargers, at a very modest price of $3,000. That's all. I can install it as part of the building cost. With two cars, maybe one unit for the owner and the other for an additional dwelling, they can share the chargers at the same time, and the cost is very modest.
Conservative
Karen Vecchio Conservative Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON
Excellent.
Mr. Li, I guess one of the challenges is that we've heard there is not enough energy to do this.
You have all the testing and all of that, so will there be enough energy for two electric cars per household?
Director and Chief Executive Officer, Horizons Group
Yes.
As you know, we have a geothermal system. Basically, all the heating and cooling power demands are handled by the geothermal system. What we need to do is install 13 kilowatts of solar photovoltaic panels on the rooftop, and that will basically take care of the power for lighting, cooking, video games and TV and so on. It is also good enough to provide the solar power for the EV chargers.
Conservative
Karen Vecchio Conservative Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON
Perfect. Thank you so much. You are doing incredible work.
I want to switch over to the Climate Institute and speak with Ryan for a moment.
I see some incredible flood mapping that's being done.
I am very fortunate to live on Lake Erie. We have four great ports, which I am really proud of. However, one of the biggest challenges comes from people building on flood plains.
What do you see across Canada when it comes to the flood mapping? Are we ensuring that all of our municipalities and conservation authorities have access to doing that?
Director, Adaptation, Canadian Climate Institute
Thank you for the question.
The state of flood mapping across Canada is not an ideal one. As I mentioned earlier, probably half of households that are at high risk of flooding in Canada are not on a flood map anywhere, so they have no way of knowing about their risk. Municipalities are often left to develop that information on their own. When development comes up and there are time pressures and political pressures associated with moving that development forward, often the mapping can't get done fast enough.
Ontario is lucky to have instituted conservation authorities, which do a lot of that work. Other provinces don't have them. Even in Ontario, conservation authorities often lack resources to be able to keep mapping up to date.
Mapping across the country is generally obsolete. The average age of flood mapping in the country is over 20 years. Essentially, 0% of flood mapping reflects the changing risk of flooding from climate change; it simply reflects historic risk.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Peter Schiefke
Thank you very much, Mr. Ness, and thank you, Ms. Vecchio.
I will begin the next round of questions with Mr. Bousez.
As chair of our committee, but also as the member for Vaudreuil-Soulanges, I want to thank you sincerely for being here and for sharing with the committee our community's experience during the ice storm.
Would you please cite some other examples besides the rain storm example that attest to the challenges the municipalities must overcome, especially with regard to climate change?
Are we prepared to face them?
Prefect, MRC de Vaudreuil-Soulanges
As I briefly mentioned earlier, floods are one of the challenges. Our region is at high risk of flooding. We observed this in 2017, 2019 and once again this year on a lesser scale, when 135 houses were nevertheless affected and may possibly be demolished.
Snowstorms are another challenge. The one that hit on December 24, for example, completely paralyzed our region.
We're dealing with increasingly violent and unpredictable weather phenomena. In the municipality where I'm mayor, microbursts destroyed an entire wooded area in 2016. Even the skating rink was caught in a vortex when it happened.
We'll be experiencing these kinds of unpredictable events more and more often. We're talking about climate warming, but we've nevertheless experienced extremely cold nights, followed by extremely warm days for the season.
So we're observing many phenomena like these. Are we prepared to face them? The answer is no. We're never ready enough, for one thing. Are we learning from our mistakes? In our region, we've learned from the ice storm in 1998, but have we learned enough?
In the very first hours of the last ice storm, only 8 out of 23 municipalities were prepared, which is quite surprising. It's also surprising that some municipalities have halls that can accommodate 1,500 to 2,000 persons but that aren't equipped with generators in winter. If we have places to accommodate people but those places don't have electricity, we have a problem.
Are we ready enough? No. I liked the question that the lady who talked to us about amateur radio asked earlier. We won't be able to communicate with everyone if we don't have more robust radio communication services adapted to climate change and wind, rain and winter storm events.
We can communicate among ourselves, but the fact remains we're never prepared enough. I repeat: events like that won't just occur back home in Vaudreuil-Soulanges. They'll happen all across Canada. You're experiencing them in your regions—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Peter Schiefke
Mr. Bousez, do you think the problem can be attributed to a lack of planning? Is it more a lack of knowledge of the funding that the federal government offers? Do you think the eligibility criteria for those programs exclude the municipalities from access to them?
As prefect, what you think the problem is?
Prefect, MRC de Vaudreuil-Soulanges
You raise several points.
First of all, people don't always have the right information. There are so many different programs that the problem can often be attributed to the difficulty involved in finding the right one rather than to a lack of available funding. If we had a single window, for example, and someone could tell us which program suits us, that would simplify matters. Right now, we really have to sift through the programs and do some research, and that's difficult.
In addition, Canadian and Quebec governments have a special relationship regarding most federal-provincial programs and agreements. Federal assistance first has to go through the province before it reaches the municipalities, which makes no sense. The process should be reviewed in short order.
On the other hand, I believe there's a lack of knowledge of the programs that are available to the municipalities. People are poorly informed. The fact nevertheless remains that there's much to be done to assist and guide the municipalities.
Getting back to adapting to climate change, what do we do when we see municipalities being impacted by floods now? Do we demolish half of the city because it has been affected, or couldn't we build a levee instead? Incidentally, a temporary levee has saved the municipality on two occasions. However, Environment and Climate Change Canada prohibits them from being built.
What do we do when a seniors centre, for example, or a school with 5,000 students has to be protected? There will have to be a little more flexibility in that regard if we really want to adapt to climate change. We won't cause any more damage if we build a levee to protect the city.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Peter Schiefke
Thank you very much, Mr. Bousez.
Next we have Mr. Morrison. The floor is yours.
What we'll do for the last round, colleagues, if it's okay with you, is that since we have 12 minutes left, we'll give all parties three minutes.
I'll turn the floor over to you, Mr. Morrison.
Conservative
Rob Morrison Conservative Kootenay—Columbia, BC
Thank you, Chair. My first question is going to be for Mr. Ness.
I was really happy to hear you talking about proactive investment. We can look to the Sumas floods. We had a billion dollars of damage when the dikes didn't survive, and that was predicted.
I have a unique problem in my riding as well. The Columbia River basin supports over 600 hydroelectric dams. Part of the dam system goes down into the United States and comes back up into Canada. Where it comes back into Canada is the Kootenay River system, and the Kootenay River dikes are failing. We know that. We're predicting it, yet it's really hard to get the federal government to look at proactive investment. We are always reacting, and it costs us significantly more money.
I'm wondering if you can give me an example of how we can stress the importance of proactive investment over reactive investment.
Director, Adaptation, Canadian Climate Institute
Thank you for the question.
In those kinds of examples, when the dikes for flood protection that have been so much the subject of conversation lately are allowed to degrade and are not maintained to the level of service and the level of protection that they were originally designed to provide, we see the consequences during a major flood event. The cost of upgrading and maintaining those dikes would almost certainly have been a fraction of the cost of the damage that resulted. We see this over and over again in all kinds of disasters.
We could have foreseen where the impact would be, as the Insurance Bureau of Canada mentioned in earlier testimony. Most of the flood risk in this country is concentrated in the top few per cent of homes that are at flood risk, so a relatively small investment to protect or perhaps relocate those homes would deliver major benefits in terms of reducing the flood damage that those homeowners, and then the Canadian economy as a whole, have to bear.
Conservative
Rob Morrison Conservative Kootenay—Columbia, BC
Thanks very much.
My last question is for Mr. Nielsen of TransLink. I am a TransLink user whenever I'm in Vancouver. You have a very good system there.
The problem to me, being from rural British Columbia and rural Canada, is that while we're certainly putting a lot of investment into urban areas, our rural communities have opportunities as well. For example, we have a fairly good train system, so we can go to electric trains, but it's really hard to get noticed when we're focusing so much on urban needs. As you are from TransLink in the Lower Mainland, I understand, how can we make our government, the federal government, more aware of the needs in the rural communities as well, where we have distance challenges and weather challenges?
Director, Enterprise Sustainability, TransLink
That's an excellent question.
The Lower Mainland, inclusive of the entire Fraser Valley, needs to be looked at as a system and as a watershed. If we take a watershed view, what happened in our flooding several years ago could have happened right in the hearts of our urban populations as well.
The importance of the Lower Mainland flood strategy across the entire system is that what we do in one part of that overall watershed for diking, improving or taking back orphan dikes or making them seismic-resilient is really important. It can't be just one body doing that, so I think the federal government has a role in that regard.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Peter Schiefke
Thank you, Mr. Nielsen. Thank you, Mr. Morrison.
Next we have Mr. Rogers. You have three minutes, please.
Liberal
Churence Rogers Liberal Bonavista—Burin—Trinity, NL
Thank you, Chair. I'll try to do the best I can in three minutes.
Mr. Ness, in Canada's national adaptation strategy, the federal government sets a number of targets for improving the understanding of the risks that climate change poses to infrastructure. Here are examples:
By 2025, 60% of Canadians are aware of the disaster risks facing their household as a result of climate change.
By 2028, at least 200 out of 250 targeted high-risk areas identified as priorities in collaboration with PTs are covered by new flood hazard maps, produced in accordance with scientific guidance and made available to Canadians
By 2025, 50% of Canadians have taken measures to respond to climate change risks facing their household
Given these targets, what is Canadians' current level of understanding of the disaster risk their households face because of climate change? What steps can Canadians take to address the climate change-related risk facing their individual households?
Director, Adaptation, Canadian Climate Institute
Mr. Chair, I am just confirming that the question is for me.
Director, Adaptation, Canadian Climate Institute
The state of Canadians' understanding of climate risk is very poor. There have been interesting studies done that have shown that a fraction—10% or perhaps even less—of Canadians who live in flood risk zones are aware that they are at risk. There is not only a gap in climate risk information in this country, but also, even where it exists, Canadians aren't accessing it to better understand that they are, in fact, at risk.
To the second question in terms of what Canadians can do, certainly there are some steps that Canadians can take to make their homes more resilient, for example, and to upgrade their homes. There are some government programs at various levels that can help them to do that.
I would also, though, submit that Canadians should look to their elected officials and to their public servants to take the right steps in terms of the big things that need to be done at a collective scale to protect them from risk, whether it's building flood risk protection infrastructure or moving neighbourhoods out of harm's way or the like.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Peter Schiefke
Thank you very much, Mr. Rogers.
Thank you very much, Mr. Ness.
Mr. Barsalou-Duval will have the floor next.
Go ahead for three minutes.
Bloc
Xavier Barsalou-Duval Bloc Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Bousez, you mentioned in your presentation that the key factor when a climate crisis or extraordinary event occurs in a community is communication. It's becoming increasingly difficult to communicate with people because we don't have individuals' cell phone numbers.
Do you think that cell phone directories or people's cell phone numbers should be made available to municipalities, public authorities or even MPs' offices, for example? Should there be an official list so we can contact them and send messages that they should evacuate an area or determine whether they're all right or need help?
I'd like to hear what you have to say about that.