Human Resources committee  Certainly there are levy issues, as Mr. Goldstein says. A lot of it is zoning. I could tear down my house here in Ottawa tomorrow and build a McMansion, but if I want to build a triplex and house three families, I would be facing years of red tape. How the accelerator can help

Human Resources committee  A lifetime ago, I was head coach of Canada's national dodgeball team; and yes, we do have one. We won gold back in 2013 and 2014. I would like to say to Ms. Kusie as well, I think my comments may have been misinterpreted. I am certainly not advocating more of the same from the f

Human Resources committee  I would echo Mr. Pomeroy's sentiment. It's actually unclear to us what that housing accelerator should be trying to accomplish. I think affordability should be part of that, but I also think we need to think through environmental outcomes. In Ontario, we are losing 175 acres of f

Human Resources committee  I think we need to focus more on tying these funds to outcomes and particular reforms. I know a number of parties, for instance, have talked about how if cities are getting transit funding, they should be required to allow a certain height, duplexes or triplexes by right. I thi

Human Resources committee  I certainly think there is a role. For the lower end of the population, it's just going to be too expensive to assume that they play in the market rate space. With that said, I think a lot of the barriers to doing that are regulatory ones that hit both market rate housing and sub

Human Resources committee  The first thing we need to look at are all of the disincentives in the system to building larger units. I agree with Mr. Goldstein that a lot of the tax and development charges we have at a municipal level incentivize the building of many smaller units rather than family-sized

Human Resources committee  Thank you for having me here today. My name is Mike Moffatt and I'm the senior director of the Smart Prosperity Institute, a clean economy think tank housed at the University of Ottawa. Over the past five years, home prices have doubled in Halifax, in Kitchener-Waterloo and on V

Environment committee  I think the biggest thing on the household side is just keeping organic materials out of landfill. Here in Ottawa we have our green bins. We see this as being a useful project that other municipalities could follow. I'm originally from London, Ontario, and we don't have that ther

Environment committee  I think a lot of it is getting prices right on things like tag programs for garbage and trying to price that externality so people are taking into account the costs of their actions when they take them. That was a lot of that report. I believe it was my colleague Stephanie Cairns

Environment committee  That's correct.

Environment committee  We should produce more, but we should produce more through innovation. I don't accept this idea that this necessarily has to be at a cost to each other. Again, if we look at the agricultural industry across Canada, our output has increased, but our greenhouse gas emissions have

Environment committee  I agree, and I would go further. The risk that governments run in using those instruments is that they're picking winners and losers, in many ways, by setting those performance standards or those technology standards. It's essentially, “You do this; you don't do this”. In some se

Environment committee  I'm just trying to think.

Environment committee  Yes. I do. Again, this is an industry where I think governments, both federal and provincial, do need to tread very carefully. We have a sector where, again, margins are low and they are susceptible to international competition. The last thing we want to see is a reduction in whe

Environment committee  I would say that, in many cases, the carbon tax is the most cost-effective way of doing that. Does that necessarily mean it's necessary? Well, no. We could find other ways of accomplishing that, but those ways, in some instances, will be more expensive. I would say, with agricul