Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Aboriginal Peoples
Issue 7 - Evidence - May 18, 2016
OTTAWA, Wednesday, May 18, 2016
The Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples met this day at 6:46 p.m. to study best practices and on- going challenges relating to housing in First Nation and Inuit communities in Nunavut, Nunavik, Nunatsiavut and the Northwest Territories; and for the consideration of a draft agenda (future business).
Senator Dennis Glen Patterson (Deputy Chair) in the chair.
The Deputy Chair: I'd like to welcome all honourable senators, members of the public who are watching this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples here in the room, via CPAC or the web. I'm Dennis Patterson from Nunavut, deputy chair of the committee, and today I have the privilege of chairing in place of Senator Lillian Dyck.
I would now like to ask my colleagues, please, to introduce themselves.
Senator Moore: I'm Wilfred Moore from Nova Scotia.
Senator Oh: Senator Oh from Ontario.
Senator Enverga: Tobias Enverga from Ontario.
Senator Raine: Nancy Greene Raine from B.C.
Senator Tannas: Scott Tannas from Alberta.
The Deputy Chair: The mandate of our committee is to examine legislation and matters relating to the aboriginal peoples of Canada generally. This evening, we continue to hear testimony on our Northern housing study, with a mandate to study on best practices and ongoing challenges relating to housing in First Nation and Inuit communities in Nunavut, Nunavik, Nunatsiavut and the Northwest Territories.
Tonight, we're going to take the time to review a draft letter that was discussed last week. It is a letter to the minister on a matter that's considered somewhat urgent. But before we do so, I would suggest we hear from our first witness, who is standing by.
Senator Moore: Absolutely.
The Deputy Chair: Then we'll attend to the letter — perhaps before we hear our second witness.
I'm pleased to begin with Ms. Mylène Riva, Assistant Professor, Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Laval, who joins us by video conference. She's an expert on the social consequences of the housing issues we've been studying.
Ms. Riva, you have the floor. We will have questions afterward.
Mylène Riva, Assistant Professor, Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Laval, as an individual: First and foremost, thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to present in front of the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples on the really important issue of housing in indigenous communities across Canada.
Tonight I would like to bring you perhaps a different perspective from what you will have heard in your meetings with experts across Canada. My research activities and expertise pertain mostly to housing as an important determinant of indigenous peoples' health. Most of my work is conducted in the Arctic, so the ideas that I will convey tonight are most relevant for Inuit populations. However, there are similarities in housing histories and issues in indigenous communities across Canada, so parallels can be made.
I sent the presentation in PDF. I'm not sure if you have a print copy with you. We're going to page 2.
The Deputy Chair: Yes, we do have copies. Thank you.
Ms. Riva: Living in satisfactory housing conditions is one of the most important aspects of people's lives. Housing is essential to meet basic needs, such as shelter, but the human right to housing is more than just four walls and a roof. Housing should offer a place to sleep and rest, where people feel safe, where they have privacy, where people have a personal place, a place where they can raise their families and a place where they can live in dignity and harmony.
There are different ways through which housing can influence health and well-being. This is on page 3 of the documents I sent.
The history around housing and housing policies is, of course, very relevant to consider with respect to their long- lasting effects on housing situations across many indigenous communities today. There are the structural factors associated with housing, and by this I refer to the integrity of the house, whether the house is in need of repairs or not; issues of overcrowding; exposure to physical, biological and chemical agents; and issues with indoor air quality. Structural factors of the house have been documented in scientific research in relation to various physical and mental health outcomes in indigenous populations, but even more so in non-indigenous populations.
There's also the wider community conditions within which the house is located, and by this I refer to the health- promoting or damaging resources in a community — for example, access to recreational space, access to good-quality food, health care resources in communities and how these resources may be important for people's health and wellness.
Then there are the psychosocial factors associated with the house environment, and these really refer to the perception that people have of their housing environments. These psychosocial factors are especially relevant to consider when looking at housing issues and situating issues that are seen today within historical contexts. Psychosocial factors are also important to consider when preparing future housing strategies and policies and also when thinking about housing construction.
On page 4 is a quote by Nellie Cournoyea, who was then the Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer of the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation. She said at the Northern Housing Forum that one of the consistent stresses identified by her community was social housing. People living in social housing do not feel in control of their lives, and this lack of control creates extreme stress, leading to mental anguish and addiction.
Page 5 brings me to the idea of house versus home. Having a roof over one's head is certainly necessary and important, but it's not sufficient for having a home. A home can bring ontological security, which is a big word to say that it is a sense of constancy and a sense of control a person has over their social or material environments, which in turn can influence their identity development and their self-actualization and provides a secure place to live one's life. These ideas of ontological security and psychological factors, although they are not labelled that way when I speak to people in the community, are nonetheless recognized and discussed as important things to consider in relation to housing, especially in the Arctic.
On page 6, you have quotes that the Nunavimmiut shared with me. Nunavimmiut are Inuit from Nunavik, which is the Inuit territory in northern Quebec. These are quotes that people shared with me when I asked them about how they perceived their housing condition, and you'll see that what they had to say really relates to the issue of having control over one's life, having the possibility or not having the possibility of choosing where to live and the question of identity, recognizing oneself in the house.
"When houses are attributed, they do not consider what would be ideal. Families are just moved to the next house available, no matter what size of house they would need. Houses have no design. They are dull. They all look the same. Houses are not comfortable to live in and to be with family. We don't feel proud. These are houses; they are not homes.''
These psychosocial factors have become one of the central arguments of the project that is currently under way in Nunavik and Nunavut, on page 7. This project is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and ArcticNet. With this project, we're trying to assess the impact of moving to a new house for health and well-being for Inuit families in Nunavik and Nunavut. Most of the studies conducted today looking at housing conditions and health among indigenous populations are cross-sectional, so we can talk about association but we cannot talk about causality. If housing conditions change, what will happen to people's health? Will it improve? We would hope so, but we just don't know yet.
One of the objectives of this project is to see whether improvement in housing conditions that would happen when people move to newly built social housing is associated with better psychosocial factors, which can in turn influence health.
If you go to page 8, there's a table showing you examples of questions that we ask people in Nunavik and Nunavut, and we ask whether or not they agree or disagree with several statements. Here I present to you results in a positive way. Rather than saying 40 per cent of our study participants live in overcrowded conditions, 60 per cent don't. That's in Nunavik. Nunavut has different figures. Along with regional organizations who are involved in this study — so Nunavut Housing Corporation, Kativik Municipal Housing Bureau, the health board, Department of Health of the Government of Nunavut — we collectively decided that it's better to focus on the positive so that it's easier for partners to this project to use the numbers and the information generated to set objectives for improvements in the respective regions, but it's also less stigmatizing than always focusing on what is not going well in the regions.
In the table, you have the proportion of people who said they agree or strongly agree with statements related to identity, control, safety, privacy and satisfaction. "My home provides a good place to live my life,'' 50 per cent agree or strongly agree. "I feel in control; I can decide what happens,'' 40 per cent. Seventy per cent reported feeling safe in their house; 50 per cent reported having privacy; and about 50 per cent reported being satisfied with their house.
By presenting these numbers in a positive way, by no means do I want to say that some people are not also experiencing distressing psychosocial factors in relation to their house environment. If you go to the next page, page 9, we looked at the psychosocial factors of overcrowding. We know that overcrowding is very high in the Arctic and in other indigenous communities in Canada. However, if we focus on people who are not living in overcrowded dwellings, these people were more likely to report more favourable psychosocial factors compared to people living in overcrowded housing conditions.
Nunavummiut who were not living in overcrowded dwellings felt that they had more privacy, that they were more satisfied with their house, that they had more control over what happened in their house environments and that their house provided a good place to live their life. So their house was starting to feel like a home.
If you go to the following page, page 10, right now we are actually in the data collection. We collected data for this project before people moved to a house, and now after. My team is in one community in Nunavik right now seeing participants who have moved to a new house. When we asked the question, "Do you feel at home in your house?'' you have some of their responses: "I feel like a king. I feel more relaxed. I feel proud, safe to have my own place. It's a good place to sleep. It's my home. I'm more comfortable to have my own stuff, my own rules for my safety.''
The issues of safety and having their own place arise as important factors in relation to housing.
Another aspect of housing that I would like to discuss tonight is the cultural adequacy of housing. Cultural adequacy is one of the elements of the right to adequate housing in The Right for Housing Toolkit developed by the United Nations. This referred to the construction of housing, including building materials and methods, that must take cultural identity into account. This is important if we want houses to start feeling like homes.
There are different initiatives across Canada that I am aware of, regional or local initiatives. For example, in Nunavik there's the Pivallianiq program, which is a multi-component program. When tenants move into a new house, they receive a visit from the local housing committee. They have basic tips on home maintenance. These tips are really good. Even for me as a new homeowner; I have no idea what to do with a new house. This information is very useful, and people are appreciative of this program.
People can choose their paint colour. Just having that added intervention, giving people the option of choosing the colour of their wall, is a lot cheaper than building new houses, but it could go a long way in improving people's satisfaction with their house.
Yes, more houses are needed, but not just any type of house. I know the Senate is trying to find solutions and best practices to improve the housing situation in many indigenous communities across Canada. I acknowledge that there's a huge housing backlog that needs to be addressed. Several thousands of houses need to be built overnight across Canada to alleviate the housing needs.
However, I'm hopeful that eventually housing construction will not just be in a crisis mode, responding to a crisis, but that time will be taken to sit down with the communities to talk about what type of houses people would like to have: how big of a room, the shape of the room, more bedrooms, fewer bedrooms, bigger communal spaces.
These activities, design charettes, are currently being led across the North. Inuit, for example, in Nain have sat down with Alain Fournier — whom you've probably seen as part of this committee — to design houses in collaboration with Inuit, but also to involve more Inuit in construction. There's always the argument that foremen don't have the time to train local staff because the building season is too short. This regional and local capacity could be built over time, and that would be very useful for the region as well.
Then there's the issue of housing inequality. If you go to page 12, there are pictures of houses for schoolteachers right in front or right behind houses for Inuit, and that's in Kuujjuaq. People are seeing these inequalities daily. I know that they're trying to change the situation. It's not just for the school board, but it's also for the health board and for any regional organization, especially in Nunavik.
If you're White and you're coming to work up North, you're going to have a house that is fully furnished, you're going to pay a symbolic rent, and one or two persons will probably live in a three-bedroom apartment. If you're an Inuk working as a teacher, having the same responsibility as a White teacher, you're not allowed to live in one of these houses with your family. It's expected that, since you are from the community, you should be able to find a house to live in. However, there are no houses in the community.
That is something to take into consideration. People say, "Why can they have these nice designs of houses, whereas with ours, it's all the same, in all communities?''
If you go to the last slide, on page 13, I'd like to sum up what I've just said by quoting Andy Moorhouse, who's now with Makivik Corporation in Nunavik but who was president of Kativik Municipal Housing Bureau in 2008. He said that housing is not the only issue, but all issues relate to housing.
In order to address the housing crisis, for lack of a better term, the housing situation in many indigenous communities across the country, we need to look at it from different perspectives and have different sectors of society involved in addressing the situation. Thank you.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Riva. I'd like to begin by asking you about your research. Do I understand from your presentation that it's going on now and that you don't necessarily have conclusions or findings yet that you could share with us? Is that correct?
Ms. Riva: Yes. I have findings from baseline, so before people moved into the house. The table with numbers that you've seen, those are results from interviews that were conducted with 136 people from Nunavik and 155 from Nunavut, in six communities in each region, before they got to move to a new house.
In that project, we have information on housing conditions, psychosocial factors related to the house environment, community conditions — so whether they feel their community is safe, perceived sense of cohesion in the community — and also we ask questions about mental and physical health, but the real objective of the project is to see whether a change in housing condition is influencing health.
We are now interviewing people 15 to 18 months after they move to a new house. There were 150 social housing units that were being built in Nunavik in 2014 and 210 across 18 communities in Nunavut in 2014-15. We saw the people before they moved to the house, and now we're seeing them after.
The full results of this study will not be ready before the end of this year. We're in Nunavik now. We're hoping to see most of the people. We're probably going to have to go back in the fall. In Nunavut, the post-move survey will happen this fall and early winter 2017.
The Deputy Chair: Has the baseline work that you have done been written up?
Ms. Riva: Yes, and we're working on it. We're also working in a participatory project. I am the lead researcher, but Inuit organization partners are on an equal footing with me. We have agreed to a structure of work where the written work produced from this report is shared with them first, and then we decide together how we are going to publicize that information.
I am more than happy to engage in a discussion with the Senate committee to see what information would be most useful and then come back to my partners.
We're working on a one-page summary brief of structural housing conditions, psychosocial factors related to housing, perceived community conditions, and also baseline health information.
Once that's done, I'll discuss it with everyone around the table about sharing it, but it has to be shared with the partners within the project first.
The Deputy Chair: I totally understand and respect that, but on behalf of the committee I could say that although we fully understand phase 2 is yet to be completed, the first phase that provided a baseline of data would certainly be of interest to us in describing the consequences of overcrowding and the current problems in housing as we develop our report. I could put that request to you on behalf of the committee and say that we would hope you and your partners would be willing to share that with us for a good cause, which would be to illuminate the problem.
Ms. Riva: Absolutely.
The Deputy Chair: We'll leave that with you, and you could interface with our clerk on that.
Ms. Riva: Definitely. It will go forward. I just have to be open with the partners.
Senator Raine: Thank you for appearing before the committee. All of us are interested in drawing on your experience in this field and maybe getting some of your personal observations based on your experience and education.
I note that you did a study in Greenland, "Household crowding and psychosocial health among Inuit in Greenland.'' Could you give us the conclusions of that study?
Ms. Riva: Data from this project were from the Inuit health in transition, the survey that was conducted in Greenland. It's a repeat cross-sectional survey, so every seven years this survey goes through selected communities across Greenland. In that study, we looked at overcrowding, which is less of a problem in Greenland than it is in Canada and Northern Canada, but it is nonetheless still a problem.
We looked at household overcrowding, and in this paper, as in other papers I have written on crowding and health in the Arctic, I do not necessarily abide by only one definition of "crowding,'' because it is contextual on cultural grounds. Does Statistics Canada's definition of more than one person per room uphold in the context of the North? We still don't know.
I use different measures of crowding to define the housing situation in Greenland, and we were looking at the impact on mental symptoms of living in an overcrowded house. I use brackets here because there were two questions in the survey. In the past two weeks, did you feel depressed or sad or anxious or were you fearful of something? These are not standardized measures of mental health, so we refer to that as mental symptoms. We observed that in houses where there were more people per room, so in houses that were overcrowded, people were more likely to report feeling depressed but not feeling anxious. Again, these are not standardized measures of mental health.
We also looked at binge drinking. Measuring overcrowding can be tricky in the Arctic, I found, using data from regional health surveys, because sometimes overcrowding can be seen as a measure of social supports. The more people in the house, it can sometimes be protective for health, but it can sometimes be bad for health. In that paper, we also look at binge drinking. But if we only look at the number of people in the house, the more people in the house, people are less likely to engage in binge drinking.
That's a bit counterintuitive, but that got us questioning the structure of the households. With more people in the house, overcrowding usually means more children in the house, and more children in the house sometimes will act as a buffer for people's behavior, so parents might be less inclined to drink in front of their children. It's when we looked at housing composition that we saw an association in the direction that we could have expected. It was in households where there were more than two adults that we saw that the risk of binge drinking was higher, and it was higher especially among women, but also in households with more than two adults. So we have to be careful about our measure of "crowding.''
It relates to other studies that we've seen. There are studies conducted on overcrowding and mental health in non- indigenous populations, and we see an association. I have a student working right now on children with externalized behaviour at 10, 11 years old and again at 16 years old when they live in overcrowded situations in Nunavik. We don't have the results of that yet.
This research is building up, and I'm trying to contribute to it because most of the literature on housing and health, especially in indigenous settings, pertains to respiratory health.
If we look at mental health and distress, and I have people in the Department of Health in Nunavut who asked me to look at the data from the health survey that was conducted in 2007, 2009 in relation to psychological distress and suicide ideation, this has not been documented in the scientific literature yet. It's a very sensitive issue and topic, especially this year, but there is more research being conducted on the topic of housing conditions and mental health among indigenous populations in Canada.
Senator Enverga: Thank you, Ms. Riva, for your presentation. Your presentation just confirmed some of our thoughts when we visited the Nunavut area.
I was struck by your statement that overcrowding is not really bad after all, but it's actually sometimes good because of the social dynamic, because people help each other. Can you expand on why you would say it's sometimes better?
Ms. Riva: I would certainly not like to be quoted on this, because it's just what we see roughly when we look at data from health surveys. But when we start digging, we see associations in the direction that we might expect, but that's coming from a Southern perspective.
There's something we might be able to look at in our database, and I'm interested in looking at that with regional health surveys. There are situations when people live in overcrowded conditions but do not show psychological distress or they report to be very healthy. This is just anecdotal, but from what I have seen in the people we've interviewed, it often happens that families who live 15 in four-bedroom apartments but who camp out on the land or have the means to go out and spend some time outside in the community, overcrowding for these families might be less problematic.
Overcrowding might become problematic when there is one or more persons who has a problem with alcohol or drug consumption or when there is someone in the household that creates social problems within the house. It can become a problem for women who live with their in-laws. It could be vice versa for men, but we heard less of that. But for women living with in-laws, because they have nowhere else to live, that can become a stressful situation.
I don't want to be quoted as saying that overcrowding might sometimes be good, but there are different ways of conceptualizing overcrowding. If we just look at the number of persons per room or the threshold of more than one person per room, then we might be missing important information.
When looking at overcrowding, we always focus on the 2006 figures: 49 per cent of the population in Nunavik lives in overcrowded houses, but 50 per cent doesn't. What is the health of these people? What can we learn from them? What are the coping mechanisms? Why do they not live in an overcrowded house? Or what are the coping mechanisms of people who live in overcrowded houses but who report good health?
I think that is something we need more information on.
Senator Enverga: Don't worry; we won't quote you that overcrowding is sometimes good.
More related to overcrowding, we know sometimes there are psychological issues in people in overcrowded houses. You heard about the suicides in First Nations or Inuit lands. Do you think overcrowding or bad home situations — not necessarily in-laws — are causes of people taking their life because of overcrowding or bad home situations?
Ms. Riva: I don't know about overcrowding, but bad house situations or bad childhood experiences, probably. I'm definitely not an expert on suicide. I was in Kuujjuaq earlier this spring for three days, and there were two suicides when I was there. These two added to three more that had happened the month before. I heard that the youth that unfortunately took their own lives were from very good, well-functioning families. I don't know if it's the situation for most of them, and I cannot say if overcrowding plays a role. That's why my colleagues in Nunavut wanted me to look at the data to see if there is an association and if housing could be related to psychological distress in the Canadian Arctic and eventually to suicide ideation and passing to the act.
Senator Moore: Thank you, Ms. Riva, for being here. I want to ask you some questions with regard to the chart on page 8 of your brief. You said that you interviewed a total of 136 people in Nunavik and 155 in Nunavut; is that correct?
Ms. Riva: Yes.
Senator Moore: When you interviewed 136 people in Nunavik, were they all Inuit or were some of them from the South?
Ms. Riva: I think two were from the South. One was Cree.
Senator Moore: Were they couples, or were those individual homes? Of the 136 participates, was that 60-some couples?
Ms. Riva: It's made up of 125 households for 136 participants, so there were a few people from the same houses. We recruited people who were on the wait list for social housing, and we recruited the person whose name was on the wait list and whichever adults were going to move with them. We were expecting more couples, and some are couples but the other person just didn't want to come and be involved in this project.
In Nunavik, for example, there were a lot of one-bedroom apartments built in 2014, so that would be geared to a one-person household or maybe a couple without children.
Senator Moore: You mentioned that you spoke with individuals in six communities. Were they three in each, or what was the distribution?
Ms. Riva: Six communities in Nunavik and six in Nunavut.
Senator Moore: So you were anticipating 150 new housing units to be built.
Ms. Riva: In Nunavik, yes.
Senator Moore: How are you going to do the next part this fall and early winter? What do you do? Do you go to just those 150? Do you talk to others who might not have moved and how they're doing today?
Ms. Riva: The way I understand the question is from an each epidemiological perspective as to whether we have a control group.
I will explain the study in more detail. We recruited people in 6 of the 18 communities in Nunavut where houses were being built in 2014.
This started out as a grant from CIHR of — this is public information — of $200,000. To send my team into one community for a week to interview 15 people, it was $15,000. Once we got the initial funding from this study, that prevented us from including a control group. After people moved, we are only interviewing those who have moved. We are not interviewing those who didn't move.
Senator Moore: Yes, okay.
Ms. Riva: In terms of strength or proof of study design, we are not going to be able to say without a doubt that moving to a new house improves or doesn't help because we don't have a control group. However, there are ways that we will be able to make up a control group using statistical techniques. Our study design is good, but it's not the best.
Senator Moore: Do you intend to go to the 150 new homes of the people that did move? That's a pretty solid control group, isn't it? It seems pretty indicative for something.
Ms. Riva: Of the 136 participants, 92 were able to move to a new house, and we are seeing these 92 participants.
Senator Moore: Good. What about the others? There are 150 houses, so there are 60 others. Is it a matter of funding?
Ms. Riva: No, we're not able to interview everyone. This is a study. In the North, people are generally very tired of researchers asking questions. We went into the communities where social housing was being built, and we invited participants on the wait list for social housing to participate in this study. We oversampled the wait list by 25 per cent knowing that not everyone that we would meet in 2014 would get to move into a new house. That's why, of the 136, only 92 per cent moved.
To be honest with you, right now, in the follow-up, we have less than 50 per cent. If we keep doing it as we are, we're only going to see 50 per cent of the 92 per cent of the people who moved.
Senator Moore: It wasn't 92 per cent; it's 92 interviewees, right?
Ms. Riva: Sorry, 92 individuals.
Senator Moore: You're going to get half of them, maybe.
Ms. Riva: Yes. It's very difficult.
Senator Moore: Well, you should have been with us.
Ms. Riva: Well, no, because it's an independent research project funded by Canadian money.
Senator Moore: I know. So was ours.
Ms. Riva: Yes, but with different goals.
Senator Moore: We got into some places you probably couldn't have. We probably could have helped you.
Senator Oh: Thank you, Ms. Riva, for appearing before the committee.
You talk a lot about the overcrowded housing and living conditions. How big are the two-bedroom, three-bedroom and four-bedroom homes that you mentioned? What size are they? How many square feet are they?
Ms. Riva: That's a good question. I'd have to look it up.
Senator Oh: How big are the houses?
Ms. Riva: Off the top of my head, I don't know. I can pull it up. A two-bedroom house is definitely a lot smaller than a two-bedroom house in the South.
Senator Oh: How many square feet?
Ms. Riva: Hold on.
The Deputy Chair: Dr. Riva, if that information is not readily available —
Ms. Riva: It's not readily available. It's somewhere on my computer.
The Deputy Chair: Perhaps you could kindly let the committee know later?
Ms. Riva: Yes.
The Deputy Chair: We did look at houses, and they are smaller than the typical southern home, for sure.
Senator Oh: Can you also provide, on average, how many people are living in two-bedroom and three-bedroom houses?
Ms. Riva: No, but that information is available from the Kativik Municipal Housing Bureau.
Senator Oh: If possible, could you get the number of how many people are living in two-bedroom and three- bedroom homes?
The Deputy Chair: Senator Oh and Dr. Riva, we have been in Nunavik and Nunavut, and we were given that data by the appropriate authorities in those regions. We won't ask you to duplicate that effort.
Ms. Riva: Thank you.
Senator Raine: This is maybe a completely out-of-the-box type of question, but in doing our study, we have had some incredible presentations. One of them was by an airship company that has a proposal to airlift fully built houses from manufacturing locations in the South. They could be designed specifically for the Arctic. They could even be done by indigenous companies. They would airlift them to foundations that were in place in the Arctic.
My question draws on your experience as someone who studied housing. As somebody that's a researcher, obviously you've got your eyes open and your brain is working. You mentioned that people want their own house, something that's personalized a bit to them. Do you think it would be possible to have a catalogue of all different kinds of houses with all different kinds of colours and shapes and sizes of the rooms so that a person in the North could order what they wanted from a catalogue and it could be delivered by an airship? Do you think that's a possibility, or is that pie in the sky, or a house in the sky?
Ms. Riva: I saw that report in the news, and we were just exchanging emails. It's a fantastic project. I don't know how much that would cost; probably a lot.
Senator Raine: If you don't mind me, I'm going to interrupt because I've come to the conclusion that right now we're spending a lot of money building houses but it's not an investment because they don't last and they don't work.
Senator Moore: Exactly.
Senator Raine: I would rather spend a lot more for something that's going to work and will last as an investment. We have to figure out how to do that, so don't worry about the cost.
Ms. Riva: Okay. Well, I think it would. I'm going to let Trevor Bell, who's going to speak after me, talk about the padding and the permafrost and where you can put houses in the communities. The houses couldn't be any shape and size because of permafrost.
I've heard people say, "Well, we've been to the South. We've seen the houses that you live in. Why can't we have these houses up North? Why can't we have a basement in communities where there's no permafrost?''
That would certainly be appealing, but they would need to own the house, right? It wouldn't be social housing that would be flown in from the South, and that's a different issue altogether. There is rent-to-own, too. That program existed back in the 1970s. It worked well, but it was abolished. Several people that I talked to would not buy a house overnight, but they would be very much interested in renting to own. Maybe that could be a part of this program.
Senator Raine: Thank you very much.
The Chair: You handled that well, Dr. Riva. I think it was a bit outside your study terms. Thank you.
Senator Enverga is our last questioner.
Senator Enverga: Thank you for joining us again. I can see from your presentation the housing inequality. It even says here, "Houses for schoolteachers are very nice. I would like to have the same house.''
When we were in Kuujjuaq, it was mentioned that a lot of the teachers' houses were boarded up when they were not teaching. What's the effect of this? Does it cause more depression? When students see teachers' houses boarded up with nobody there and it not being used, is that depressing for students to see? Is that part of their overall psychological depression?
Ms. Riva: I don't know. It's not just for the kids but also for their colleagues at work, the Inuit who are in the school system teaching, or the vice principal, who don't have staff housing either. I know they board some of the houses up for the summer.
When there's a major renovation of houses in the North, I think families have three choices: They get a voucher to go stay at the hotel; they are given a tent, which I've heard is not of good quality; or they're given money to go live with a family. This is for months at a time while their house is being refurbished. Why not use these houses that are vacant in the summer to house people in the community?
Rules have been put in place. It probably makes sense on paper. I've heard of people, a young Inuk man, for instance, who moved to Montreal to be by a regional organization. If you live 50 kilometres away from the village, even if you're from another village and moving to Kuujjuaq or wherever, then you're entitled to have a house. So he moved to Montreal in order to be able to have a house to work for a regional organization, even though he's from the community.
Senator Enverga: You mentioned that when a house is being built, renovated or refurbished, they are given money to stay in a hotel or stay in a tent. Who provides the money? Who provides the tent?
Ms. Riva: I think it's the —
Senator Enverga: Is it the Makivik Corporation?
Ms. Riva: No, I think it's the regional housing organization, Kativik Municipal Housing Bureau. You could check with Watson Fournier or Jean François Ménard who could provide more information, but that's how the situation was explained to me. I know that tenants are offered different options, and none of them are respectful, in a way.
Senator Enverga: I was surprised about the tent. I think we should look more into that.
Ms. Riva: Yes.
Senator Enverga: Thank you.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Riva, for this testimony and for your willingness to consider interfacing with the committee further on as we continue our study. Thank you very much for your assistance.
Colleagues, before we hear from our next witness, Dr. Trevor Bell, University Research Professor, Geography Department, Memorial University of Newfoundland, who's been involved in a model home being built in Nunatsiavut and studied community well-being and sustainability in the context of climate change, could we take a few minutes to review the letter that we had discussed at committee respecting the Makivik Corporation? The steering committee would like to recommend it to the committee for approval so that we can send it out, as we'd agreed, to the minister responsible for the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. I think you have all received the letter. Shall I read it? How do you want to handle it? It's four paragraphs and a concluding sentence, and it's sent on behalf of the Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples to the minister responsible for the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
Senator Moore: Read it into the record, chair.
The Deputy Chair: So here's the letter:
As Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples, I'm sending you this letter with the unanimous support of members of the committee. Our committee welcomes the federal government's commitment to develop a nation-to-nation relationship with indigenous peoples, including a new fiscal relationship. As part of this commitment, we believe it is vital to explore funding delivery mechanisms that better reflect local needs and priorities.
Ensuring that indigenous communities and organizations have appropriate decision-making authority over funding allocations has been a key theme throughout our current study on housing in First Nations and Inuit communities in Nunavut, Nunavik, Nunatsiavut and the Northwest Territories.
In Nunavik specifically, the committee heard that local housing concerns could be better addressed if federal funding for Northern housing were transferred directly to the Makivik Corporation rather than to the Government of Quebec. This would not be the first time that federal funding for housing has been transferred directly to the Makivik Corporation. An agreement signed between the Makivik Corporation and the provincial and federal governments transferred federal funding for housing construction directly to the Makivik Corporation in the 2015-16 fiscal year.
As Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples and with the unanimous support of the members of the committee, I encourage your officials to collaborate with indigenous organizations so that funding for Northern housing identified in Budget 2016 may be transferred directly to the appropriate local indigenous organizations. More specifically, as a previous agreement with the Makivik Corporation has already been concluded in this regard, we hope that the current budgetary allocations can also be transferred directly to them. Such measures, we believe, would better address local concerns and reflect a renewed nation-to-nation relationship with indigenous peoples based on partnership and cooperation.
I would like to thank you for your attention to this matter and I look forward to your response.
Sincerely, Senator Lillian Eva Dyck, Chair, Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples.
Comments?
Senator Enverga: Should we perhaps copy our Minister of Indigenous Affairs? That's what I was thinking, so they will get more leverage.
Senator Moore: That's not a bad idea.
The Deputy Chair: Agreed?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
Senator Enverga: When we send the letter, perhaps we could include an explanation that on our trip, they trusted Makivik and that it's a good organization. It doesn't have to be in the letter, but maybe part of the record there, just to indicate they have full support and that people trusted them.
The Deputy Chair: The clerk has pointed out to me that that would be in our report, but the report is still to be written, so we're not yet ready to do that.
Senator Enverga: Okay.
The Deputy Chair: I think steering felt that this letter should be sent in advance of the preparation of our report given that the new fiscal year is starting now, so it will be in advance of our report.
Senator Raine: There are a couple of phrases that were repeated there. I'm not sure we need them in both places, but that's up to steering to look at.
The Deputy Chair: You said the reference to unanimous support doesn't need to be repeated twice?
Senator Raine: It's there twice.
The Deputy Chair: Yes.
Senator Raine: However, I think it is important that they understand this letter is coming from the full committee with support, and if steering feels it needs to be repeated, I'm fine with that.
I do think, though, to Senator Enverga's point, that we are sending this because we don't want them to start making a program to divvy up the budget money in the wrong directions. We want them to know where we stand on it a little. Maybe we could offer to meet with them specifically on this issue, should they wish, so we could provide them with some information ahead of our report. Would that make sense?
The Deputy Chair: Steering has already agreed that we would invite the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation to return to our committee.
Senator Raine: Yes. When they come to committee, it's not in camera. It would be great to have the opportunity to brief them instead of them briefing us.
The Deputy Chair: Perhaps the letter could say, "I would be pleased to discuss this matter further with you,'' or words to that effect.
Senator Raine: Thanks.
Senator Moore: I'm just thinking about the timing. This department is probably already anticipating the funding that's in the budget. They're probably already planning, so the quicker we get this letter in there, the better, chair.
The Deputy Chair: That's why we brought it here tonight, yes.
Senator Moore: I'd get that right there tomorrow, before the break. I'd get it in there.
The Deputy Chair: With those comments, is it agreed steering can finalize the letter and send it off promptly?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you for those suggestions, colleagues.
Welcome, Mr. Bell. I'm Dennis Patterson, Deputy Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples. I would like to thank you for making yourself available to us tonight in connection with our study on housing in Inuit communities.
We know that you're based at Memorial University. I happen to know that you've just been to Pond Inlet, because I was in Iqaluit when you were there and I met one of your colleagues en route to Pond Inlet. We know that you are doing research across the Arctic on ice and community wellbeing and sustainability in the context of climate change. One of your projects addresses the challenge of healthy homes with a blueprint for culturally appropriate and environmentally adapted housing.
I understand you have a presentation and some comments you could make to us.
Trevor Bell, University Research Professor, Geography Department, Memorial University of Newfoundland, as an individual: Yes, I have some comments that will take about eight to ten minutes. I wasn't asked to prepare a brief, so unfortunately you don't have a copy of those comments. They're not detailed in that sense. They're just broad comments telling you a bit about my projects and some of the results that have come from them.
The Deputy Chair: Please go ahead, and senators may have some questions or comments afterwards. The floor is yours.
Mr. Bell: Thank you for the opportunity to talk to you tonight about my research.
As a geo-scientist, I have been involved in a number of projects that have dealt with Inuit housing, one in Nunatsiavut and several in Nunavut. I would like to briefly tell you about them this evening in the next few minutes.
The Nunatsiavut government recognized that their communities were rapidly growing and changing, while at the same time climate change was having an increasingly pronounced impact, affecting infrastructure, community services and the well-being of residents. Their Sustainable Communities initiative, in which I was a team member, had the primary goal to develop best practices and provide support and guidance for enhancing community sustainability in the region.
A key issue for Labrador Inuit, like Inuit from across the Arctic, was housing. A housing needs assessment conducted in the region illustrated all too vividly the extent and depth of the housing crisis in Nunatsiavut: 60 per cent of homes are in desperate need of major repair; homes fail within the first 10 years of construction; 44 per cent of homes have mould, far surpassing all other Inuit regions in Canada; overcrowding is three times higher than the national average, in fact five times higher in the two larger northern communities of Nain and Hopedale; and 44 per cent of households are unable to keep their dwelling warm primarily due to poor structural conditions.
A separate housing condition assessment revealed that much of the housing damage in Nunatsiavut is initially triggered by building homes that are ill-suited to the environmental conditions of sub-Arctic northern Labrador. While natural climate variability and freeze-thaw cycles place significant strain on community infrastructure, recent climate warming has accelerated this deterioration. Rising temperatures and decreasing snow cover have destabilized frozen ground, resulting in shifting foundations and infrastructure damage. Almost nine out of ten homes in Nain showed signs of damage stemming from ground movement.
As the Joint Management Committee of the Nunatsiavut Government concluded, it was time to try something different. Together with the Nain Research Centre, they proposed to design and build Nunatsiavut's first sustainable dwelling. This was an affordable, energy-efficient, multi-unit dwelling adapted to the dynamic realities of a warming climate and designed through a participatory community-driven process that reflects the needs and preferences of Labrador Inuit and the unique cultural, social and environmental characteristics of their homeland.
For this integrated action plan for healthy homes we shared the 2013 Arctic Inspiration Prize. This $1 million prize recognizes and promotes extraordinary contributions made by teams in the gathering of Arctic knowledge and their plans to implement this knowledge to real-world applications. The first Nunatsiavut multi-unit dwelling, designed for mixed elder and youth occupation, will be built in Nain later this year.
This healthy homes action plan is representative of the Labrador Inuit philosophy and holistic approach to building sustainable communities. The strategy does not look at individual challenges in isolation or invest money or resources on single issues. Instead, it recognizes the interdependence of issues, for example, in the case of housing, links to land- use planning, water and energy security, and new training opportunities; and it tackles them concurrently.
Also of importance is the need to evaluate programs, and consequently the new multi-unit dwelling will be monitored for physical performance and improved health outcomes of its residents. In fact, Dr. Riva will be involved, whom you spoke to earlier. She will be involved in the health outcomes assessment for that multi-unit dwelling, along with my team.
I'm also involved with several active research projects in Nunavut to inform decision-making on housing development through linkages with geoscience information. These projects try to identify when, where and how geoscience information should be provided in the decision-making process.
The role of local knowledge in partly driving the geoscience questions and understanding the local environment is very important; hence these projects are always carried out in collaboration with the communities we work with.
As background, I've been involved in several community projects to identify and map landscape hazards that would negatively impact built infrastructure. Essentially, we are trying to identify areas that are unsuitable for infrastructure in a community because of potential ground instability, erosion at the coast or by rivers, or flooding, while also taking into account the possible future impacts of the changing climate. Obviously, when you build infrastructure, you're hoping that it has a certain multi-decade lifespan, so you need to be looking into the future. With climate change, we are trying to predict what those conditions might be.
The end product is normally a composite landscape hazard map for communities. These maps use a simple traffic- light colour scheme to indicate areas of different risk: red for high, orange for medium and green for low risk.
I was part of a team that conducted a review of this type of community hazard mapping with potential users. The information was seen as highly valuable to them, but nonetheless, they identified some concerns: a general lack of awareness of this geoscience information in the community planning process; a lack of guidance and understanding of how to integrate this geoscience information; a lack of opportunity to implement the information; and, in some cases, general frustration with the messages that that information was conveying.
We attempted to address some of these concerns through a series of projects based in Arviat, Nunavut. I should add that we've generated these hazard maps partly in Arctic Bay; in Clyde River; in Arviat itself; and, through Natural Resources Canada, in some other communities around Hudson Bay.
I will tell you about these two projects and how they try to address or tackle those concerns.
First of all, decision mapping for housing development. It tackles the concern about a lack of awareness of this geoscience information. Through interviews with key decision-makers, my PhD student Rudy Reildsperger and I attempted to map the process by which decisions were made to develop housing in Arviat, with the intent to identify when and where geoscience knowledge should inform these processes.
Information entry points in the decision-making process. Our initial results suggest five entry points for geoscience information in the housing, planning and development process: first, the selection and planning of housing lots, that very early stage when housing lots are being selected and designed and planned; the preparation of the housing lots, so if there has been any work done to them at that point; the selection and construction of gravel pads, if they are the preferred choice in a community; the selection of housing foundations; and the selection of housing designs.
These are active projects, I should add. Those are some of the early results that we are finding. When these decisions are being made in the entire process, geoscience information will aid in making better decisions — more robust and climate-adapted decisions.
I would hesitate to claim that these same decision processes and, therefore, the same entry points may be relevant in all other Arctic communities, but I suspect there is a good chance that at least some of them are relevant right across the North.
In another project in partnership with the Yukon Research Centre in Whitehorse, we are looking to address the issue of integration and utility of geoscience information for decision-makers. For example, how can we make community landscape hazard maps more useful for local decision-makers?
One issue raised by decision-makers was the pressing need for more building land within communities and the desire for building infrastructure within existing community footprints. In other words, they do not want to extend their communities in areas well beyond the core area, especially if you're talking about young families, perhaps, or maybe even elder housing.
They want to be able to choose where they want to build this type of housing. However, sometimes those areas represent highly vulnerable or risky areas to build on. What if their first choice of building land was in moderately to highly vulnerable areas of the community? What can we do about that? How can we help facilitate them making a decision in these areas?
We are in the process of attempting to develop a methodology for converting these maps of hazard levels to what we call "cost-of-adaptation maps.'' These maps would document the additional cost of modifying building methods or materials for areas that have been characterized as vulnerable. In other words, it opens up those areas that we map as vulnerable. It opens them up to building within the community, but you need to build in an additional cost, the cost of adaptation to those particular ground conditions, to those particular hazards.
In our Arviat case study, we are using both geotechnical expertise and economic modelling to calculate the additional cost necessary to adapt housing developments in areas that have been identified as potentially vulnerable to increasing instability, particularly as permafrost degrades. In this case, we are talking about a permafrost hazard. Because ground vulnerability varies across a community with permafrost conditions, these maps show the additional cost for building housing in areas with different degrees of current and future vulnerability.
We are still in progress. I can give you an example of identified adaptations that we are costing. Gravel pads, for instance. Gavel pads allow the creation of building surfaces at appropriate heights and grades in building lots, but more importantly, they allowed the permafrost to grade up into materials that are thaw insensitive. These gravel pads will maintain a stable ground surface even under the permafrost degradation or thawing. Gravel pads are effective in mitigating the impact of that thawing permafrost.
There are various guidelines that describe the type of material that should be used in gravel pads; for instance, the thickness of them, the inclusion of insulation within them and maybe the main size of the gravel in them. It may cost different amounts to apply different guidelines. Adopting these various guidelines represents an additional expense that may be necessary when building in vulnerable permafrost areas, and you need to build that expense into the house for building in that location.
Another example is foundations. Foundations anchor buildings in the ground and maintain a stable base surface for buildings. However, there are different choices in the North. Historically, you have piles, screw jacks and space frames, and these are more effective under certain terrain and environmental conditions. Their use in housing affects the cost of that housing, the most expensive one being the more modern space frame. This cost may be necessary if the more expensive foundation is the preferred type in a vulnerable permafrost area. We are trying to work out what's the extra cost of using adaptations to permit housing in areas that might initially be seen as vulnerable.
In summary, geoscience can provide knowledge that supports decision making in site selection, lot preparation and foundation design for northern housing. It is critical, however, to consider when, where and how this knowledge should be integrated into the complex decision-making processes of housing development and construction in Northern regions.
Thank you.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Bell.
I think you indicated you're working with the Nunavut Housing Corporation in the latter project you described, and, in particular, in Arviat but also Arctic Bay and Clyde River. I'm wondering if your work has gotten to the stage where it will influence the planning and maybe construction methods of the housing corporation. Is it at the stage yet where they're considering applying your findings?
Mr. Bell: We have been working with the communities and the decision-makers within the communities. In Arviat, for instance, that involves both regional offices of Nunavut Housing Corporation as well as the community offices.
I would say that what I have described is an evolution. For the last decade, there have been efforts to have geoscience information like hazard mapping produced for communities to help guide decision-making. Clearly there are some parts of communities where housing should go and others where we should be avoiding it because they are unsuitable.
Only over the last couple of years, when we tried to test whether this information was being picked up by the decision makers, we realized, in fact, that the decision-makers are not aware that this geoscience information may be available. Perhaps that's because of turnover or poor communication. It may also be because the decision-making process for houses, as I'm sure your committee has tried discovered in trying to unravel it over the last year or so, is very complicated. It involves all sorts of levels of decision-making, from the local hamlet to the local housing association and up to Nunavut Housing.
Our current projects are, therefore, trying to address what we see as those barriers for the use and uptake of this geoscience information. Currently, we are not so much producing hazard maps; rather, we are trying to work out why hazard maps have not been effectively picked up in the decision-making process. In that sense we've been talking to Nunavut Housing Corporation officials on the ground, who have expressed a real interest in it, but we have not directly addressed the headquarters of Nunavut Housing Corporation in Iqaluit. That's one of our next steps once we have results to share with them.
The Deputy Chair: You mentioned some Hudson Bay communities in which you worked. We visited Inukjuak and saw a map similar to the one you described, where there was a green area appropriate for housing and another coloured area that was not. Is that the kind of map that you're referring to, and did you do work in Inukjuak?
Mr. Bell: No, that was probably the Laval team of Dr. Michel Allard, but the maps are very similar. They are colour coded to indicate, essentially, high-risk areas that you should be perhaps avoiding in red and green for areas that have the lowest vulnerability or risk.
The Deputy Chair: We heard about a model home in Nain from Mr. Alain Fournier. Is that name familiar to you?
Mr. Bell: Yes. They designed the multi-unit dwelling that I referenced in the first part of my presentation. They got the contract to design that. They participated in the local charrettes in the communities and took both the geoscience and the design factors given to them from the community and produced the design that he showed to you.
The Deputy Chair: We got a detailed presentation from Mr. Fournier on that, so this is all fitting together. Thank you.
Senator Enverga: Thank you, Dr. Bell, for your presentation. I believe we learned a lot, especially about geoscience. We've been to some areas around Nunavut and heard about the melting of permafrost. It's unfortunate that we were not able to go to Nain because of the freezing rain.
How widespread is the melting of permafrost? Are there a lot of communities affected? Will it mean major changes to a lot of the communities?
Mr. Bell: I think climate warming and warming of the ground is going to affect all communities across the Arctic — all Inuit and Aboriginal communities, even in the northern parts of the provinces.
The permafrost towards the south in the sub-Arctic is less continuous than it is as you go farther north. On northern Baffin Island, it's fully continuous.
Frozen ground can consist of, for instance, bedrock, and whether bedrock is frozen or thawed, it's still a very solid ground surface on which to build.
The issue is really where you have non bedrock or what we call unconsolidated sediments, because some sediments are more sensitive than others when thawing. Sediments that accumulate moisture and build thick layers of ice within them — for instance, fine-grain, muddy sediments like silt and clay — can build thick layers of ice that may be hundreds or thousands of years old. But when the thaw descends into the ground with climate warming, it will melt that ice, and that ice will then wash away, if you like, from the land. If ice in the ground was 50 centimetres thick, the surface will subside by 50 centimetres.
It's all about the amount of what we call "ground ice'' that is in the permafrost. If it's close to the surface and therefore may melt in the next 50 years, it causes ground instability because it may not be an evenly thick layer of ice, so some parts of the ground might therefore drop 50 centimetres and another part might drop 70 centimetres.
If you have a house built on that and one corner of the house drops and another doesn't drop as much, you can imagine that if you don't have the right type of foundation — or if you don't continually adjust your foundation — that will cause stress on the integrity of the house.
For instance, in Arviat, there is a program where every house in the community is visited about every two years, maybe more often, and one of the observations they make is whether the house needs to be re-levelled because of this shifting ground. They then re-level it, and that's quite easy to do where you have something like a screw jack foundation. I'm sure you saw these in some of the communities you visited. You literally turn the screw on the jack, or if you have a wooden wedge system, you knock the wedges together more to raise the house up a little bit.
However, if houses are not being monitored for that type of ground subsidence, then you're going to have structural damage to the house or other structures.
Senator Enverga: Basically, it's affecting the integrity of the foundation of the house. Is there a chance that the integrity of an entire community could be affected by this shifting ice or the melting of permafrost? Can such a thing happen?
Mr. Bell: I need to point out that it's a gradual effect. This will gradually happen over time, so the ground is shifting slightly, but from year to year and over decades it can be significant.
It's easier for me to answer whether there are communities where this situation will not affect them. That is the case where houses and the community are mostly built on bedrock, where even as the permafrost thaws in bedrock it doesn't lose its integrity. So in some communities, like Whale Cove in the western Arctic and Iqaluit, those houses are mostly built on piles that rest right on bedrock and are fairly solid.
In other communities, like Arviat, the source of this fine muddy material tends to be former marine sediments, former seabed. Much of the Arctic, and in somewhere like Arviat, the community was on the seabed a thousand years ago. The land has been rising out of the sea. That's just a part of the geological legacy of glaciation in the Arctic. So it has been rising out of the sea, and therefore much of the material on which the community is built is marine sediments, which tends to be muddy. Therefore, when they freeze, they tend to grow this massive ice in the ground.
Many communities will be affected by this thawing permafrost to some degree, others more than some. Arviat is one of those cases where there are a lot of issues, but we've mapped it in other locations as well.
Senator Enverga: You say you have mapped in other locations, and there is a chance you will ask them to move to a particular location? Is that what you're telling us?
Mr. Bell: Not that the communities necessarily move, but they have to adapt to the ground on which they are built. Especially as climate warms, where you have these vulnerable materials on which the community is built, they will tend to respond to that warming much greater than other places.
If you can't use piles down to bedrock, if you don't have that solid foundation, you need to think of different adaptations to make sure that your houses are not failing very soon after they are built. You need to maybe use very thick gravel pads, or you may need to use the more modern space frame foundations which are much more resilient to uneven ground subsidence.
Senator Enverga: Thank you.
Senator Raine: In hindsight, it's too bad you weren't here 50 years ago when they were first starting to build these communities, because obviously some of them have been built in difficult places.
I know that when you're looking at a community, for instance Iqaluit, it is growing and wants to expand, but it is faced with all kinds of challenges. Are most communities able now to look at not only the future sites for homes but also for the infrastructure? If you are doing a cost analysis of your planning, the infrastructure costs to connect different, suitable locations could be very substantial and could actually go through areas that are not suitable for infrastructure. Is this all part of the mapping that you're doing?
Mr. Bell: It's probably simpler than what you have outlined. I'd like to add that in many cases, communities do not have access even to the most simple geoscience information or the most basic geoscience information. I don't want to give you the false impression that we are at that last stage of perfecting geoscience information for communities. In most communities, none exists, and they're not aware that in other communities maybe some of this information is available.
Very often it's the local expertise. People know in their own communities where it's a really bad place to build houses. They'll tell you that. They'll make our jobs easier because they'll direct us to the places where the houses are failing.
If you go to the maintenance guys at the housing associations of any communities, they'll tell you the houses that they have to keep levelling year after year. They know that those houses are shifting or the walls are cracking or the doors don't open and close properly, or you can see daylight through the corners of the houses because of the amount of shifting going on.
It's that deeper understanding of projecting into the future areas that are stable now that will end up stable in the future or helping them make decisions around what type of foundations might be most appropriate to create the most resilient housing in the future.
As people will tell you in the North, climate is changing so rapidly up there. They see things happening there. The youth will tell you how fast it's changing, and they've only been making their own observations for a decade or two, at most.
I think I'm not being alarmist in saying that understanding how community footprints will change and how community planning areas will change is really important information for the planners up there and for the hamlets who are making decisions for their communities, the hamlet council. Even this basic information needs to be generated for communities that are most at risk.
If you ask me which communities are most at risk, I can't tell you that without some sort of quick and dirty examination of all the communities to be able to say these ones here need further study and these ones here are fine because they're sitting on bedrock.
I keep talking about permafrost, but for other communities it may be a sea level rise and coastal erosion. We know, for instance, in Hall Beach they're talking about potentially having to move some houses away from the receding coastline.
In Arctic Bay, for instance, there is a limit to where they can build as this community rapidly expands because the slope behind Arctic Bay is very sensitive. There is a lot of thick ground ice in the ground, and if you disturb that at all, they are going to cause massive ground subsidence that will affect any structure they're trying to build on it.
I think there is a real need for more geoscience information. As the results of my projects are suggesting, we need to be thinking as scientists in creative ways to communicate that information to the decision-makers in the region. We need to make them aware that this information could be available if necessary or is available if it's already been done, and we need to also translate the knowledge so that they can use the information for the decisions that they have to make. Scientists can create lots of reports, but if they are not accessible to decision-makers, then they may not need to have been made in the first place.
Senator Raine: Do you think there should be a check box on the funding agencies that are funding housing development in the North to ensure that the geotechnical studies have been done?
Mr. Bell: It would do no harm. It would certainly make sure that people are actively engaging with the information. They either tick the box, or they don't. It would be useful to make sure that some level of geotechnical information is available in all of the communities because the environment is changing so rapidly.
Senator Raine: Without it, the investment will be lost because it will fail.
Mr. Bell: That is a risk, yes. If, for instance, Nunavut Housing Corporation, who may be designing houses for a certain community, has the opportunity to be able to plan what type of housing foundation best suits that particular geoscience condition, then that would, I think, be ultimately the best solution. It would help them make more resilient housing.
Senator Raine: Thank you very much.
Senator Moore: Dr. Bell, thanks for being here. You mentioned the new multi-unit dwelling. How many units are in that dwelling?
Mr. Bell: I believe there are six units. I'm trying to imagine an image of them in front of me, and I'm counting. I think six units.
Senator Moore: So is it like high-rise or running linear to the road, to the land?
Mr. Bell: No, it's vertical, so two a side and then up on those floors, which would be the first multi-unit — I don't want to call it a high-rise. At three storeys, it's not exactly a high-rise, but it would be the first of its type in Nunatsiavut.
Senator Moore: For the materials and the design, who developed those standards? Whoever did it, did they talk to the people who live there and have experience in what they need?
Mr. Bell: Yes. That was part of the process that the Nunatsiavut government undertook. They essentially held what we call our design charettes, which are basically groups of people of the community coming together and discussing, both from an environmental and from a cultural perspective, what is the best design for a house. Does it meet the different requirements?
For instance, housing today in Nunatsiavut is essentially the same type of bungalow that's built in St. John's, Newfoundland, except it's in sub-Arctic Labrador. There are no double doors walking into the house to prevent drafts. There are no cold areas for Inuit to prepare hides or anything like that that they are maybe working on. They heard that sort of feedback, and that has been adapted into the multi-unit dwelling that will be built this year in Nain.
Senator Moore: Okay. When we visited various communities as part of our study, we were told, and we saw, that houses were built facing north, no windbreak, no porch or opportunity to break the weather, just directly from the weather inside the house. When you're doing your work and advising on the multi-unit or whatever else you're going to advise on, are you looking at the direction of the house and trying to maximize the warmth of the sun or just some of the basics that people think of? The elders and others in the community told us how wrong that was, but nobody listened to them.
Mr. Bell: Yes. In Nunatsiavut, for example, where I've been most involved in what I call climate-adapted, resilient community planning, we have been encouraging a sustainable community plan. There is one place in the Arctic where this has been done, and that is in Iqaluit, up on the crest, what is a new housing subdivision there. That has actually taken into account the orientation of the sun for passive heating of those houses. It has taken into account predominant wind direction so that, in fact, the roads are swept clear of snow to reduce snow-clearing costs, and the snow doesn't pile up in front of houses. The houses are designed so that the living areas are facing the sun and the sleeping areas are facing to the north.
As elders told us that in Nunatsiavut, this is the way they used to build their houses, and, somehow or other, once planners came — usually planners from the South coming North and applying Southern perspectives, essentially —
Senator Moore: Yes. You're being kind.
Mr. Bell: Essentially, the road went in first, and then the houses were built perpendicular to the road. Somebody forgot that, no, it should be owing towards passive heating, et cetera, et cetera.
Senator Moore: Thank you. That's interesting, chair, about the subdivision in Iqaluit. Weren't we there? Did we go by that?
The Deputy Chair: Yes, I think that's the plateau that Dr. Bell is referring to.
Mr. Bell: That's correct. There's an interesting report about that that you can get from the city of Iqaluit, and I believe — although Senator Patterson probably knows this better than me — that the regulations and, let's say, bylaws that were put into place to control the planning of that subdivision have now been applied to all new areas of Iqaluit. Whether it's the faucets on the showerheads and the taps, that general sort of sustainability approach has been applied to all new subdivisions. It is the first time in the North, I think, that that sort of fresh perspective — or maybe I should call it an old perspective — has been reconsidered for new developments.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you for alerting us to that, Dr. Bell. I think Iqaluit won a sustainability award of some kind for that work.
In closing, I'd like to ask a question, as I don't think there are any other questioners. We are doing a study that will provide recommendations to the federal government as a funder of capital and a provider of operations and maintenance funding, although that's diminishing, for social housing or public housing in the Inuit regions. I wonder if I could dare to ask you what you would suggest we might recommend that the federal government should do by way of perhaps attaching conditions or encouraging the agencies that they fund to get better value for public money that's spent on social housing, benefiting from your findings. Could you sum up what it is that could be done better in this area of adapting to climate change and pursuing better community well-being? That's not a difficult question.
Mr. Bell: One of the key messages coming from me is that, especially when you have the opportunity in doing medium-term planning, geoscience should be included in the decisions around where houses are built, how lots are prepared and developed, and how foundations for houses — and maybe even the design of houses — should incorporate that geoscience knowledge, where applicable.
When we are trying to build houses that last decades, we need to understand how ground conditions may change, whether that's coastal erosion, thawing permafrost — anything — or flooding in communities. We need to protect the investment. We know there's a housing crisis in Inuit regions, so the onus is more to make sure that for those dollars spent now, we protect that investment by making sure that they're built on solid ground.
The Deputy Chair: That's very helpful. I think you indicated that there is a lot of knowledge in the community. I think you said that people know where the vulnerable areas of town are. There's also a need for scientific knowledge, but scientists need to find ways to communicate information so that it can be blended with the traditional knowledge. I think that might be what's required.
Is it a challenge sometimes for scientists to communicate with community people? I know you're working extensively with community people, and you've said that they were fully involved in designing the model house in Nain. Is it a challenge for scientists sometimes to communicate scientific information in meaningful ways, in your experience?
Mr. Bell: I'm afraid you have opened a can of worms. You might be here for several hours now, but I will keep my remarks to: "Yes, this is a challenge for scientists,'' in understanding the perspectives of communities, being respectful in communities, understanding the value of that local knowledge and being willing, when they conduct their own science projects, to co-design them with the community to address these priority issues like housing and community planning.
It's different for somebody like me who shares that perspective already. When I go into a community, it's always being open to what are those issues in the community. From my perspective of decades working with communities, if the research that you're doing — even for me, if I'm thinking of geoscience and I'm talking about how it should be incorporated, the planning of future housing — it's very difficult to get the attention of the hamlet and the decision- makers if those are not the issues that are on their desk at that time and if they're consistently responding to crises in their community.
Housing is a real crisis in the North, and I know you know this. Very often I hear in the communities that it's more important to build houses than where you build them, or building more houses is more important than where you build them.
Earlier, I specifically said "in the medium term,'' because, to be honest, in the short term, communities just need more housing. I think the number for Nunavut right now in order to satisfy their need would be 5,000 homes, overnight. That's an incredible number, as you know, based on the number that's built on an annual basis.
I would never go into a community and say, "Stop everything. Don't build another house until you have done this geoscience study that takes two years.'' I just wouldn't have any credibility. I realize that, in the short term, communities need to get houses built, but thinking towards the medium to long term, where we have the time to be able to make evidence-based and science-based decisions for where houses are built and how they're built, I think that is crucial.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Bell. Just one quick question in closing: Has this work of yours been written up in some form that we could access?
Mr. Bell: It's currently being written up, because it's very active research. The study from Nunatsiavut is probably available. I can try to make interim reports available to you from the Nunavut studies, if I sort of know your timeline and when you might need to receive that information.
The Deputy Chair: That would be much appreciated, in addition to the valuable information you've given us tonight.
I would say that we are going to conclude our work at the end of June and start writing our report over the summer, for delivery in the fall. If that's helpful to you, that's our rough time frame for our work plan.
Mr. Bell: I think that may match with our report writing.
I should let you know that the work in Arviat on the cost of adaptation mapping is funded by CanNor, the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency, so federal government.
The Deputy Chair: Yes.
Mr. Bell: Just so you're aware of that. So they obviously see the economic benefit of this type of research and how it can make houses better.
The one about how to mobilize the scientific knowledge better is funded through ArcticNet. That's also a federally funded network of Centres of Excellence.
The Deputy Chair: Dr. Bell, this has been most helpful, and I thank you on behalf of the committee for your time and for your insights.
(The committee adjourned.)