Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Aboriginal Peoples
Issue 7 - Evidence - May 10, 2016
OTTAWA, Tuesday, May 10, 2016
The Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples met this day at 9:33 a.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.
Senator Lillian Eva Dyck (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Good morning. I would like to welcome all honourable senators and members of the public who are watching this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples, either here in the room or via CPAC or on the web. My name is Lillian Dyck, I am from Saskatchewan, and I have the honour and privilege of chairing this committee. I would now invite my fellow senators to introduce themselves, starting with our deputy chair, Senator Patterson.
Senator Patterson: Good morning. Dennis Patterson from Nunavut.
Senator Beyak: Good morning. Senator Lynn Beyak, Ontario.
Senator Oh: Good morning. Senator Victor Oh from Ontario.
The Chair: Senator Oh is replacing Senator Enverga today.
Senator Raine: Senator Nancy Greene Raine from B.C.
The Chair: The overall mandate of this committee is to examine legislation and matters relating to the Aboriginal peoples of Canada generally. This morning, we are continuing 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.
For our first witness, we are very pleased to have the Mayor of Iqaluit, Madeleine Redfern. We were unable to meet with her when we were in Iqaluit a couple of weeks ago, and are very thrilled and happy that she could make it here this morning.
Before I give you the floor, Mayor Redfern, I would like to note that, in 2015, Ms. Redfern was presented with an Indspire award for her public service. That is considered to be one of the highest awards recognized by the aboriginal communities.
Mayor Redfern, you have the floor, and then we'll open up for questions.
Madeleine Redfern, Mayor, City of Iqaluit: Thank you. I apologize for not being in Iqaluit when you visited and being able to host you. We are very pleased that you did actually come and visit our community. It makes a difference when people actually see what our reality is rather than just looking at pictures or reading about it.
I'd like to thank Dennis Patterson, our senator, as well. I'm sure he was a most gracious host.
Today, I come before you on the issue of housing, not only for Inuit and Nunavut, but also specifically with respect to the housing issues that we face in Iqaluit.
I had the privilege of being part of the Qikiqtani Truth Commission back in 2008 until 2010, and we did a historical inquiry. Part of that looked at the issue of housing, and I will share that link on that with this Senate committee. The portion on housing is brief, but I would recommend that the Senate look into or review that. It gives a very succinct history and helps you understand why and how we are in the housing situation that we are in. It's a very short history, since the Canadian government began to be involved in more governance and administration in our northern part of Canada and in the east since about 1950.
Just in summary, what we were able to determine was that the Inuit were made promises or were provided, unfortunately, very poor explanations or information about the housing that they were going to be provided. Government officials struggled with the whole ability of explaining the concept of welfare and social housing, and in the end, often Inuit were told that the government would be providing them free housing, low-income housing or low- rent housing in perpetuity as one way of enticing Inuit to move into the permanent settlements. That original notion continues today in people's understanding.
We were also able to learn and determine that, often when government began to build houses in the North, there was poor planning, insufficient understanding of the Arctic environment and the Inuit culture, there was little or no consultation on the way in which government would build housing or where, there was poor implementation and insufficient resources, and the first initial homes that were built were clearly inadequate, not only in number but also in kind.
Therefore, it's not surprising that, with a poor foundation with respect to housing, we find ourselves 50-plus years later having just simply compounded the problem, more often than not, by repeating the same approach.
The reason why you have a situation where there are significant numbers of Inuit living in overcrowded housing is simply because there is an insufficient number of houses. The reason why you see a lot of damaged homes, especially in the public housing area, is compounded by a number of social factors — everything from low education, overcrowding, poor health, frustrations, boredom, anger, and suffering from a variety of different abuses from government programs like the residential school program and such. So it is very challenging. Housing is one of those key issues that clearly affects a wide range of other issues.
I'd like to now move forward to 1999, with the creation of our territory. As you are aware, our territory exists because of the land claim agreement and the decision to create our territory. Iqaluit was chosen as the capital as a result of a referendum, and we have seen both opportunities and challenges as a result.
One of the initial institutions that was created and in place to assist the leaders in developing the territory was the Nunavut Implementation Commission. The commissioner, with his staff and through consultations, looked at a number of issues. Housing was one of them.
The focus, however, was mostly on government staff housing. As was the practice in the Northwest Territories, the government provides a significant amount of staff housing to attract people to come to the territory to work.
Unfortunately, the Government of N.W.T. sold a lot of its housing in what would be Nunavut prior to 1999. That was an extremely unfortunate decision. Those units were often picked up by people who had the money or the ability to buy them at relatively cheap prices. Not surprisingly, some of those units actually became rental units for the Government of Nunavut.
Additionally, the Nunavut Implementation Commissioner made a recommendation that the government enter into long-term leases in order to get a sufficient number of units. Now, I understand that with the new government there were some concerns, issues or inability to be able to borrow the money that it would need to build and own the government staff units and that the long term leases were therefore the way to go. The developers were not prepared to build on speculation, even though clearly the government was going to need several hundred units for several thousand territorial employees.
The subsidy program which was developed has created possibly an unfortunate, unintended consequence. I'll give you an example. When the Government of Nunavut decided to lease a two or three bedroom unit, it entered into an agreement with the developers that it would rent that unit for $3,200. The government would provide the landlord or the developer the subsidy of approximately $2,000. The balance of around $1,200 would be paid by the employee. Therefore, several hundred of units that needed to be built at $2,000 subsidy per unit for 20 years in many cases meant that we created a small number of multimillionaires overnight.
We also had the unintended consequence of inflating the rent in the communities, in particular in Iqaluit. So a one- bedroom unit that rented in the high rise, which I believe you saw when you were in our community, was approximately $700 a month. That complex was almost certainly mortgage-free by 1999 because it had been built in the early 1970s, and it actually staffed or housed many government employees over those 30 years. Within a few years, that $700 one-bedroom unit now rents for $2,225. That is the effect of that subsidy.
Similarly, not surprisingly, it also had the effect of increasing the housing prices. Homes that you could purchase in 1998 for just under $200,000 within a few years began to climb from $200,000 to $250,000 to $300,000 to $350,000 to $400,000. Now a starter home in Iqaluit is approximately $500,000, whether you're buying a pre-existing home or whether you're building a new home.
I don't know how we undo that decision and that effect, but that is what happened at least in Iqaluit.
In our community, we have a blended model, more so than you'll notice in the other smaller 24 communities. We do actually have public housing, less than 20 per cent. There is also private home ownership, people who have bought or built their homes. I will ensure that accurate numbers are given to the Senate by my staff, but I would estimate that at about 25 per cent. The bulk of the homes in Iqaluit are staff housing, whether provided for by the developers or the landlords to the Government of Nunavut or the Government of Canada, the city and, of course, there's also staff housing by business, to attract employees up, whether it's the taxi companies, the restaurants or the hotels. Any major employer will more often than not provide subsidized staff housing for their employees.
There are a tiny number of available units provided by landlords to the open market. What we've seen over the years is a situation where it costs approximately $1,000 to $1,300 to $1,400 to rent a room in someone's house. A one- bedroom is over $2,000, a three-bedroom is over $3,000, and a four-bedroom is over $4,000.
We are the capital, and our population has grown tremendously since 1999. We were about 3,000 on the creation of the territory. We are now at approximately 8,000. In my last term as mayor, this city had estimated growth about 300 new residents every year. That's almost 1,000 new residents every three years.
The city develops neighbourhoods and makes lots available for development. Unfortunately, the last three years there were no new lots developed or offered. There were buildings constructed, but those were by people who had pre- existing land and were now developing it.
There is tremendous outlay of hundreds of millions of dollars required for the city to develop a new neighbourhood. We must do the engineering, surveying, building of roads and the installation of the utility or pipes. When we've managed to do that, we recoup our costs by selling those lots. We determine on a per square foot basis an ability to recover all the outlay. More often than not, lots have been selling in Iqaluit for rarely under $75,000 but up to several hundreds of thousands, depending on the size of the lot. That is a lot of money and prohibitive for quite a number of people, and it does add quite a bit to the cost of building a home.
The city actually now finds itself in an unfortunate situation where it has to deal with a deficit. We are looking at creative ways in which to be able to offer a small number of lots this year, but our goal and hope is that next year and the year after, we'll be able to develop a whole new neighbourhood. We may be seeking assistance from the territorial and federal government to make that happen.
When we find ourselves in that situation, it means that employers, like the Government of Nunavut or the Government of Canada, or even the city and others, have a hard time attracting employees or retaining them, simply because there's insufficient housing in our community.
The other issue that I want to bring to this committee's attention is that while it sounds quite dire, I'm still relatively optimistic insomuch as that construction and development is good for our community and good for the territory. We see that a lot of the smaller communities' population statistics remain fairly static — like Kimmirut at around 400, or Grise Fiord at around 150. Even though they have a significant birth rate, people migrate to the regional centres. They migrate; they come to live and work in Iqaluit. That is a good thing, as long as they come ideally with a job and ideally that they've negotiated with their employer a housing unit so they don't end up living in our communities on the beach or in a tent because they didn't realize that there wasn't going to be housing.
I'm very pleased with the fact that the new government is committed to developing a national housing strategy. Our territorial government, with the other two territorial governments, is looking at how they can develop that.
The City of Iqaluit is doing a significant amount of its own work because we recognize that we have to take a lead in developing our own housing strategy — everything from looking at homelessness, public housing, home ownership, government staff housing, and ideally the policies of the programs and how they can be adjusted to increase the number of units that get built in our communities and how we can actually develop affordable housing and get a lot more people living in units, reducing the overcrowding and all the negative effects that come with it, and increasing the number of people who can work in the construction business and in the trades, not just for our community but for the other communities.
I come today before you, and I think there are lots of solutions out there and we need to focus on that. We recognize and we know some of the challenges or problems that are associated with housing, ancillary problems associated with it as well. But I think we need to be more strategic. The three different levels of government and the Inuit organizations need to work better together. Ideally, the Inuit organizations and our leaders also need to recognize that they need to invest in housing. I think the mindset that they're not responsible for housing absolutely needs to change.
I'm open for questions. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you, Mayor Redfern.
Before we start questioning, I'd like to welcome Senator Moore to the committee.
I'll take the prerogative of the chair and ask one question. When we were travelling up North two or three weeks ago now, it was quite an eye-opening trip. As you mentioned yourself, it's good to see things on the ground rather than to read about them.
One of the things we heard about, probably first in Iqaluit, was staff housing. You have given us a lot of background as to how the staff housing came about. It sounded like you indicated that the majority of houses were staff housing, whether it was one of the layers of government or whether it was one of the major employers. One of the things we heard from two of our youth witnesses was that staff housing creates a barrier for them because they are actually northerners, and staff housing is more or less reserved for southerners.
Has the City of Iqaluit come to any kind of change in policy to address those kinds of concerns? Has something been developed to address the youth who have left Iqaluit and who come back with post-secondary training and then have trouble finding a place to live? Have you developed any solutions to that?
Ms. Redfern: Thank you for the question. The predominant number of staff housing units that are in our community and across the territory is with the Government of Nunavut. We've highlighted to them that we think they need to be looking at their policy with respect to their units being predominantly only available to those that are relocating from the South.
There are, without a doubt, many people in our community that require housing. The notion that you are already housed in the community is too simplistic. I'll give you an example. I am aware of a family where there was the mother, the father, an adult daughter with her spouse and their four children living in her one bedroom; another sibling, another sibling, another sibling. In total, you had almost 10 people living in a three-bedroom house. The adult daughter was working at Parks Canada. I said, "Did you ask your manager for a housing unit? Because we know there are empty units in our communities.'' She went to her supervisor, and they said, "No, you are already housed.'' I asked her, "Did you tell her about your living conditions?'' So she went back and told her supervisor, and they said there's nothing that they can do. The unfortunate thing is that she decided to leave her employment, in part because of her anger and frustration, only to learn, several months later, that her replacement, a single woman from the South, was offered a three-bedroom unit. That kind of policy and the way it's implemented, I can tell you for a fact, causes racial tension, anger and frustration.
When I was mayor, in my last term, we had an apartment building with approximately 27 units burn down. In less than 48 hours, the Government of Nunavut was able to rehouse all of those people because of the number of empty units in our community. Similarly, a year later, when the white row of approximately 22 units burnt down, which housed college students and their families, again, in less than 48 hours, they were all rehoused.
In those two situations, because they were Government of Nunavut employees and students that the Government of Nunavut provides housing for, they were to be rehoused. If it had been a fire of a private residential unit without any staff or students, they would have been homeless, and permanently homeless easily for years and years. Many people would have had to just leave the community or end up moving in with family or friends or living in sheds or shacks.
So that policy absolutely needs to be relooked at. Thank you, senator.
The Chair: Thank you for those examples. It really does illustrate that that policy is creating a lot of unfairness and tension. Do you know the number of units that are actually empty that are considered to be staff housing? Do you have a number for that?
Ms. Redfern: I don't have an actual number. I think the minister responsible, George Hickes, would probably be able to provide that to the committee. However, we know which units are empty by simply driving down them. There's the green row, which everyone knows is relatively empty. It's very frustrating.
I recognize that the way the Government of Nunavut has chosen to deal with their staff units is that a unit is assigned to a particular staff position. If that position is vacant, then the unit remains vacant. The Auditor General of Canada noted in one of his reports that it takes approximately 320 days for the GN, the Government of Nunavut, to fill a staff position. I'd also like to remind the committee that approximately 25 per cent of the total GN territorial bureaucracy is actually vacant, so there are empty units, not only in Iqaluit but across the whole territory.
I'm also Chair of the Legal Services Board, and we had one of our long-standing employees, who had been with us for 16 years, become homeless because of a marital break-up. She was living with family, and we lobbied intensively for two years to try to get her a unit in Gjoa Haven, but at the same time we were trying to fill a staff position of an office manager, so we asked, "Can't you just give her that unit?'' We were trying to advertise and unsuccessfully fill the office manager's position while she remained homeless. A policy like that and its interpretation and implementation leads to undue hardship. It's very frustrating.
Senator Patterson: Thank you. Welcome to our mayor.
I've always wondered about the number of people living in social housing — and it's a minority — who have significant household incomes. They report their incomes to the housing authority as an annual requirement, I believe, and as a requirement to obtain a social housing or a public housing unit, so the housing authority has a pretty good idea of the household incomes of their tenants.
I've always hoped that one of the solutions to the pressures on social housing would be to find ways to encourage and provide incentives to those people with high household incomes to own their own homes and thereby liberate social housing units for those who need them more and cannot afford to maintain their own homes.
I believe Ms. Redfern has had experience encouraging people to become homeowners through the Inuit Non-Profit Housing Association, which has built homes in what was then the Northwest Territories and also, I believe, in Ottawa.
As a little further background, committee members will recall that, in Iqaluit, we heard that this is not really a viable options, that it's very expensive to own and maintain a home, that in fact many people who obtained houses through homeownership programs run by the Nunavut or Northwest Territories Housing Corporation ended up losing their homes. They couldn't afford them. In some cases they retired and, on their reduced income, they couldn't afford their homes and the homes were taken over by banks, or in some cases — I think the term is quitclaim — they were repossessed by the housing corporation.
I'd like Ms. Redfern to give us her views and experience on how this might be done and whether it can be done, please.
Ms. Redfern: Thank you, Senator Patterson. There are some individuals and their families who are living in social housing in Iqaluit who do have significant income. I recollect when I was Chair of the Legal Services Board that approximately 44 tenants received eviction notices from social housing because of their high incomes. We assisted them to actually have those eviction orders stopped, but I would absolutely acknowledge that that was the wrong approach for Iqaluit housing to take.
What I find annoying and frustrating is that there is very little support or assistance to help people who have enough income to look at the whole possibility of homeownership. I've had family members and friends who simply did not have financial literacy, awareness of what mortgages are, how to buy a home, the whole notion of principal and interest and everything that comes with homeownership.
Those 44 individuals and their families, if provided special and targeted assistance, could probably get into the private market, but just sending an eviction notice is not good enough. What ended up happening is some of those individuals actually quit their jobs so they could keep their social housing units. Others, of course, had come to legal aid for assistance and we stopped those orders. But freeing up those 44 units so those families could buy homes would be significant.
When I was with Inuit non-profit housing, we did a significant amount of research to look at ways in which to increase the number of units or homeownership. There are bands and reserves across the country — a small number, albeit — that have taken a much more creative approach where the band effectively becomes the guarantor, the community or the municipality has offered its land as equity, the banks have assisted in providing the mortgage and the territory or province have provided down payment assistance programs.
The band took the lead in ensuring that the program criteria and the way it was designed made sure that people who applied had sufficient and stable income to be able to participate in those homeownership programs. There were courses offered to individuals so that they learned how to budget, particularly their own personal budget. Then there were courses on mortgage payment and homeownership and everything that came with it. The housing coordinator in the community, therefore, was not just responsible for collecting rent from social housing tenants, but they were also the go-to person, whether for co-op housing or homeownership. The goal was to make sure that people understood their responsibilities and got any assistance they needed, and therefore they and their families enjoyed living in a unit.
It's frustrating when I think that there are likely dozens, if not at least over a hundred people in Nunavut, who are working in a housing-related job, yet so many of our residents are provided so little support or information as to looking at their housing options and if they're in a situation to be able to actually buy or build a house and how one gets to that stage.
I know at least with my brother at one point, their household income was clearly over $150,000, and they were in a social housing unit. With assistance, they were able to build and own their own home, but for the vast majority of people, if they don't have a family member or someone to go through that process with them, they just get stuck in social housing.
Senator Oh: Welcome, mayor. My question to you is about the referendum that occurred yesterday. To my knowledge, residents and investors have to pay a fee to the local government to lease land in Nunavut because only the municipality is allowed to own land. However, a referendum took place yesterday to decide whether public land can be sold to individuals or corporations. Most of the voters in Nunavut's historic referendum voted "no'' as to whether municipal land can be bought and sold. Can you comment on how this result may impact the current housing market?
Ms. Redfern: The reason the land in Nunavut is leasehold in our municipalities is because of the land claim agreement. The Inuit negotiators and Inuit themselves felt that they didn't want to have the land as a freehold system until they or we were in a situation where we would be able to buy and own and be the main tenants or landlords in our own communities. The land claim provided for the ability to do a referendum 20 years later, and that's what happened yesterday right across the territory.
There are several reasons why the majority of people voted against converting from a leasehold system to a freehold system. One, they were not provided sufficient information to understand what the impact of a "yes'' vote would be. Two, there is a belief or perception that not enough Inuit are homeowners, even under an equity-lease system. And, three, at least from the municipality of Iqaluit's point of view in discussion with our lawyer, we had not been adequately prepared to move into a new system.
Right now, as the landowner in Iqaluit, we are able to collect property arrears and debts, because we withhold consent until the parties have paid us what they owe us. That's been a very successful way of ensuring that we get those property arrears. We would lose that under a leasehold system.
Second, a lot of our utilities, or the ones that we cannot see, like buried pipes, are not adequately mapped and therefore not registered on titles. If we had moved into a freehold system, our lawyer warned us that it would be possible that landowners would tell the city or the utility to remove that utility from their property. That would incur a significant cost.
I think the other underlying issue is that the City of Iqaluit and a few other municipalities impose a residency requirement, and we can do so because we have a leasehold system. When we offer single-family-dwelling lots in our community, you have to be over 18, a resident for two years and never have purchased a lot from us before. It supports the first-time homeowner. Our lawyer informed us that without territorial legislative amendment, we would be prevented from doing that under a freehold system.
Residency is key. As I said, a lot of Inuit really want to see that we become the primary homeowners and/or landlords in our own homeland. We simply haven't managed to get there yet. If we manage to tackle the housing crisis better and more strategically, in the future, I can envision a predominant "yes'' vote would happen in many of our communities.
Senator Oh: For affordable housing, do we have any idea of what the total rent of a unit is up there, and what the vacancy rate is?
Ms. Redfern: The vacancy rate in Iqaluit is virtually zero at all times. When and if it is not zero, it's simply because the rent is too expensive for people to afford on the marketplace. Yet, as I indicated earlier, there are empty units that aren't filled because of staff units dedicated for a particular staff position. That's technically a vacant unit, but it's not available.
I'm trying to remember what your first question was. My apologies, senator.
Senator Oh: I was asking about the total number of available, affordable rental units there.
Ms. Redfern: I'm more than happy to go and speak to that. There are three major landlords, and I can come back with a specific number. But on principle, it's usually zero. There's often a waiting list, except for the units that are too expensive for the people to afford.
Senator Oh: So you have a certain number of vacant units, but you're not renting them out. They are sitting empty.
Ms. Redfern: The staff units are sitting empty, predominantly. There are virtually no units available on the private market, and when and if there are one or two, it's simply because they're unaffordable.
Senator Raine: I must say I enjoyed visiting Iqaluit. I'm sorry you weren't there to guide us, but we had a very good guide.
The situation you find yourselves in is very different, but I can't help think of my experience living in Western Canada with the ski resorts, where the price of land is very inflated and beyond the reach of working people who need to live and work in the resorts. They have come up with some creative solutions around housing societies where only those who are living in and working at the resort are able to buy into the lot or the land and build a home. When it comes time to sell those homes, they can only sell it to the same group of people. That does help. I think you're probably looking at that.
I have one burning question, and I'm hoping you can answer it. We saw the big building that was built by the American military during the Cold War, sitting vacant near the airport. I forget what it's called. It looks very substantial. It was used as a university residence until they had a problem with a fire and mould and things. Who is in charge of the decision-making around that? It seems a shame to take it down if there's a possibility to go to the private sector with a proposal call and see if it can't be rehabilitated for some kind of housing that would fit the needs. I know there are big needs there. Could you just comment on what is going to happen with that particular development?
Ms. Redfern: I presume you're speaking of the old residence.
Senator Raine: Yes.
Ms. Redfern: It is a territorial government facility used predominantly for Arctic College, for classrooms, offices, residences, a gym and cafeteria. Attached to it are also a workshop and some storage.
I have not heard any plans for it being torn down. That was been spoken about on and off for the last 30 years. I understood renovations were done to remove mould and some other contamination within the building. There was some speculation that that would be removed because of the new airport. I don't think that is the case now, but I can go back and confirm with the Government of Nunavut what their plans are. They haven't indicated anything with the city at this point in time.
Senator Raine: I'm hearing in your comments that there is a bit of a disconnect between the reality of life, running the capital city of Iqaluit, and the Nunavut government and restrictions that they are putting on. How are those kinds of conflicts going to be resolved? Is there a table that you both sit at? The city of Iqaluit is housing 80 or 90 per cent of the population of the territory, or a big percentage, anyway. Is there a table that you all sit at?
Ms. Redfern: What tends to happen is that a lot of it is either personality driven or it's about the priorities of the politics or bureaucrats of the day. Without a doubt, there have been some disconnections. I'm very pleased with the new minister responsible for the Nunavut Housing Corporation, the Honourable George Hickes. I think he's very open to working with the different levels of government.
However, I recollect him making a comment at the Baffin mayors' forum about my question: What are the territorial government plans on developing a territorial housing strategy as part of the federal national housing strategy and whether or not his government would commit to working with the municipalities? He did say that it was a large undertaking and they wouldn't be able to consult with all the communities.
I did remind him that, as the capital city and the largest one that is growing with a massive in-migration, we would be more than prepared to assist and develop effectively not necessarily our own strategy but all the information that they would need to incorporate our reality and our needs and challenges and issues into their territorial strategy.
Sometimes the dynamics between the different bureaucracies, priorities, political or personalities become an issue.
Senator Beyak: Thank you very much for your knowledge and hard work on this issue. It's really refreshing.
We've heard from witnesses lately from Habitat for Humanity about the efficiencies, the affordability and the collaborative work. Are you working with agencies like that and others? If you could give us a little more detail, I would appreciate it.
Ms. Redfern: I'm an avid supporter of Habitat for Humanity, especially in our community. The last time I was mayor, we met with their members to look at ways in which the city could support their program, in particular by offering them land either for free or at nominal cost to reduce the overall cost of a unit that they would build.
The challenge, of course, is that it's only been one unit every few years. We have a tiny number of on-the-ground volunteers, and when they are actually able to build a unit in our community, they bring in a significant number of volunteers from across the country. Actually, I think there were even some volunteers that had come internationally. They paid their own way to Iqaluit, and our community members put them up.
It's a valuable program. It makes a unit significantly more affordable because the mortgage is only cost, not market value, and a lot of the labour and the materials and the land is offered at a discount or for free. But as I said, right now they're only able to do sort of one unit every few years. They were looking at possibly expanding it so that it would be at least a duplex.
I think the main thing to recognize is that, as we deal with the housing problem, not just in Iqaluit but in our small communities, there is no single solution. It frustrates me when I hear institutions or government only ask the federal government for social housing, social housing, social housing. I think we need to look at the wide range of options and support multiple ones.
Senator Moore: Thank you, Your Worship, for making the trip and for being here. I have a couple of questions.
I want to follow up on Senator Greene Raine's question with regard to that residence building that the U.S. Air Force built. We were told by different people there that it was going to be demolished, that it's in the way of the new airport terminal. We were also told that it's very well built. I think somebody said it has concrete floors that are built to last. Who owns that?
Ms. Redfern: That's a territorial government facility.
Senator Moore: They own that.
Ms. Redfern: They own that.
Senator Moore: Where did they get the title to that?
Ms. Redfern: They probably inherited it from the Government of Northwest Territories, who would have inherited it most likely from the Government of Canada, who transferred it from U.S. ownership about 1959 or so.
Senator Moore: The land where the airport is and the new terminal, who owns that land?
Ms. Redfern: I believe it's also territorial, because airports have been devolved to the territorial government. Landownership is complicated in Iqaluit. There are some lands that are Crown near the airport, as well as territorial, and then in some cases there's land that we own, and there's a tiny number of fee simple properties which were grandfathered because they were purchased before the land claim was signed.
Senator Moore: For example, when that new terminal was built, did the builders come and talk with you and the council to discuss the proposal and how it might impact on abutting properties and their usefulness and so on?
Ms. Redfern: Yes. Officials or representatives of the territorial government actually came before mayor and council — that was my earlier term — along with our consultants, and I recollect making a couple of statements to them. One was reminding them that usually with respect to new development where we have sold the land or leased the land, that we are able to recoup the costs associated with the public services, like building roads, paving them, or utilities or booster stations. Because the land the new airport is on was already owned by a different level of government, there was no ability for our level of government to actually collect any substantial revenue to do things like upgrading that road or other related services.
When I asked them if their $300 million-plus airport would include fixing the road, paving it and such, they looked at me dumbfounded. Like, "Well, that's not our problem. You're going to benefit from a $300 million-plus airport.'' I said, "We don't have that money, and I can't pass that cost, effectively, on to our tiny ratepayers.''
Senator Moore: Don't they have to come to council to get zoning and approval and building permits?
Ms. Redfern: There had been a conditional approval or conditions attached to that, which included a transportation study, which was going to look at those ancillary and associated costs. What I understand is when I was not the mayor in the interim, significant pressure was put on the council and the city to issue those permits and to have those conditions removed, and they were, unfortunately. We effectively lost a significant amount of leverage in which to get those costs covered by saying, "Look, you commit to upgrading the road and those services, and we will issue the building permit,'' but they removed them instead.
Senator Moore: Just that one instance, that's a pretty substantial deal, right? Long term, long life. Did the council seek advice, legal advice, planning advice, infrastructure advice, like "This is going to cost you so much? You need some quid pro quo here. There has to be some reciprocity.'' Was that done or was it just a council sitting there getting hammered by the pros from down South?
Ms. Redfern: I understand from having been briefed by my city officials that effectively the decision that council made went against the staff recommendation, and I wasn't there. There was political pressure put on that council. I think unfortunately, as I said, they lost significant leverage, and it's much harder now for me to go back and attempt to negotiate.
Senator Moore: Your Worship, I have served on city council in Halifax. I was deputy mayor for a while. I can't believe they went against them. The staff does not come up with opinions and reports lightly.
Somebody mentioned earlier about the situation where you have an employee in one of these government offices from the South and an indigenous person from, say, Iqaluit working in the same office but not entitled to the same housing benefits and other things. Who makes up those discriminatory rules?
Ms. Redfern: The vast majority of those policies are developed by whichever level of government has decided to develop them. It's more likely that the territorial government has taken a lead on a lot of those policies, and then whether the federal government follows suit.
It's a very difficult and challenging issue. It absolutely needs to be relooked at and revisited because it's causing individual inequity amongst employees who must work with each other, and it's causing significant inequity and disharmony amongst many different groups of people in our community.
Senator Moore: It's taken away hope. It's probably contrary to the Charter. Anyway, keep working at it, Your Worship.
The Chair: We have run short of time. I will allow one short question from Senator Patterson. If you have a burning question, please go ahead.
Senator Patterson: I'll phrase it quickly.
You said Inuit organizations need to invest in housing. There is a 16-hectare parcel of land owned by Inuit in downtown Iqaluit. There is a proposal to develop that land from an Inuit-owned development corporation for the region. Could you describe that potential? I know you're a beneficiary. The Inuit are starting to get royalties from mineral developments. How would they play a role in solving this problem? You mention the role of bands on reserves. I believe our territorial, Nunavut and Inuit organizations have yet to embrace housing. I know you're connected with them. Could you make some comments on that, please?
Ms. Redfern: There's a significant parcel of land behind the trailer park area which is near the RCMP headquarters. It's vacant all the way out towards some property that is predominantly industrial.
The Inuit organization has developed a cursory plan, which is a mix of development; affordable housing, a hotel- conference centre, potential office or facilities which I hope will also include a daycare and possibly a community centre.
It's good to see this parcel of land being proposed for development and that it would include housing. I hope that the Inuit organization looks at ways to make those units available at an affordable cost, whether as rental units or home ownership. There's still quite a lot of research being done as to the different models to ensure it is a worthwhile small initiative.
The Inuit organizations need to seriously look at not just this one potential pilot project but how they can get into the housing market at significantly greater levels, not only in Iqaluit but in the small communities, and provide more affordable housing.
It would be beneficial and useful to even build housing at cost and offer it to beneficiaries, like those people who are living in social housing units and can't afford a home or don't know how to go through the process of buying a home but would actually have the money to pay for the mortgage.
The Chair: On behalf of all the committee members, I would like to thank Mayor Redfern for being with us today, and for her brief outline and the answers to all our questions. Thank you very much.
For our second panel today, we have LTA Aérostructures. LTA Aérostructures designs, certifies, builds, operates and supports heavy-lift cargo ships for use in remote and northern communities.
This morning we are fortunate to have with us today Michael Dyment, the CEO, and Marc Bourret, the President. They are joined by Patrick Gagnon, the Managing Partner of The Parliamentary Group.
If you would proceed with your presentation, please, and then that will be followed by questions for the senators.
Michael Dyment, CEO of LTAA, (The Parliamentary Group): My name is Michael Dyment, I am the CEO of LTA Aérostructures. We are based in Montreal. With me today is my colleague, Marc Bourret, the President of LTA Aérostructures.
We are a very unique Canadian company with plans to build heavy-lift airships that will serve the needs of businesses and communities in the Canadian Arctic and in northern provinces.
Our company is relatively new, but our consortium of partners is not. Our partners include STELIA, a division of Airbus, and companies such as the Zeppelin airship company. Our consortium has many years of experience building, flying and operating airships.
What is unique to our program in Canada is that we are designing airships for quite heavy lift, and our airships are designed to operate 12 months out of the year in extreme Arctic weather conditions. This is a very unique aspect of our engineering design program.
There's a 100-year history of airships, and if many of you are hearing about airships maybe for the first time today, I can't fault you for thinking about the Hindenburg; that's usually what comes up. But today, with modern aerospace technologies, composites, advanced materials, et cetera, it is possible to make helium-based airship aircraft very safe and reliable and also quite affordable.
These airships are quite large. In fact, our smallest airship is about the size of a football field, and it lifts about 22,000 to 24,000 pounds at a time.
Perhaps you have seen pictures in the materials that were circulated earlier. The airships are quite beautiful and attractive machines, but they're extremely tough and versatile and can do an incredible job across many different sectors of industry, commerce and socially with communities in northern Canada.
Our principal markets for these airships are mining, oil and gas. In the last year and a half, however, we have been made aware of the opportunity to use this wonderful new technology that is going to be built out of Mirabel airport in Quebec to tackle problems that are systemic with the indigenous peoples of Canada, people living in remote communities. I'm referring here now to the First Nations, the Métis and the Inuit.
Our airships have the ability to lift an entire pre-fabricated house — perhaps it's built in a factory in Flin Flon, Manitoba — and it can be flown non-stop to a location almost anywhere in the Arctic, to be set down on a permanent resting spot where, in a matter of days, that home can be turned into livable quarters for a family needing two or three or four bedrooms.
This is technology that is here today. If you are familiar with Goodyear and have heard of the Goodyear Blimp, one of our consortium partners is the manufacturer of that airship, which has been flown quite successfully for many years.
I'm hoping to impart to you one important factor: airships are here to stay, and they will become increasingly a tool for Canada to open up and to provide new methods of transportation in areas where you have no roads or you're dependent on ice roads that sometimes don't support trucking because it's been a mild winter, perhaps, or in other instances where the ocean is not free of ice and you can't put building materials or other things into local areas.
We are quite aware of the interest in housing. For example, many of the Inuit communities were familiar with a program that Makivik Corporation wants to launch to encourage employment in the North to help build homes at a far more rapid pace. We've been told by people in these communities that there's a shortage of about 100,000 single- family homes. It's not our figure; that's a figure that has been mentioned to us on numerous occasions. This is 100,000 homes for remote communities, so it includes communities in central Saskatchewan as well as in the high Arctic.
That is a significant number, so we have been working quietly with our consortium and with increasing involvement with the federal government as well as the government of Quebec, who is an investor of ours, by the way, to look into building a special purpose fleet of airships that can perhaps deliver as many as 2,500 homes per year.
These would be factory-built homes. They would come from many different locations across Canada, where the homes would be produced according to specifications dictated by the communities that will receive these homes. These homes are going to be built to R-2000, very high quality, with a capability to lift them up and fly them to their final resting spot in a matter of a day or two.
When we hear stories about homes being designed and built and needing five years from the time there's a plan to the time where people are able to move in, this program that we hope will be of interest to the federal government and to the First Nation, the Métis and the Inuit will become a complementary program to other plans that are in place. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you. We'll now open it up for questions, and I would like to start.
With regard to airships for this type of use, has that been accomplished elsewhere yet? Is it being utilized, for example, in the U.S. or Europe? Have any pilot projects been conducted here in Canada? What is the current state of usage of this type of technology?
Mr. Dyment: Let me start by answering your last question, and that is that as far as we know, LTA is a unique effort. Canada has not undertaken for over 60 years any effort to use airships for any reason. This period ended in the late 1950s, 1960s.
In the United States, it's different. There are numerous U.S. military airship programs that have been invested in and funded quite extensively over the last 10 or so years. These are programs that have the involvement of companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and the like, and these U.S.-based programs are focused on building airships that work well in deserts. It's a different thing to design and build an airship for the desert and hope that at 50 or 60 below zero it stays in one piece in northern Canada.
These efforts that we are undertaking in Quebec with the resources available from the Montreal aerospace community, I might add, make this program very interesting and specifically focused on safe operation of heavy lift for the Arctic.
The Chair: Thank you.
We'll turn to our deputy chair, Senator Patterson.
Senator Patterson: I'd like to welcome Mr. Dyment and his colleagues. I've been privileged to hear their presentation at mining symposiums and other venues, and I congratulate you for promoting this exciting idea widely in the north.
I'd like to ask a couple of questions. First of all, you talk about organizing and helping to lead the formation of an appropriate consortium to address the high cost of transportation of materials to remote locations in the north and propose a solution to the government within the next few months. Could you give a little more detail about how you see this consortium being composed? I would also be interested to know how you envision the ownership and operation of your airships, please.
Mr. Dyment: Very well. Again, I'll answer the second question first.
It's been our business plan for the last couple of years to finance ourselves, with our resources, the manufacture of airships and to own them. We will own them; we will not sell them. We are doing that for a couple of reasons. One is that even though companies like Shell Oil, for example, have a desire to have access to airship capacity for their cargo needs, they're not necessarily the natural owner, nor do they want to own an airship. This is the case, obviously, if you look through the mining industry where our airships will be ubiquitous over the next 20 or so years.
Our plan is to operate the airships but make them available on a cost-per-tonne-kilometre basis or a cost-per-hour basis. That way it's very affordable for communities or for individual mines. Even small mines can afford access to our airships, and they don't have to worry about training pilots and operating these machines safely.
It is also important, from the standpoint of safety, that we will have highly trained and highly skilled employees who are pilots, co-pilots, mechanics, et cetera. That will ensure the safe operation of the airships.
Your second question is interesting in many respects. First, we are not a housing company. We don't purport to know very much about the specific technical needs for certain homes constructed in certain ways for the Arctic. Of course, we are homeowners, so I guess in some ways we have some opinions.
What we've learned in having people come to us with the request that we consider using our airships to move pre- fabricated houses is that a pre-fabricated home is going to be built efficiently, it's going to be built cost-effectively because factories are producing these homes, and they will be built to outstanding quality. The mere issue of lifting the house and relocating it a thousand miles away is really the easy part of it.
Our airships are very inexpensive to operate, so we know that moving a house is not going to add very much to the overall cost of the structure. Our numbers have shown that we could build homes at about half the price of what current construction facilitates, and we can do it quickly. The homes can be available within the year.
The consortium needed to be successful in this regard is a consortium of government, probably the housing industry and certainly the Northern Affairs department. We have been invited to and we've spoken to as many as 20 different government agencies, federal agencies, in the last month and a half about this rather radical approach to housing. We feel that the consortium can be there, and even financing can be there. This creates new business models for housing. It's potentially very interesting.
Senator Patterson: I have a quick supplementary on that. I've seen your solution to northern Canada's housing emergency, the white paper series, and it shows a picture of a modular house on page 4 actually being suspended from an airship.
Mr. Dyment: Yes.
Senator Patterson: The picture suggests the house would be sent intact. Do I understand that's the model you propose, or would it be transported in more compact, pre-fabbed panels?
Mr. Dyment: We could do that, but we can also deliver the house intact, in one piece. That house can be equipped with utilities and appliances. A home builder has approached us who has a deployable wind turbine that comes out of the side of the house and goes up into the atmosphere to generate an off-the-grid type of solution.
To go with me on this, if we are able to lift the whole structure and not need to have special construction crews available — we will need people on the ground, but we will not have to have a big team of experienced home builders.
The innovation that can occur at the factory as opposed to onsite could be incredible here. If the problem is big enough, 100,000 homes or something like that, a very large number of homes, there's a tremendous opportunity here for the country to innovate, and it's not just with respect to airships. Our airships will have other needs and uses in the Arctic, but this is potentially a way to bring innovation and fantastic ideas about the quality of living for these people to site. Perhaps open competitions for architecturally designed homes are one of the initial steps that could be taken.
Senator Beyak: Thank you, gentlemen. This sounds very exciting, especially in view of the numbers. Whatever employment may be lost on the ground putting the homes together will be picked up servicing the airships, I imagine, and building the proper infrastructure for them to land.
You mentioned in your presentation it was originally for oil, mining and gas, but I see a great future here. I wonder if you could tell me or elaborate more for people watching at home how the airships will land, if the landing strips are big enough and if you have to do something with permafrost.
Mr. Dyment: Thank you. That's a great question. I'm excited to say that we don't need landing strips. These airships operate on the basis of buoyancy. They are filled with helium, and they can go up and down like a helicopter. We just need a space, if we need to put them on the ground.
This really opens up the operation of the airships to some of the most remote communities you can imagine, where there may not even be a landing strip. We can service communities of 20 people as opposed to communities of 7,000 people.
It's important to note here that each of our airships is a little employment centre. Each airship will require about 40 people who are trained as pilots, co-pilots, ground handling people and mechanics. We are not going to get our pilots from Miami Beach. We are going to need to hire people from these communities and train them in programs that we call ab initio programs, where people who are interested in becoming operators of these airships will be sent to a training centre in Montreal to be trained as pilots and airship operators.
The Province of Quebec is a direct investor and shareholder in our company. Their reason for investing in our airship business, despite the fact that we are locating in Quebec, is that they're hoping the airships can accelerate development in northern Quebec where there aren't many roads and it's very costly to build roads.
In terms of employment, we did a study for the province that analyzed the impact on employment, and our business will directly and indirectly support about 6,000 people employed, many of those living in remote areas. It should have a very positive impact.
Senator Beyak: I appreciate that. I live in northwestern Ontario and everything costs a lot there as well. Thank you.
The Chair: As a supplementary to that, I was thinking too about what input you've had from the local Inuit. You've indicated there is a possibility of training to fly the airships. Does that also include the possibility that local Inuit may be involved in maintaining the homes that are actually delivered or even setting up the buildings if they're delivered collapsed as opposed to already assembled?
Mr. Dyment: Either way, it's generally the last 50 miles that gets the job done.
If you look at how housing has or has not happened in Iqaluit, I understand last summer there was a ship that was unable to get into port to deliver housing materials. I could be wrong on this, but I think it was 20 homes that were supposed to be built. The materials then went back to Montreal, so they missed a whole season for that.
With respect to working with the Inuit, we've had a cooperation agreement for some time now with Air Inuit. We are very anxious to have northern operating partners. We have extended this offer to Air Inuit, to Makivik Corporation, and we are opening up discussions now with the Assembly of First Nations and other cooperatives across the country.
This is not something that we can do out of Montreal. We absolutely recognize that the demand for these programs and even the definition of these potential housing programs and food programs — I've not talked about those — but these housing programs should really be sort of a pull strategy where the communities, now that they see the technology is available, can decide what they want. And there's time; let them decide how we can fulfill their housing needs. We can do it very quickly and inexpensively.
If I can just offer: I have not talked about food before, but we have done studies to look at ways of feeding the North. Since our smaller airship can carry about 22,000 or 23,000 pounds of payload, you can imagine that these airships are able to deliver lots of food 12 months out of the year. If you have tough weather conditions, it's actually even better to have an airship because it can turn its nose into a crosswind. You can't do that with an airplane. We should be able to access remote communities and assist with the food needs and the sustainability in that respect as part of our mission.
The Chair: Just as a point of clarification, you were saying that your smallest airship can carry about 22,000 pounds worth of cargo. Could you compare that to the type of plane that would normally deliver food, just so we can get some idea of the scale?
Mr. Dyment: Sure. Let me start with cargo aircraft. There were, until last year, C-130 cargo aircraft operating to support the mining industry. They were based out of Yellowknife. These aircraft carry about the same payload that our airship does.
For a smaller aircraft like a Twin Otter, you're looking at a couple thousand pounds of payload, and it's very difficult to put building supplies inside. Small aircraft are not the solution.
If you look at the housing issue, it's very hard for us to visualize any solution that uses traditional methods of construction just to move material around. People would be dependent on ice roads still for conventional building.
Senator Raine: This is very thought-provoking, and I have some questions right away.
Obviously the extreme cold in the Arctic is a climatic condition that is very special. The paper says:
The airships are designed to utilize the latest carbon lattice-based composite and metallurgical technologies.
Is there an ability to test these components and technologies in extreme cold? We did see some problems with composite houses, where they became brittle and fragile in the cold.
Marc Bourret, President of LTAA, The Parliamentary Group: The technology that we are envisioning for these airships already exists and has already been tested many times. In fact, a lot of these composite materials, or even the metallic structures that we are envisaging, have already been tested for airplanes and helicopters. We know that they can sustain these kinds of temperatures. In fact, every typical aircraft or helicopter program does include a test where you immerse these prototypes into the very cold temperatures of the North. You fly them there, start them and really test their systems. We know that this technology has already been tested.
The good thing about the airship technology that we are looking at is that the technology already exists. We are not fighting on the same ground as, for example, new OEM, trying to introduce a new aircraft where it has to break barriers of either altitude, speed or capacity, and even propulsion system capabilities.
These airships will fly below 6,000 feet. They will not go any faster than about 70 or 75 knots. No cabin pressurization is required. No doubt some heating will be required for the crew.
You're looking at a lot of simplification compared to what we already see as part of aerospace development right now. That's why I've been telling all the people who ask me that we are not doing research and development here. We're doing pure engineering integration of existing technology. This is why this idea has come forward and is becoming more popular.
Senator Raine: Your business model would finance and own the aircraft along with investors, general investors in the stock market and government, and then would contract to housing authorities in the North to transport the modular homes to their final location?
Mr. Dyment: Yes.
Senator Raine: Obviously, then, the supports for the homes or the basement structures would be made in place and the house would just come down and . . . click.
Mr. Dyment: Yes, it would click. That's good.
Mr. Bourret: Click in place.
Mr. Dyment: There is a housing developer who has approached us and has a foundation actually integrated into the house. It has extensible support systems.
I think this approach is going to produce many innovative solutions to foundations, not just housing. Putting a house on permafrost is a rather risky thing if you can't adjust and re-level the structure probably on a regular basis.
I had the good fortune some years ago of living and working in the Arctic. I worked for Shell Oil, and I worked up in the Beaufort Sea. Single-handedly, I observed the incredible challenges of getting anything done logistically or with transportation or even with housing.
I think that this approach that we are suggesting could deliver many well-built housing structures. We can also deliver buildings in pieces. Through the innovative interest of the housing industry and the people who live in the Arctic or in remote communities, this can truly revolutionize what's being done.
I personally think that this is a very inexpensive and low-risk way to tackle a large number of houses. If you want to solve the problem or begin down the pathway to delivering thousands of residences, this is really the way and you should consider very carefully studying it as a solution.
Senator Raine: I'm just wondering if you have any information or a video clip that you could share with us, because a picture paints a thousand words. It's hard to imagine the scale. You talk about a small one being the size of a football field, but obviously if your mind starts to go, we're not going to just be transporting houses but all the supplies for the hardware store, which doesn't exist now, or the building supply centre or the furniture store. You could have a catalogue and order whatever want, and it could come inside the house, I suppose.
How much does a 1,500-square-foot house weigh, a modular home?
Mr. Dyment: There are designs under way that will weigh less than 22,000 pounds. They're not overly spacious homes, but they are extremely well insulated and have all the functionality we referred to earlier. If someone wants a larger home, we can carry them in two pieces, and they can be mated at the building site.
The transportation costs using airships are really quite low, and the results are that you're producing houses that are livable right away, within days of having them put into the location.
We don't deal with problems with the traditional building methods. Materials are shipped up. They sit out for the winter or maybe two winters. When you build the home, the wood materials are wet, and that introduces black mould almost right away, guaranteed. We are disposing of that potential outcome with this approach.
Communities can tailor make the houses in the communities they want. There are also many cooperatives and other housing manufacturing facilities that are either invested in or owned by the First Nations, by the Mohawk and I believe the Inuit have at least one and maybe more. There's no reason why homes can't be built by the communities if they have looked after that side of it as well.
We are building a larger airship. It won't follow into operation for another three years after our airship begins operations in 36 months' time. That larger airship is 70 metric tonnes, which is seven times more payload than a 10- tonne, obviously, but it doesn't mean it's seven times larger or longer because the helium creates the volume. The 10- tonne airship is about the length of a football field. The 70-tonne is the length of about one and a half football fields, to give you a visual.
There is also a paper — Senator Patterson has it and is reading it — that is available that has illustrations of the airship. I think that's either available in this room or you can get it through your package.
You see on the illustration for that white paper that there are iso-containers strapped under the airship. That's another method. The house is carried in what's called a sling load. It's a carbon fibre cable that supports at several points along the top of the house, the lifting points. When you're carrying a structure like that, you're not going to fly as fast as you could if you didn't have a big house under you. Building materials can be carried in the iso-containers. There is no issue with that either.
But I think the elegance of this solution is the homes are built in a factory, so when they go on site the homes should be good for 50 years. They are of very high quality. The new standards that Canada has promoted, the R-2000 standard, could be a guaranteed standard. You could have beautiful homes.
The Chair: I'd just like to follow up with regard to the timeline. If you had everything approved that needed to be approved and had all the necessary partners, it sounds like it will take about three years before you have the larger airship available, but do you have the smaller one available now so that you could actually launch, let's say, a pilot project?
Mr. Dyment: We have a smaller airship that is available now. It's called the NO7, and it carries about 4,000 pounds. It's the same airship that's used by Goodyear. Goodyear has re-fleeted. They still call it the Goodyear Blimp, but it's not a blimp. A blimp is a gas-filled bag. Our airships have structure to them.
The Arctic version of the airship is in design. It will be manufactured over the next several years and will be available at the end of the decade. So just to be clear, it will be three or four years, practically, before we can put that airship into operation. It's an aero-structure. It also has to be certified. We're currently working with Transport Canada on that effort, but that's just a fact with our program.
Now, it may take three or four years to get a housing program organized, so there's no reason to do nothing. We can begin work immediately, but we do believe that a consortium should be formed. Clearly, as an airship manufacturer, we're just a piece of it.
The Chair: To follow up again, you said you were talking to Air Inuit and Makivik Corporation. Could expand a bit on your relationship with Makivik. When the committee travelled up North, we heard that Makivik had great success locally in building homes at a reasonable cost. You're talking about building homes elsewhere. I'm wondering how that works with Makivik and whether they would see that, in some sense, as a negative. In some sense, that may be taking business away from them.
Mr. Dyment: You're right in that we could be perceived as a competitor, but what we are hoping to do is to bring the Inuit in as a partner so they can benefit from the ownership of what we're doing and can lead in that respect.
One matter that is very important for us in looking for future partners is the experience they have. Air Inuit, along with First Air, are very sophisticated operators of aircraft. They understand weather issues and the challenges of operating in the middle of the winter. We feel, as does Air Inuit, that a future partnership would include sharing that experience and maybe they can assist us with training pilots and many other facets. We've always framed our business as a partnership. We're looking for operating partners, manufacturing partners and so forth, and we want to continue to pursue that.
It's fortunate that the Inuit have their communities on water, with only some very minor exceptions. It's possible to bring building materials in by barge to many of these communities. That is one facet of this that is interesting and a challenge. But there are other things that we can do, carrying food, for example, where we could very easily substitute with the National Food Program to provide a lower-cost way of supporting those communities.
Senator Patterson: The paper that I mentioned contained a statement that you estimated that the all-in cost of a modular-build home delivered by airship will be half that of a site-constructed home, with unquestioned quality improvement. I'm reading from the paper. Could you elaborate more on that? Are the savings in transportation costs or labour, or are there other factors? Would it be possible for you to share the basis for making these estimates with the committee?
Mr. Dyment: Absolutely; we're very happy to share analysis, and we would hope also that this analysis would continue with not just a small handful of communities but perhaps a wider array.
Certain types of homes for the Arctic are going to be different from homes that need to be built in northern Saskatchewan. We recognize that. What we're seeing now from the factory-built side is that you get a pretty darn good house for a couple hundred thousand dollars that are multi-bedroom and well-constructed.
In the prior testimony that I sat through an hour ago, it was mentioned that the market for, say, a three-bedroom home in Iqaluit was $400,000 or $500,000. These homes could form a case study, just to underscore the figures that are in the white paper.
We've sort of learned it's best to look at business cases community by community. We do this for the mining industry as well, where it's best to look at where a mine site is and look at what equipment has to be moved in order to come up with a cost-benefit analysis. But we stand by what we say in the white paper, namely that you might be looking at 50 per cent of the cost for a factory-built home at the location — finished, complete, walk away — versus a home that has taken a number of years to produce using traditional methods.
Senator Patterson: Did I understand that you will be willing to share those estimates with the committee?
Mr. Dyment: Yes.
Senator Patterson: Thank you.
The Chair: You mentioned that you were looking at the feasibility of using airships in Saskatchewan. As a senator from Saskatchewan, that kind of tweaked my interest, and I'm wondering which parties you've had conversations with in Saskatchewan about initiating this program.
Mr. Dyment: In Saskatchewan, I don't think we've spoken with anyone, but we have talked to people in Ottawa who have experience and relationships with Saskatchewan communities. One of our key advisers is actually in the room with us today. His name is Guy Freedman. He's with the First Peoples Group. I'm sure you're familiar with his experiences in that regard.
I can't name a community for you, but we have talked to people in Manitoba and elsewhere. Every day we learn more. It's a fascinating challenge, and we look forward to getting to know people in Saskatchewan on this program.
The Chair: Thank you. We have time for Senator Moore for a question, but we do have to be out by 11:30.
Senator Moore: Thank you, gentlemen, for being here.
I expect that in terms of the houses that may be designed, you will have to work with them to ensure that they incorporate some kind of a lifting point or mechanism so that you can lift them. I raise that because there's an interesting article in today's National Post newspaper. A noted Canadian First Nation designer, Douglas Cardinal, has designed a house for use in the Arctic, and there's an image of the concept. You should look at that. He is sensitive to this. We had many questions for him when he appeared before us last year. I know that Senator Raine has been pressing on the design of the houses, and I think he's taken that to heart and has come up with something. It might be useful to take a look at that.
Mr. Dyment: Thank you.
The Chair: With that, we will adjourn the meeting, but before we do, on behalf of all the senators, I would like to thank the representatives from LTA Aérostructures for bringing to the committee some innovative thinking about transportation. With that, I will adjourn the meeting.
(The committee adjourned.)