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THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORT AND COMMUNICATIONS

EVIDENCE

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OTTAWA, Wednesday, March 30, 2022

The Standing Committee on Transport and Communications met by video conference this day at 6:34 p.m. [ET], to study the impacts of climate change on critical infrastructure in the transportation and communications sectors and the consequential impacts on their interdependencies.

Senator Leo Housakos (Chair) in the chair.

[Translation]

The Chair: Honourable senators, good evening. I am Leo Housakos, senator from Quebec, and chair of this committee. I would like to introduce the members of the committee who are participating in this meeting: first, the deputy chair of this committee, Senator Miville-Dechêne. We also have with us this evening Senator Cormier, from New Brunswick; Senator Dasko, from Ontario; Senator Dawson, from Quebec; Senator Manning, from Newfoundland and Labrador; Senator Galvez, from Quebec; Senator Simons, from Alberta; and Senator Sorensen, from Alberta.

We are meeting to continue our study on the impacts of climate change on critical infrastructure in the transportation and communications sectors and the consequential impacts on their interdependencies.

[English]

This evening we are pleased to welcome from the Council of Canadian Academies, Mr. Scott Vaughan, Chair, Expert Panel on Disaster Resilience in a Changing Climate; Jérôme Marty, Project Director; and from the Canada West Foundation, Mr. John Law, Senior Fellow. Welcome and thank you for joining us virtually.

We will begin with the opening remarks from Mr. Marty and then turn the floor over to the senators for questions. Mr. Marty, you have the floor.

Jérôme Marty, Project Director, Council of Canadian Academies: Thank you very much. Mr. Vaughan is not able to connect, unfortunately, due to technical issues. I will provide the remarks on his behalf.

Honourable chair, vice chair, members of the Transportation and Communications Committee, thank you for inviting us. My name is Jérôme Marty. I am a project director at the Council of Canadian Academies.

In 2022, earlier this week, the council published a report called Building a Resilient Canada, which was shared with members of the Senate earlier. I’m pleased to be joined online with Scott Vaughan who was the chair of the panel for this project. I’ll make a brief statement describing the report and would be pleased then to answer any questions from committee members.

I will start by quickly describing what this report was about, the charge and the sponsor.

The CCA was asked to answer the following question: “What key opportunities exist to improve disaster resilience in Canada through better integration of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation research and practice?”

Public Safety Canada was the main sponsor for this assessment, but many other federal departments were co-sponsors, including Transport Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and Natural Resources Canada.

Public Safety Canada also posed the following three subquestions:

The first one: What institutional barriers, incentives, and disincentives prevent the effective integration of climate change adaptation and disaster risk management in Canada?

The second: What climate-related tools, data sources, methods, and frameworks are underutilized in Canada’s existing disaster risk reduction efforts? What disaster risk reduction tools, data sources, methods, and frameworks are underutilized in climate adaptation initiatives and practice?

And the last question was: What adaptation and disaster risk reduction capabilities are required to enhance resilience to climate-related natural disasters in the future?

To address the charge, the CCA assembled a multidisciplinary panel of 11 experts who contributed a broad range of knowledge, expertise and experience to the deliberations of the topic, with backgrounds in a number of areas including sustainable development, insurance, planning, policy and resilience. The panel conducted interviews with experts in Canada, in particular with Indigenous community members, and internationally between 2020 and 2021. The report was peer reviewed before its release in early 2022.

The context for this report is increasingly well understood and is the focus of many news headlines. In a changing climate, disasters pose an immediate and growing threat to Canadian families, communities and the economy. The report notes that until the 1960s, Canada averaged about 30 climate-related disasters per decade. That number has increased to 100 per decade, with the largest increase in wildfires, floods and storms.

Climate-related disasters resulted in $2.4 billion of insured damages in Canada in 2020 alone. Given the unprecedented heat waves, wildfires and flooding in 2021, that figure is likely to be higher.

The report notes several drivers behind this increase in disasters — land use decisions, population growth in vulnerable areas like flood-risk areas — all increase the cost of losses when disasters do occur. The report observes that Canada is likely to experience concurrent, cascading and non-linear impacts. What does that mean? It means that overlapping disasters may unfold simultaneously, or an earlier disaster risk, like the B.C. wildfires in the summer of 2021, may worsen the effects of flooding that occurred later in that year.

One tool to help anticipate those interconnected risks is an all-hazard risk assessment. The government uses these risk assessments, but unlike most other OECD countries, they are not available to the public in Canada. The methodologies used are public.

But I’ll note that all-hazard risk assessments currently rely on historical climatic norms, which are becoming less reliable. For example, when planning and development controls hinge on floodplain mapping that is based on historical conditions and, in many parts of Canada, out-of-date or non-existent data, communities may continue to invest in the development of buildings and infrastructure in locations that will become increasingly flood-prone in a changing climate. The maladaptation may also stem from this, where addressing one risk will inadvertently exacerbate another one.

This is a final word on context: Since the release of this report, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its report tracking the current risk and inevitable rise of climate-related disasters, while a report by the UN Environment Programme examined the rising risks of wildfires linked to climate change.

The key finding of the panel is that disaster-risk reduction and climate adaptation programs are not integrated. Disaster risk deduction programs and front-line responders focus on short-term disaster response and recovery. Their structures are understandably top-down and command-and-control. By contrast, climate adaptation programs focus on longer-term disaster prevention and rebuilding. Their structures tend to be more bottom-up and collaborative.

This failure to integrate climate-change adaptation into DRR activities, policies and tools reduces the efficiency and impact of public investments in disaster resilience.

A recurring theme of the report is the importance of disaster prevention. Most governments persistently under-invest in mitigation and later pay the price in terms of disaster response and recovery. This manifests in Canada with mounting payouts, for example, under the Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangements, or DFAA.

The economic case for investing in disaster prevention is compelling. The report notes, for example, that for every dollar spent on prevention, as much as $11 in response and recovery costs can be avoided. These include inexpensive investments in backwater drain valves in basements to avoid flooding or fire-resistant roofing materials.

The panel examined three ways to support better integration: data and information, finance and governance.

First, on data and information, the panel noted the importance of providing data covering recent climate disasters that is timely, comprehensive, accessible to both specialists and broader users, and, perhaps most importantly, trusted. Providing public access to Canada’s all-hazard risk assessment is one opportunity. Another is improving the Canadian Disaster Database, so Canadians can have a better picture of trends in their areas.

An important area of the data and knowledge involves Indigenous and local knowledge. The panel spent quite a bit of time on Indigenous knowledge, noting, for example, instances in which traditional forestry stewardship practices like cultural burning appear to have lowered wildfire risk. Another piece was incidents in which DRR operations were unaware of the rights of First Nations communities in evacuation orders.

Second, the panel explored the role of finance. The report examined five areas: home insurance, private-public sector partnerships, public disaster relief, public infrastructure investments and forthcoming risk-disclosure rules. There are several challenges here. A lack of understanding of exposure to flood and fire risks and poor understanding of the kinds of perils and damages that are and are not covered by various insurance policies create risk. This risk manifests at the household level when inadequate coverage leads to unanticipated financial burdens, and it also impacts governments, which are ultimately called upon to provide disaster relief in these circumstances. And when insurance policies do pay out and when public recovery funds are disbursed, often the stage is once again set for disaster, as similarly vulnerable structures are rebuilt in similarly exposed locations.

The third and final area involves governance. Given the scale of climate risk, the panel underscored the importance of a whole-of-society collaboration, as well as government mandates and top-down direction being required to operationalize integration. This will be important in 2022 as the government releases its National Adaptation Strategy.

Going from the bottom up, leveraging the knowledge and capacities of local communities is critical for ensuring that DRR and climate-adaptation activities and policies work to improve resilience and promote decision buy-in among those most affected by disasters. From the top, central governments can provide essential funding and information while playing a vital coordinating role. Central governments can also develop policies, regulations, codes and standards that will all drive local progress. Critically, though, mandates must go hand in hand with adequate financial resources and locally relevant information to ensure success.

Chair and colleagues, let me conclude by noting, first, that disasters result from the interactions between communities and naturally occurring hazards. They are the consequences of human choices at individual and societal scales. Resilience is a choice to lower risk. Second, addressing the root causes of vulnerability and hazard exposure are essential.

Chair and honourable members, thank you for inviting us. I welcome any questions or comments.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Marty. I would like to turn it over to Mr. John Law for his opening remarks. Mr. Law, you have the floor.

John Law, Senior Fellow, Canada West Foundation: Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. It’s a pleasure to be with you today. I’m looking forward to the discussion.

I’m going to come at the issue from the other end of the spectrum in terms of the discussion that I will offer today. My remarks will focus on previewing for the committee a forthcoming report that I authored with my colleagues from the Canada West Foundation which is due out in the first week of May. It has been supported by a coalition of national business associations, including the national Business Council of Canada, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Construction Association, Western Canada Roadbuilders and Heavy Construction Association, and the Western Transportation Advisory Council, or WESTAC, among others.

The report argues that it is urgent for Canada to establish a first national plan to improve the resilience of our trade and transportation infrastructure. We have called upon eight years of work in the space that we have done on the issue, which has included extensive consultations domestically with both industry and governments across the country. We have also spent a lot of time talking with other countries that, we believe, have insights in terms of best practices that can inform the development of such a plan.

I would like to start by reflecting on some of the events of the last few years, including the COVID-19 pandemic and some of the rampant environmental destruction we have seen from severe weather events. There have also been unprecedented disruptions to our international supply chain, and now there is the Russian war in Ukraine. All of these have highlighted a level of increased uncertainty and risk that we have not seen before. One of the key features for these interdependent challenges that I want to start with is to highlight in many cases these events that have been in the headlines in the last 24 months have shed light on a series of conditions that actually were pre-existing that did not start two years ago, but in fact are the product of issues that have been in place for the better part of the last decade.

This is certainly the case when it comes to Canada’s trade and transportation infrastructure which serves as the foundation of Canada’s supply chains that move Canadian products to international markets and is why a nationally consistent approach to understanding and quantifying risk is required to ensure resilience for this full basket of interconnected challenges, which obviously includes climate change.

In the current environment of risk and uncertainty, there is an urgent need to rethink how Canadian infrastructure is planned, how it’s delivered and how it’s operated. The scale, pace, and interconnectedness of the threats I outlined are more challenging such that our infrastructure has to be adaptable in new ways that are more resilient than ever before. This means embracing new practices based on a nationally consistent and systemic approach to understanding and quantifying risk and benefits.

One of the objectives to address climate change in our report is to establish a road map which embeds a more comprehensive approach to resilience and infrastructure decision making. Best practices here advocate not only identifying vulnerabilities and interdependencies ahead of time for infrastructure planning, but also approaches to build community trust and support by encouraging greater transparency in infrastructure decisions and a recognition of regional needs.

In the near term, transportation infrastructure and supply chains can be expected to continue to be fragile and reflect debt levels in both the public and private sectors that will be at historically high levels.

In this condition, the wrong policy steps by ignoring the experience of the last decade could not only derail our recovery but usher in what Peter Hall, EDC’s retiring chief economist characterizes as a lost decade for the Canadian economy.

The recommendations in our report offer a permanent home for serious ongoing climate impact analysis and mitigation where our learnings can be shared across the country and also across asset classes. Overall, it’s based on a recommended solution for more rigorous evaluation of benefits, costs and risk, and it is intended to outlast changes in government and to focus on thoughtful, strategic approaches that build on best practices as opposed to the fad of the moment.

We’ve entitled the report From Shovel Ready to Shovel Worthy: The Path to a National Trade Infrastructure Plan That Can Enable the Next Generation of Economic Growth.

Let me give you a quick overview of the key features of the report. Why does this particular category of infrastructure matter so much? If we agree as a starting point that climate change is the issue of this generation, then I would add that one of our strongest recommendations is to figure out how to pay for what we can do for climate change. This is where trade and transportation infrastructure is so critical. It is because trade infrastructure enables trade which accounts for two thirds of Canadian GDP. That for Canada is a much more significant consideration than it is for jurisdictions like the United States where national income is about 25% of GDP for trade in the U.S. We’re at the upper end of the scale. We don’t have the size of the national markets that are present in the United States. The economies of scale dictate that we have to go out to international markets to get to the economies that make us competitive. Trade simply matters more for Canada.

Trade infrastructure, why do we need it? My colleague at the Canada West Foundation, Carlo Dade, says we need trade infrastructure because it pays for the trade infrastructure that we want, not only climate change mitigation, but also hospitals, special care homes, schools, and to retire debt. If we don’t get it right, if we don’t make this a priority now, our contention in the report is it will not only derail Canada’s recovery from the pandemic but even worse, it has the potential to jeopardize the next generation of economic growth in the country, where we think there are tremendous upside opportunities.

A quick word on the problem. I won’t spend a lot of time here. Our report highlights that in terms of world rankings 10 years ago, in 2009-2010, Canada was ranked in the top 10 according to the World Economic Forum and the World Bank when it comes to the quality of Canadian infrastructure.

Ten years later, with regard to overall infrastructure we are currently rated at twenty-sixth in the world and thirty-second for our trade and transportation infrastructure. This gives a sense of why this is of such significance. In talking about this with industry members over the last number of years, I thought this was old news, but the response from Canadian industry is that this is relevant not only as a data source, but more importantly it reflects the real-world experience of Canadian businesses who are having much more challenging problems working through the logistical issues of delivering their products to markets around the world. Because they work on the frontlines, they are seeing improvements being made in some of the competing jurisdictions. This has had a direct bearing on their ability to retain customers and their ability to acquire new ones.

If we look to our neighbours to the south, who perhaps in some categories might have been categorized as not making this a top priority in recent years, the Biden administration, as committee members will know, have announced hundreds of billions of dollars in a new infrastructure program which is not only putting money out on the problem; they have a number of initial programs under way that are exactly focused on the right issues according to international best practices.

So what is this notion of shovel-worthy versus shovel-ready as an approach? We’ve tried to take from international best practices the learning from other countries who are ahead of Canada in this space and combine those with some of the domestic learning we’ve had from successes here at home. We put these in a package that resulted in a recommended series of components of seven initiatives that we think can help comprise a new national plan for the country.

I’ll quickly review these. First, we need to define Canada’s national trade corridor network to get everyone on the same page. This is an inventory of the key important trade and transportation assets that make up our national network. The good news is, in most of these we are not starting from scratch. In this instance, for example, Transport Canada has done some excellent work developing what they refer to as regional transportation assessments for each region of the country in which they identify and highlight not only some of the key transportation assets, the exports being facilitated through the transportation network, but also some of the key partners and where the bottlenecks might be addressed to solve this.

The second of the seven components that we have identified is the significance of identifying criteria of national significance. This is important to understand how to prioritize and ensure we’re doing the best work that we can in the right areas.

Third, there is a significant opportunity to enhance institutional independent advice from the private sector. The private sector offers us, amongst other things, at least two important sources of intelligence. First is they are the holders and operators of much of the infrastructure. As a result, they have sophisticated supply chain knowledge and expertise that is not available and evident to Canadian governments for the most part.

Second, they have frontline operational experience. They’re dealing with these issues on a day-to-day basis. This is another feature of most of the international best practice plans already in existence.

Fourth, we have suggested it is important to develop and maintain a long-term project pipeline. Typically these are 15 to 30 years in duration and provide an understanding of not only individual project benefits, but how those projects affect the network as a whole, from end to end and understand where there may be a need for complementary investments or to optimize by virtue of doing other things in the network.

The fifth of our recommended suggestions is a key feature for climate change, and that is to undertake regular assessments to measure progress. Each of the best practice jurisdictions we have looked at conducts regular audits or assessments of projects that have been implemented where they examine the planning, the construction, the strengths and weaknesses of their processes and each year or two they make adjustments and changes to upgrade those.

The final two items to talk about are the opportunities for us to upgrade infrastructure intelligence including forecasting and modelling that can inform our decisions and to ensure we adopt a strategic strategy for communicating Canada’s commitment to make these improvements to our international customers. It is also to ensure that we’re sharing intelligence and data with the various working groups across the country that are currently participating in this. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Law. You have long advocated a strategic approach to investment in Canada’s trade gateways and corridors. I’m not sure how strategic we are being in that regard in Canada, but can you comment on how provinces and the federal government are building climate resilience into that investment in Canada’s trade gateways? Are we currently integrating climate resilience into those investments effectively?

My other question is, when we are considering, potentially, a greater than 1.5-degree rise in global temperatures, what sort of level of investment will be required in order to build the national infrastructure resilience that we require going forward?

Mr. Law: Thank you for those questions. First, I would agree with you that our commitment to a more strategic approach has not been the case. In fact, our paper starts by talking about the shovel-ready approach as a representation of what has been problematic in the system to date, where we have been less focused on the longer-term returns on investment that are important here.

I think that our efforts around climate resilience, although they’re starting to make their way into project considerations, typically are not included in either the procurement processes nor in the execution as a regular state of business. There are major opportunities for improvement here. I think this is emerging and developing, but a lot more could be done.

As to what the right level of investment is, we have long argued that we are under-invested here as a category of infrastructure where we need to be making greater levels of investment. The only quasi-permanent program that we have in the myriad of infrastructure programs that are available federally is the National Trade Corridors Fund, and I don’t want to, in any way, take away from the commitment that’s been made there, which I think is extremely important. But $2 billion out of the $188 billion is a relatively smaller percentage than what we think is probably required to get there and make meaningful improvement.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Law.

Senator Galvez: I couldn’t agree more with everything both of you have said, but I somehow feel that there are two issues that have not been covered.

The first question, with respect to the destruction of the infrastructure due to extreme weather events and all the solutions that you have proposed, you need to pass by the collaboration and the input of engineers. Are we preparing engineers in universities to design, plan and build resilience, as you hope? We know there is not enough money for the infrastructure. What about education?

My second question is, when we talk about reducing risk and increasing resilience, that comes with a very high price tag. What is your view on the distribution of the responsibility of reducing the risk? Who should pay for that — only the public, or the public and private sectors? Thank you.

Mr. Law: I’m not sure which question was for me and which wasn’t, but let me take a crack at maybe answering part of both of the two questions.

I would agree with you that our education system, with respect to the training of our engineers, has been perhaps a little parochial. I say this as a former deputy minister of transportation. We have a well-established history in my own jurisdiction — and I would say this of the jurisdictions with whom I’ve worked — around the development of our engineering capacity for the needs of our departments, such as they were. I know that there are now significant demands and interest from a number of jurisdictions. I’m working with a couple right now who are looking to augment the educational capacity and qualifications of their engineers to address this very issue. Regrettably, I think this will take some time to work its way through the system. But I do think that this is certainly more than on the radar screens. It’s a priority. What we can do to accelerate that, I’m not sure.

As to the risk and who should share in the cost, it’s long been my view that this has, for some time, not been a problem that is exclusive either to the federal government or to governments in general. In fact, the private sector is in many cases a majority owner or operator of much of our important infrastructure. In many instances, they have made some sizable investments themselves. But there’s a lot more to do here.

I think one of the things we need to appreciate — you talked about collaboration. One of the big lessons from one of the programs that continues to get kudos 10 years on is one that we got right in Canada, the Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor Initiative. One of the key lessons I remember talking to senior officials from Transport Canada about at the time, is that when the government would announce a commitment to a project, they would frequently get unsolicited visits from the private sector. They would show up and say, “If you’re planning to make that public investment, then we’re prepared to do the following things knowing you’re going to make that investment.” Inevitably, what the Transport officials told me was that they ended up with a much more informed project charter once the private sector showed up. I think that when it comes to both the collaboration of developing the scope of projects and also how we think about planning and paying for those projects that we need to think much more creatively about how we can combine forces from both the private and public sectors.

Mr. Marty: Thank you for your question, Senator Galvez. On the training side, the report provides some directions to say that there are new programs that allow for engineers to include climate adaptations into their practice. I’m thinking about the PIEVC program, for example, that helps public infrastructure to incorporate climate solutions into the design. Another aspect that was discussed by the panel is the idea that we need new standards, and engineers need to incorporate them into the new designs.

One of the key gaps in the field of climate adaptation and disaster reduction is not necessarily all on the engineers. It is about making sure that the information that exists in one field can be transferred to another. The panel really made the point that one option here is to have knowledge brokers — people who will be able to take all that information from models and complex data that exists and that is readily available but is not necessarily easily transferred to the people in their practice.

Another gap that has been highlighted in the report that is going to need some attention in the future is about the role of natural-based solutions. These are new solutions, new ways of mitigation and limiting risk or reducing risk. However, there are severe gaps in understanding their efficiency, how long they can be effective and where they can be the most effective. At the moment, I think it’s fair to say that in the engineering practice there is not much adoption of natural-based solutions, and the reason is that we are lacking information on their effectiveness. That will be a gap here in training the next generations of climate-ready engineers and climate specialists. It is coming. In fact, I learned recently at Western University that the first graduate program is just on that, to make sure we understand what catastrophic reductions are in climate and how we can provide solutions for the new generations.

On the second question about the distribution of risk, the report really makes the case that it is a whole-of-society approach that is needed. One key element here might be to really look into the biases. We all have our own biases. I have my own, you have yours, government has their own, and they play an important role in understanding what we can do and what we are responsible for. We can have a whole session just on the biases because it is such a complex and important topic here to recognize in relation to climate risk. Thank you for your questions.

[Translation]

Senator Cormier: My two questions are going to be for Mr. Marty and I am going to ask them in French.

Thank you for your presentations and for this report which we have read with great interest, Mr. Marty. The questions I am going to ask you concern governance and the issue of transparency. In your report, you said that you felt that decision-makers were not adequately held accountable for the measures that led to the exposure and vulnerability of infrastructure populations. Obviously, in the context of trying to assess the impact of actions and the need to act accordingly, I would like to hear more about that. How could the federal government increase its responsibility for its own infrastructure?

I’ll move on to my second question. In the AHRA document — the All-Hazards Risk Assessment — it is said that the information contained in this document is not publicly available. Furthermore, it covers a five-year horizon and does not take into account predicted future climate conditions.

My two questions are: How could the federal government increase its accountability for its own infrastructure so that it can truly be assessed, measured and acted upon? Is the government transparent enough about these issues? Could it be more transparent? If so, in what way, do you think?

Mr. Marty: Thank you for your question, Senator Cormier. I really wish the chair of the panel were here to answer these very interesting questions.

For the first question, in terms of accountability, the report emphasizes that the responsibilities are really divided between the different levels of government. A single government cannot have all the responsibility since all the decisions that affect land use are divided between municipalities, communities, provincial governments and the federal government.

It’s a big challenge to align all these levels of government and make sure they’re all going in the same direction. What I could say is that we are talking about infrastructure, and infrastructure requires long-term solutions because it requires solutions that are important. Long-term solutions need to be provided and investments will also need to be long-term.

When we look at what is being done at the moment, for example in the case of flooding, we see that the federal government has announced that we are going to have an increase in the capacity to map flood zones. These are important things to do for each type of risk. We do it for floods, we could also have the same approach for fires. We’re starting to see new areas where there have never been fires and now there are.

Responsibility, again, is something that is difficult. When you think about development in the British Columbia region, in Vancouver, where property prices are very high, it’s very difficult for municipalities not to consider certain areas that we know are in danger. Maybe one of the things that senior levels of government could bring would be to share that information and to make sure that we are informed about the areas that are at risk today and the areas that will most certainly be at risk, not just in the near future, but in the distant future.

Senator Cormier: So I understand that this information is not being passed on. Why isn’t it?

Mr. Marty: This information does not always exist. In the case of floods, this is a work in progress today. If we think about the Canadian Disaster Database, it has many problems. It is not updated regularly.

In the report, as you can see, the data is reported only up to 2019, although we know very well that since 2019, we have had many disasters, unfortunately, in Canada. These data are not updated at a frequency that allows us to really assess needs in real time. We won’t talk about the future either, although this data would also be very important to improve predictions.

At the same time, I kind of touched on the other part of your question about the AHRA. Can you repeat the question for me?

Senator Cormier: The document says the information is not public. My basic question is that it is difficult to act when information is not made public. As you were saying, as there are several partners involved, if this information is not public in nature, transmitted and shared, how can we have tangible solutions for the future?

Mr. Marty: In the case of all-hazards risk assessments, which are also considered not to be transparent or shared publicly, certainly in these discussions the panel has recognized that some information is confidential and cannot be shared. There are other sources of risk that could be affected and increased if all the information were public.

However, in the context of infrastructure, in order to increase resilience and apply climate adaptation measures, according to the panel, it would seem that this information should be shared in a much more transparent way.

Senator Cormier: Thank you, Mr. Marty.

[English]

Senator Sorensen: I think my question is more directed to Mr. Marty, but I would be happy to hear from either of the experts, and the second part of my question may be more directed to Mr. Law.

Mr. Marty, I want to say how much I appreciate your comment that communities are those that are most affected. Just for a little grounding — my colleagues are aware of this — I live in Banff, Alberta, and I’m the previous mayor of Banff. So talk about bias. My question may indicate that.

Extreme weather events caused by climate change pose severe risk to Canada’s tourism sector. Fires, floods and other extreme weather may prevent visitors from travelling to a Canadian tourist destination and certainly burden officials who can be responsible for evacuating not only residents but our tourists. In a town like Banff with 9,000 residents and 25,000 to 40,000 visitors on any given day, that’s a huge undertaking and is quite scary to be thinking about.

Even destinations that are not directly affected from the disaster can be influenced. I think of wildfire smoke coming in from any number of places miles and miles away.

We know that climate has impacts on the viability of roads, trails and waterways and I’m curious to know, while we seem to be able to get exact numbers of true costs associated with a disaster caused by climate change, is there any data on the economic impacts of extreme weather to the Canadian tourism sector, but maybe if not that specific just generally the incremental costs that come from these disasters? I’m thinking of B.C., of course, over this last few months.

I’ll sneak in a second question: I think there was a comment that there is work trying to be done with municipalities on the part of the federal government. How is that going, and what are some of the barriers when trying to work with local communities? I’m sure there are a few based on all kinds of variables in a municipality.

Thank you.

Mr. Marty: Thank you, Senator Sorensen. We haven’t looked carefully at different sectors, but the numbers we reported are the ones that everybody is reporting, which is to say the insured losses. There are good mechanisms and good data to track here — the cost of disasters.

What is highlighted in the report is that nobody has really assessed a comprehensive cost of a disaster. There’s a lot to be added on the social and health impacts of disasters — all of those connected areas that are not necessarily captured in the way we measure the impacts of disasters. So there is a lot to be done here.

I would like to highlight something. You mentioned communities that are relocated in response to fires, for example. There’s a need to carefully consider how we respond to disasters in remote communities, in particular in Indigenous communities. We’ve heard from Indigenous leaders that, sometimes, they do have the knowledge that will allow them to stay in their communities and avoid relocation. The human cost of relocation, in some cases, has been greater than the cost of the disasters themselves, because the relocation is not necessarily adapted, and places are not necessarily ready to receive the people who are relocated, unfortunately.

On the barriers, there are many barriers that you can find in the report. Again, I’ll go to biases. It is critical that the population and decision makers have a good awareness of the biases that they are influencing and that are influencing their decisions. People think that disasters happen maybe once to them but will not happen twice. That is a mistake. We’ve seen that now. There are publications that we’ve used that have even shown that politicians sometimes prefer to invest in disaster response because the reward is greater if they do a good response than actually investing in a disaster that may never happen during their mandates.

Those are really important things to consider when we think about the need to include climate adaptation in disaster response.

Mr. Law: I have one quick response to supplement the earlier remarks.

On the issue of impediments to cooperation, I would add a couple of quick comments.

One, I would say, is capacity. In terms of the ability of municipalities to be able to be proactive in some of these efforts, in many instances, the experience we’ve had in dealing with recovery from these kinds of issues is that there are some skill sets there and, in some instances, a lack of experience. In some cases, who could blame them? I recall in many of these circumstances when I was a deputy minister being told that this was a once-in-a-75-year incident, so what would you do to prepare for that, only to learn, as said earlier, that two years later, we had the same issue come again, and we had done nothing really to prepare in terms of ensuring that the key stakeholders were properly prepared.

I’ll just add that as a comment.

Senator Sorensen: Thanks to both of you.

Senator Klyne: My first question is for Mr. Marty. I have a second one, but I could do it in a second round, and that one would be for Mr. Law.

Mr. Marty, in the introduction of the Building a Resilient Canada report, it notes:

Never have the impacts of extreme weather events been starker than during the summer and fall of 2021. More than a dozen Canadian temperature records were smashed, with Squamish, B.C. recording over 40°C.

The report also notes that:

The B.C. coroner’s office recorded a 300% spike in sudden unexpected deaths during the week of June 25th, 2021, which was attributed to the heat waves that covered western Canada . . . .

Those are very difficult numbers for this committee to hear, but I think they should be part of the public record.

During extreme weather events, critical infrastructure is critical, including the ICT sector. My question centres on technological advances, which are more integrated than ever, requiring faster data transfer and processing times. As I understand it, the fifth generation, or 5G, wireless capabilities will require a greater number and density of telecommunications infrastructure.

My question is this: Will these advancements and augmentation of infrastructure in the face of increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events, heat waves included, present new risks to CI resilience, and are we ready?

Mr. Marty: Thank you, Senator Klyne, for your question. I’m going to partially answer the question, because we didn’t dive into that particular topic, the ICT sector in particular.

There are opportunities to use upcoming technologies to help, even on the ground. We do have systems, for example, such as warning systems on the Canadian coast in some areas that are at risk. Some panel members have made the point that we could have a similar system in communities that are prone to fires. We don’t have warning systems for fires. That is a system that could be helpful and benefit from the communication and technology progress in that field.

One of our panel members was an expert in data and modelling, and we are expanding our knowledge of the ability to map disasters and understand trends over the long term. The new technologies, again, will refine that ability to understand the extent of what areas are at risk and which ones are increasingly at risk.

Again, all the modelling that happens on mapping for floods is going to be very helpful for not only large municipalities but also remote communities.

I’m not very satisfied with my response, Senator Klyne, but I will be happy to come back in writing with a better answer, if that is possible. Thank you.

Senator Klyne: Mr. Law, in one of the answers you provided as a supplement — and I think it was either around the chair’s question or Senator Galvez’s — you mentioned collaboration in the context of federal, provincial, territorial and municipal jurisdictions. If we look at a number of mandate letters of those ministries that are connected to critical infrastructure, such as Transport Canada and Natural Resources Canada, we hear the reference quite often that it will take a whole-of-government approach. I look at that particularly around Canada’s transportation infrastructure corridors and supply chains and climate change. It will take a nation-of-the-whole effort.

I’m wondering what advice you have to offer about how — rather than the federal government working from the inside out with the private sector and other sectors, foisting upon them their policies and ideas — they can collaborate through a vast consultation with provinces, territories, municipalities, and the private sector and Indigenous partners. Can they do that advanced consultation and do more of an outside-in approach to developing policies, programs and responses to what will take, I would say, a nation-of-the-whole approach to solve climate change and infrastructure innovation around transportation corridors and such? What is your advice about how the federal government can pull all of that together and do it through advanced consultations?

Mr. Law: Well, first of all, I want to start, senator, by agreeing very much with your approach. Our report tries to provide enough information to describe what we think are important elements to collaboration among not only different levels of government, but importantly we seek to engage with communities in the private sector as part of the process. This is a shared initiative, for sure. If you even just start by looking at the mandated responsibilities between the federal and provincial levels of government, there are different levels of responsibility laid out there in terms of ways that they need to think about these problems differently.

That said, we have picked up some suggestions. We’ve purposely left some room for negotiation, which we think will be required here.

However, to your point about going outside in, we think that there is a real opportunity to develop a different platform for communications and that there needs to be a recognition of the different areas of expertise that can be brought to the table that can inform how that’s done. Most of the industry people with whom we talked believe that the leadership role, the convening role is an appropriate one for the federal government. Provinces, of course, have a shared responsibility on the execution and delivery of infrastructure, particularly road networks across the country, and so forth. We also have ports and airports and other aspects of this at the municipal level that are equally important.

One of the real features here is that we can look to other jurisdictions for advice from those who have been able to do this. We collaborated with the folks at the U.K. and at Infrastructure Australia. I noted that in the last round of consultations conducted by Infrastructure Australia they met with over 5,000 different stakeholders as part of their annual consultative process, and there is a defined and laid-out process around how those consultations are conducted and what the inputs are.

It was very much a flattening of that process, and we got some great suggestions and hints that we can adapt here to incorporate it. We do have a big hurdle to get over here. Many of the stakeholders in the different sectors of this issue have pretty entrenched positions that, even when it comes to the sharing of data, I think represent challenges.

This has been overcome by others and I think we can use some of the modelling from them as a basis for figuring out how to apply this in Canada.

[Translation]

The Honourable Paula Simons: I have to say that my friend Senator Cormier stole my first question for Mr. Marty.

[English]

I don’t want to say I was an ancienne journaliste because it makes me feel old, but I was a reporter for 30 years, and access to information is at the corner of my heart and soul. My quick question to you would be: Do you think there is anything we can do to change the culture of secrecy? I understand what you said about so much of this information being proprietary and having market value and affecting property prices, but it would be wonderful if we could get to a point where there is a unanimity of purpose that says that we need the information to do accurate planning.

My other question is for Mr. Law. Freight rail capacity in this country has been overwhelmed for years now. I sometimes feel that freight rail is the Cinderella of Canadian public policy. We just kind of expect it to do its thing. In the aftermath of the floods in British Columbia and the recent near lockout at CP Rail, could you talk about what we need to do in this country to focus more attention on creating a freight rail infrastructure that is purpose-fit for the century ahead?

Mr. Marty: Thank you for your question. I will quickly address the first one that was stolen by Senator Cormier on the question of transparency.

Some of the easy steps that could be done is to first report disasters when they occur and not having that time lag. Databases exist, and we need to make sure they are kept up to date.

On the broader questions of transparency, the panel made the point that all hazard risk approaches are effective at considering a broad range of issues. Although the framework exists, the information and the results from these risk assessments are not made public. So that is a place where I think there is, on the one hand, the need to share about all hazard risk assessments because these are complex and the communication of risk comes with a whole set of challenges. It is also a place where, if we can communicate effectively about what these approaches mean and how they work together, it should have an impact on the populations that will hopefully take action. It is about convincing everyone to get on board for these questions of climate change, and that includes my children to the top decision makers. It is a big challenge.

Senator Simons: Mr. Law, you talked about derailing recovery. That’s what I worry about. If we don’t have the rail, we don’t have the recovery.

Mr. Law: I don’t disagree with you at all on that point, senator. Rail is an integral part of the network. I often describe supply chain challenges, and I think the challenges have been much more actively and better described in some of the recent media coverage and so the general public has been aware of these issues that have earned headlines. Based on the interconnectedness, I would say two or three things. You asked a huge question that I won’t come close to being able to answer, but to the extent that we do need to think hard about freight rail capacity as part of the solution, there are two or three things I would say represent important starting points for trying to make progress in this space.

One of them is the railways, at least the mainline railways in this country, have made significant investments. The capital investment programs of CP and CN are extensive. However, I think there are opportunities for more collaboration around how those investments might be leveraged.

I’ll give you one example. When I was working through this with some of the shippers and the railways, I was presented with examples where the railways called for certain improvements that required investments also from the shippers. There were some great examples where complementary investments actually significantly enhanced throughput and fluidity in the system.

That’s not to say that everyone was 100% happy with the outcome or that they thought the information that they based some of those decisions on was perfect. I think that is one of the keys that we need to start looking at in terms of why we recommended a national plan that has some of these features. These things tend not to be stand-alone items. You can’t have a railway expenditure, for example, on the capital side that’s not going to have a direct impact on the network. It goes far beyond what is done in that particular location. I think this is an important feature. I think that the opportunity for low-hanging fruit to build trust and examples of where collaboration among different industry members and in some cases the government itself making investments, represents a real opportunity to do this. Without that, I’m absolutely in agreement with you that we’re not going to see the progress.

[Translation]

Senator Miville-Dechêne: Thank you very much for your statements, but I have to say that the picture painted by Mr. Marty is quite depressing. You talk a lot about changing attitudes, whereas the most difficult thing to do in society is to change these attitudes. You were talking about bias. The Transport Committee certainly does not have the power to change the attitudes of politicians who often think in the shorter term. I am trying to find an elegant solution to this problem. You also say that different levels of government are passing the buck, so nobody is responsible. For all the things you’ve talked about — all-hazards risk assessments, mapping, databases — who’s to blame? Who is responsible? Who needs to change? Are we talking about the federal government? Should there be a greater role in this climate change preparedness? Is it just that everyone has to pull together and go for it when we know that’s not the way the federation works? Anyway, I’m a bit skeptical, but could you at least give us a reason to be optimistic?

Mr. Marty: Yes, you are right, Senator Miville-Dechêne, it is a depressing picture. I think the important message for the panel was to emphasize the urgency of how to integrate climate adaptation into the way we respond to disasters. There are promising messages and existing practices. Increasingly, we can see that in the world of engineering and design, these kinds of measures are being managed in an integrated way. We are moving in a better direction. We are starting to do that. We could do more, of course.

Engineers 10 or 20 years ago were not doing the same job as engineers today. At the very least, I think a lot of professionals who design infrastructure are now asking the question: Do we need to incorporate a climate change aspect to make sure that the infrastructure we design will hold up for many decades?

Then, on the positive side, I would say that there is a new awareness that communities have a role to play, and that role is to provide knowledge. We understand the importance of knowledge that exists locally and at the community level. We can also see now, in many communities, that decision-making is being transferred more to the grassroots of the community. So in the context of climate change, there is more sharing or transfer of decisions, if you like, and that’s good news.

When we think about climate change adaptation, a lot of things are now done by communities. So I’m not trying to be depressing and only negative. It’s true that the overall message is one of urgency, but the investments that are underway, if you think about the large infrastructure investments at the federal level, those require that we take the climate into account to move forward and that’s very important; that will hopefully improve the situation.

The report you have in front of you has not taken into account all aspects of climate change. It has only looked at two aspects, and I would like to stress this. There is adaptation, but also risk reduction; there are all these other dimensions of health, well-being and others that are part of a comprehensive approach that is needed to be more resilient to climate change.

[English]

The Chair: I want to remind the audience that this is the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications, and we are engaging in the study of the impacts of climate change on critical infrastructure in the transportation and communications sectors and the consequential impacts on their interdependencies.

Senator Dawson: Mr. Law, welcome to the committee. I’ll be more optimistic. I recognize that’s a challenge.

The Pacific Gateway is a good example of cooperation between municipalities, cooperation at the port level, federal — [Technical difficulties] — The success of the Pacific Gateway was based on cooperation. I recognize transparency as being important, but when you have government and private entities having to deal with investments in the long term — and this is one of the challenges, and Senator Galvez is bringing this up, when we talk about the influence of money on the decision-making process. We made success on Pacific Gateway. Would we be able to do that today if we were trying to find social acceptance?

Mr. Law: I am optimistic that there is room to make progress space in this, senator. I was on the ground for the work that went into the Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor Initiative. It had a strong initial grounding among transportation ministers in Western Canada and initial leadership from Minister Lapierre, who was the federal transportation minister. He was able to bring the group together to help identify regional interests and opportunities and extended that model, as you said, to include non-government actors who had a role as stakeholders in this process.

There is no question that the NIMBYism characteristics that sometimes come into the issues associated with bringing new transportation infrastructure online are challenging, to say the least. But I also believe that there are pathways forward where there is common ground for improvements to be made.

I had some great suggestions articulated. Speaking about the lower mainland, there has been some like the Gateway Transport Collaboration Forum that is operational, which has essentially adopted the Asia-Pacific model of how it does business cases. They have been successful in the NTCF fund federally to the extent of approving 17 to 20 new projects in a relatively short time frame based on a similar basis of collaboration. Part of that is to recognize the various stakeholder needs at the front end of the process and to ensure they are part of the discussion going forward.

Yes, there are probably some additional challenges, but seeing the success that has gone into some of those kinds of initiatives gives me some optimism that there are lessons here that we can apply in terms of how we go about the process.

Senator Dasko: My question is to Mr. Marty.

In your comments, you placed importance on disaster protection and said it was one of the cornerstones of how we’re going to create change and move forward. We’ve been talking a lot about the role of the private sector and of the government.

However, I would like to ask you about the role of the public. What are we asking Canadians themselves to do in these scenarios to deal with the problems? Are we asking people to make big changes in their lives? Are we asking them to change their behaviour significantly? Are we asking them to pay higher taxes? Are we asking them to do without the amenities they have come to appreciate in terms of their lifestyles?

I know it is a big, open question. Basically, what is the role of the average Canada in the changes that you feel are necessary, particularly in disaster prevention but in other areas as well?

Mr. Marty: Thank you, Senator Dasko, for your questions. The report provides several examples of how the public can be involved in reducing the risks of disasters. They include simple things they can do at home, such as having a valve to avoid sewer backup, for example.

Senator Dasko: Yes.

Mr. Marty: It could be having systems for fires that are functional. They are simple things.

Then there is the need to recognize where we decide to be and live. That understanding requires that people have the information to know where they are and what their level of risk is when they acquire property that may be in an area at risk.

One aspect the report does not cover is the role of the public in reducing climate change. That is far beyond the scope of the report, certainly, and possibly beyond the scope of the discussions we’re having tonight.

We are here talking about infrastructure and transportation. There is that recognition that we do have infrastructure in urban areas. Canada is very much divided between the urban and remote areas. For transportation and communication, we cannot afford to lose any of it, either in remote communities or urban areas.

The public needs to understand that in order to receive food — and we did have some food shortages in B.C., for example, during the last couple of events, which was caused by a loss of infrastructure in a number of areas. It is to understand how broad and complex things are when we respond to disasters.

I would add, Senator Dasko, that when talking to Indigenous leaders mostly in northern Canada and Yukon, there is really interesting work done by communities to reduce the risk for their own communities and their infrastructure. I’m thinking about the management of fuel on the land. That is happening. I’m thinking of prescribed burning and notable things that are part of the knowledge of those communities and that could be beneficial to others if it were to be shared. Those are things people can do themselves.

I would like to add one last thought about optimism, Senator Miville-Dechêne. You got me thinking about your question.

We talk a lot about “build back better.” This term is a term we hear about, and it is well used to justify that we need to think about what we’re going to do in a better way in the light of climate change. Maybe in the light of climate change, in particular for infrastructure, the question should be that we need to build forward better and recognize that there are areas where we cannot afford to rebuild because we know there are dangers now. If not now, there will be danger in a couple of years.

There is that thinking. In the context of climate change, we should challenge ourselves and ask if we want to build back or do we need to build differently and to look forward. To go back to Senator Miville-Dechêne, that is a message of hope, because we want to do better in the future and there are ways of thinking about that.

Senator Dasko: Thank you.

The Chair: My question is also for Mr. Marty, but perhaps Mr. Law would weigh in on this.

The Council of Canadian Academies had a report called Building a Resilient Canada, and that report concluded that there has been an ongoing failure to fully integrate climate-change adaptation into disaster-risk-reduction activities, policies and tools.

You have argued that puts Canadian communities at risk. Can you both give us a specific example of how our communities are put at risk? Also, in the decades coming, how will that increase, and what areas specifically are we talking about?

Mr. Marty: For some specific examples, we can go back to even last fall. The climate adaptation committee has predicted that we would be facing more extremes. The concept of extremes is something that has been undermined, and maybe for good reasons, because we thought they would never happen. However, what happened last fall in B.C. with the fires and the following floods related to the fires is that, first, we knew that the models and data showed that we could hit those extremes, but we were never really prepared to face them. Not only that, science showed us there was a risk of cascading effects, and we never thought that would happen. And that did happen.

That is the most striking example. I’m sure the panel of the report will agree. We saw something we never thought would happen. That is the example of the failure that is behind the words that I shared in my remarks.

Mr. Law: I would just offer a couple of examples from my experience, in the transportation sector specifically, that are analogous to the earlier example that was just given.

I’m remembering one of the circumstances in which there was a sinkhole and, subsequently, some flooding in the south part of the province of Saskatchewan, which basically shut down the national highway system and directly affected the CPR main line, I believe. We knew from a geotechnical assessment that it was an area that was at risk for some time, and yet we did not invest properly in what could have been some fairly simple remediation initiatives to add some additional culvert and drainage systems. Then we were faced immediately with what we’re going to do to get the system back up and running with the amount of traffic on there and the value of commodities being moved on that rail line. What were we going to do? Were we going to do something immediately in the same vicinity or not?

We ended up doing something quickly to start with, but there was a recognition that we need to change it. Fortunately, after I was out of the chair I was in, smarter people prevailed. They did come up with a contingency that did address that.

But, as my colleague knows, that has been in play in the North. I remember the earliest discussions about the impacts of climate change on transportation that we heard about at the national table were coming from the North, where, in some instances, seasonal ice roads that provided virtually the only means of access to certain communities for the provision of supplies they needed on a year-round basis. All of a sudden, the season was shortened or, in some cases, there was no season at all and we were faced with having to consider, for the first time, brand new ways of addressing this. This was an ongoing feature of what was being described. Until we start getting much more ambitious about some of the preventative recommendations that have already been articulated in the report, we will have to take a kind of hybrid approach of providing some intermediate remediation and short-term solutions to get us around the problems. But I think increasingly where we can have a long-term plan, our report, which will come out in a couple of weeks, highlights circumstances where other jurisdictions have started much more proactively to be able to assess this.

If you look at Australia, they have already estimated the direct costs of climate change on an annual basis forward for the next 20 years. They have budgeted projects and they have in many instances put together the project inventory that is required to address these problems as part of their programming.

This isn’t about having to start from scratch when something happens. In many instances, they’ve already anticipated this ahead of time and have started to sort of move closer to that end of the spectrum in terms of how they address these problems.

The Chair: Thank you for that. Actually, it’s a great segue into my next question.

Disaster risk reduction requires a combination of information systems adapted to the needs of decision makers and flexible funding, financing and insurance arrangements that support proactive investment. In that regard, I’d love to have comments from either or both of you in regard to the estimated levels of funding that you believe we will be required from government over the coming years and decades to address these issues.

Mr. Marty: I don’t think, based on the content of the report, I can provide an estimate of the level of funding to answer that question. Maybe Mr. Law can weigh in.

Mr. Law: I’m afraid I’m not much better. That’s a big question. Some of the other jurisdictions that perhaps have five to ten years’ head start on us do have much better data around this. I’m not aware of the overall costs across some of these different spaces, although I know on a sectoral basis there is some work that has been done in this space.

There are a number of different financing tools that are available. We actually had a very good run in this country with some alternative delivery mechanisms and construction approaches that afforded better innovation in some of these fronts that I think we can probably get back to doing more of. As to an absolute number, I’m sorry that I don’t think I would be able to give you one.

The Chair: I would have been surprised if you had been able to. Of course, my next question is my last one. I’m starting the second round. We all recognize that in order to mitigate these problems we need to have collaboration between all levels of government. I think we all agree that the federal government should be taking the lead and the role. We need to find a mechanism where, in addition to a strategic plan and a national framework, there is a budget attached to it. If we don’t know exactly where we want to go, with whom, and exactly what we’re capable of spending or what needs to be spent, we will continue to just be chasing our tail and running around in circles. Would you agree?

Mr. Law: I would start by agreeing with you that we not only need the mechanisms, but we need the resources to support it. Without that, I agree that we will be challenged to be able to move forward.

What surprised me about some of the previous programs, we’ve talked about the Asia-Pacific Gateway and the Trade and Transportation Corridor Initiative, but there were other programs that found success. There was a rebuild for the first time in 20 years of the national highway system about the same time as Asia-Pacific. There were other programs like the gateways and border crossings program that was introduced to try to improve border crossings and access to and from the United States and across provincial boundaries. For me, I think that we do need some resourcing in this space.

My understanding is that there has been increasing consideration at places like the NTCF funding, for example, to support the development of better sources of information, intelligence data and so forth, in terms of putting those things together that are required to inform our decision making and help us understand the costs attached to them. Until we actually do this in a systemic way — and we’ve outlined some ways we think that needs to be done in the report that’s coming out — I don’t think we will be in a position to make significant headway in this area. That is a long-winded way of saying I agree with you.

Mr. Marty: I would add, Mr. Chair, that the current work developing the National Adaptation Strategy is one way to identify a framework that will involve multiple levels of government, and there are ongoing consultations to develop such strategies. For those in climate adaptation, at least, they really see that strategy as a very important document to move forward, to bring climate adaptation into disaster risk reduction.

Senator Simons: During the time of the flooding in British Columbia, I spoke with various actors in the railway industry. I asked them about building back better or, as Mr. Marty has taught us to say, building forward better. I asked if they were going to build more resilient rail infrastructure. The message they gave to me was that they were not because that would be prohibitively expensive and an unfair burden on their shareholders and it was cheaper for them to replace the washed-out rails with more rails that would inevitably wash out again.

This comes to the point that Mr. Law has been discussing, where you have this overlap of private ownership of infrastructure, which is absolutely essential to the maintenance of the Canadian economy. This is the tension that has under-lied Canadian transportation policy since the beginning of Confederation, where we didn’t build a Crown railway, but we made all kinds of deals with CP Rail, including giving them a tax break in perpetuity across the prairies.

How do we get to a point where we balance the shareholder interests of multinational rail companies with the interests of the Canadian economy, which absolutely depend on that rail infrastructure functioning?

Mr. Law: Senator, you ask difficult questions. I would share a couple of thoughts on that. First of all, in some of the consultative work that I did with different members of the transportation industry, there are folks who would argue that there is more latitude, that the railways are doing relatively well, thank you, and that there needs to be some accommodation of other interests to provide the latitude that’s required to be able to address the economic realities that you’ve discussed.

The railways themselves, I’m sure, would not share that view. From my perspective, we need to really come up with a vision for the country that can supersede the more localized perspectives on this. This is not to suggest for a minute that we don’t need to be competitive, both nationally and internationally, in our business environments. I think that’s critical. For the most part, the Canadian railways have distinguished themselves in terms of their ability to do well in that space compared to others in the North American space.

It seems to me that if we’re going to make the leap and if we’re going to get there, we need to be able to articulate a vision that recognizes the inherent benefits. There is nothing for the railway companies to move if we aren’t generating competitive products that can meet needs in world markets.

It’s in their best interest at some point to be in a position to be able to support what I think is a larger, higher-level value around this. To me, I think that needs to start by an articulation of what that looks like on a national level for the future, and that’s a longer-term vision than just day-to-day or year-to-year or shareholder meeting to shareholder meeting. We need to set a target that articulates what we think this needs to look like 15 or 20 years from now and start chopping away at it until we get there.

Senator Galvez: I would start by saying that I don’t have any data on the costs as well, but somehow I’m sure of something. Action is always cheaper than inaction. Following the trend of the cost of each extreme weather event and the number of these extreme weather events and the fact that this is underestimated, because of what you said, that means that very soon it will be several units of our GDP that we will use in reconstruction. Perhaps you can comment on that.

Talking about the remaining optimism, this morning I was with civil engineering students, and we were talking about the fact that we need to change the way we design and we need to include in our design robustness, redundancy and flexibility in the new infrastructure that we will design and construct. Some of the problem is the old infrastructure.

Maybe what we need to do in order to remain optimistic is to put in numbers for the short term and long term. We are seeing an increase in extreme weather events, exponential and multiple in number, so we are not prepared for these combined things. What will come first: our preparedness to this or the fact that we are going to be bankrupt because we won’t be able to afford reconstruction?

Maybe you can tell us what the priority to do and to be in the action is. As we are legislators and our tools are legislative, what, according to you, should we be recommending in this report?

Mr. Marty: Thank you, Senator Galvez. I want to start by saying that if you have looked at other CCA reports in the past, we never produce recommendations. It is a really important aspect of our work. We want to provide the state of evidence on the questions that we are asked and we want to provide that evidence to the sponsors and share it with the public, and the sponsor can actually make the recommendations, move forward what they think is going to be the most effective.

On the prevention side, I absolutely agree with you. As I mentioned in my remarks, the payback of prevention is much more than if we were to pay for the cost of reconstruction and recovery.

I think there is even evidence that this number is even higher. I think I mentioned $11 of return, but that number is even higher for infrastructure, which really shows that there is an opportunity for infrastructure to tackle the problem and incorporate climate solutions into the design. In that range of return, it is among the greatest for infrastructure.

I very much agree with you that we need to consider the existing and aging infrastructure and the new one. It is a challenge for those who are designing this infrastructure. I think there is the opportunity to adopt new standards for the new builds that will be put in place and design for as long as possible, as long as we can predict in terms of potential impacts. But there is a great challenge with adapting to the aging and older infrastructure. I don’t have here a solution to provide, but it is a very important distinction to make as we move forward.

Mr. Law: I have a quick supplementary comment. This is a bit of an oversimplification, perhaps, but I think back on some of the disaster assistance programs which I characterize as being like insurance programs. In the past, both federal and provincial programs often provided funding based on structuring the programs to get you back to where you were. That’s how the programs are organized.

What if we were to change that? What if instead we took this approach where we talked about forwarding and providing incremental benefits under the program, incentives, that if you can, in fact, demonstrate a different return on investment, it becomes a different discussion? It becomes a different metric. I think it has a lot to do with how we do the life cycle costing. If we were doing a real comparison of apples to apples, we might be able to redesign programs that would actually incentivize and in fact require, as is done in some other jurisdictions, that you put this through a filter. In other jurisdictions they have multi-filtered approaches in which you’re required to answer these questions before you qualify for funding. At least this way it forces you to go through the process.

I don’t know and I’m not an expert on some of these disaster assistance programs, but I know that as a practitioner during my time in government we found ourselves frequently responding to criteria that were not forward-looking, that were perhaps a little bit more — if I characterize these incorrectly, please correct me — as insurance-based programs rather than ones intended to advance the cause.

[Translation]

Senator Cormier: My question is for Mr. Law.

Our study focuses on the impact of climate change on critical infrastructure and the impact of critical infrastructure on climate change.

In the Canada West Foundation’s 2001 submission to Infrastructure Canada as part of the consultations on Canada’s National Infrastructure Assessment, it was stated that commercial infrastructure should be prioritized.

I’d like a clarification: One can understand the economic dimension, but would you say that commercial infrastructure is more adversely affected by climate change?

Do you have a fairly clear position on that, on whether commercial infrastructure is more prone to adverse effects from climate change? Also, does this infrastructure have an impact on climate change?

I ask the question, Mr. Law, in terms of priorities. It seems to me that what we’re trying to determine in a future report is what priorities the federal government should be looking at.

I’d love to hear from you on that.

[English]

Mr. Law: Senator, that is a very good question. I don’t know that any of our work has looked specifically at differentiation between commercial and public infrastructure in terms of whether or not one is more or less at risk. What I would say, though, is that we have a strong view that, whether it’s commercial or public, there must be a much more rigorous identification of the return on investment that this needs to be considered not as just an expenditure in the short term but as an investment.

To my comment and answer to the earlier question, it’s the view that we have taken about how to do this that would change the approach from one that is short term to one that is long term, from one that is based on expenditures out the door for a single project to an understanding of the network implications of that investment, so that we understand what it means for the system as a whole.

We’ve talked a lot about how integrated the supply chain is. In my home jurisdiction, I would frequently talk to our politicians about how, in many instances, a product would start from, say, the farm gate or from a local source of production, be moved by truck, transferred to rail, end up on a ship travelling overseas in which all aspects of that supply chain from beginning to end, need to be understood.

This is one of the key features of what we need to do in being much more systemic about how we assess these. I’m not sure that in most instances in the past we’ve used the right criteria to do that evaluation. I think in both cases we would be much better equipped to assess commercial and public infrastructure priorities if we were to apply these kinds of criteria. We refer to criteria of national significance.

I’ll give you a few quick examples that are used in other jurisdictions. One that we actually used in the Asia-Pacific Gateway program previously, which is currently common to most forward-looking best practices internationally, is whether or not the investment increases or improves the fluidity of the network as a whole. The program itself may do that.

Another criterion they often use is to actually provide a direct return on investment — to understand when you make this expenditure if you can expect to actually realize a return that pays for it and to what extent.

Or thirdly, does it generate new economic production capacity? Is there an economic development, business development or growth opportunity attached to this at a certain scale that you would say it is in the national interest for us to ensure that it is facilitated? These are the kinds of criteria that I think we need to bring to bear on these decisions.

I have to think more about your question about commercial versus public, but I think we would apply them to both and, as a result, we could do a better ordering and prioritization of which should go first, second and third.

Senator Cormier: Thank you very much.

The Chair: Canada has a resource exporting economy. According to NRCan, resource exports bring in nearly $300 billion to our GDP. The GDP associated with Canada’s oil and gas sector alone totalled $128 billion back in 2017. When we’re talking about building national infrastructure resilience, we’re obviously looking at substantial investments in order to accomplish that. Those investment dollars have to eventually come from somewhere.

I would like to get a sense from both witnesses about how we can integrate the reality that the Canadian economy is a resource-export economy with the need to also make the investments required to build resilience in our national infrastructure.

Mr. Law: I’m happy to start on that one. Part of the reason we are recommending that a priority be attached to transportation infrastructure is that it is the infrastructure that facilitates our exports and our trade activity, which you’ve alluded to. The resilience there has always been a major problem.

I recall on the first visit that I made to China with part of the Canadian trade delegation and the level of detailed knowledge that the Chinese had about disruptions in Western Canada — those associated with climate-related issues, winter movements and so forth as well as labour disruptions — at the time that we were visiting. We had a trucking issue on the West Coast. These were all things that were well understood by our customers.

From my standpoint, I think there is a return here to be had that pays for itself and for other things. Frankly, I don’t think our economy will be well positioned to be able to advance and take advantage of opportunities.

I’ll just mention one. The global middle class is projected to grow by a significant number — like 3 billion people — with the ability to buy products that we happen to be really good at producing in this country. But we have to figure out how to address the resilience and reliability question that is increasingly a challenge for us in terms of our competitiveness.

I think this is all part of a collective whole that we need to consider when we’re putting these things forward. If we do that properly, I think it is only going to enhance our export capacity.

Mr. Marty: I can add a few words, Mr. Chair. The report didn’t provide a lot of details on your specific questions, which were the importance of natural resources in the Canadian economy and how important it will be to maintain infrastructure. But I would say that the findings of the report highlight that we need to have comprehensive knowledge of where the risks are for all assets, including infrastructure, and that information is unequal. It is not available to address all the potential sources of risk that exist. I would say, again, that an all-hazard approach could really help to identify the risks associated with particular hazards and prevent impacts on infrastructure in particular.

[Translation]

The Chair: Thank you. Senator Miville-Dechêne, you have the last word.

Senator Miville-Dechêne: I have a quick question for Mr. Law. You said several times that there are several countries that are ahead of us on these issues. As the committee begins its work, are there any countries that you would direct us to, that might be interesting models for us to learn from?

[English]

Mr. Law: Thank you for the question, senator. We have looked at half a dozen different countries that we think — in fact, quite apart from what we think about it — are recognized as providing international best practice.

Infrastructure Australia is a great model because of how they’ve approached it. They introduced legislation. They’ve been at this since 2008. They do updates every year or two. They do regular audits. They have an integrated program that has evolved from transportation and now covers all of the sectors of infrastructure that are required from a national perspective. The National Infrastructure Commission in the United Kingdom is another great one for reference. There have been some recent improvements in New Zealand and Malaysia. Those are four I would start with that jump to mind that are useful models.

In many instances, they have done a great job of publishing updates to their respective reports on where to go and what some of the key projects are. Virtually all of them have found ways to integrate the private sector. They have extended project pipelines, which are multi-year. I think the U.K. is 30 years. Australia, I think, is 15; New Zealand is 20. They’ve taken a very comprehensive approach, and they’ve been at this, in most instances, for the better part of a decade. I think we can learn a lot from those countries. There are others, but those are three or four that I would start with.

The Chair: I’d like to take the opportunity to thank Mr. John Law, Senior Fellow from Canada West Foundation, for your participation.

[Translation]

Thank you very much, Mr. Jérôme Marty, Project Director at the Council of Canadian Academies.

[English]

Your testimony was very fruitful, I have to say. The two hours rolled by very quickly, and we appreciate your patience in answering all our questions. Colleagues, this meeting will be adjourned. I look forward to the next one.

(The committee adjourned.)