Environment committee  Thank you very much for the invitation, Madam Chair, and honourable committee members. I'd like to speak to three more high-level themes. Rather than getting into the specifics, I want you to get the mood of heritage in Canada. You can follow along with the slides in front of yo

Environment committee  I can do that, yes, of course.

Environment committee  Okay. That is based on a number of estimated designations at all levels of jurisdiction in the country. There were possibly, as the registrar I can recall, approximately 17,000 to 20,000 designations as of, say, five or six years ago in this country. Of the total building stock i

Environment committee  It does at certain levels of jurisdiction.

Environment committee  Say municipal or provincial, depending on your jurisdiction. Each province and territory has different types of legislation that feed in from municipalities in some cases. So there's stronger protection at the provincial level, and there's not as strong a protection at the federa

Environment committee  Well, for the last 100 to 150 years the concept has been based on age value. What is the value of a place over time? One answer can be the age of it. In general terms, they say 40 to 50 years of age or so, because in the life cycle of a building that's when you need to start addr

Environment committee  Now, yes.

Environment committee  No, the way we address it in the 21st century is we manage places with the way places evolve. We do not simply demolish places because they are not economically viable. There are other options, and we've seen that by many entrepreneurs in Canada. This is the 21st century. If yo

Environment committee  It starts with building maintenance. That's the beginning. The involvement of groups, individuals and resources is first based on the interest demonstrated by a community. The legislation is a tool that can help the people who want to protect a location get involved. The goal is

Environment committee  A number of approaches are possible. I'll tell you about what we did for buildings belonging to the Department of National Defence. The department owns about 50,000 buildings. We chose representative samples of a certain type of building. There were 10,000 buildings, but we prote

Environment committee  After speaking with owners of national historic sites in rural regions, I also think the cost-sharing program needs to be reformed. I've spoken to people in Labrador and in northern British Columbia, and they do struggle because there isn't an equal playing field. This needs to b

Environment committee  In the short term, they would be the things that you can do in terms of the Treasury Board policy. You could revisit it easily within policies driven internally by government, and you can revisit some of the ideas there. Strengthen them. Refine them. They haven't been touched by