By  Christopher Cheung for The Tyee.

The construction industry has a big role to play as Canada aims to meet to its commitment to the Paris climate agreement and transition to a greener economy, according to a new report.

“We need that construction workforce to get us to net zero,” said Bob Blakely, the COO of Canada’s Building Trades Unions (CBTU), an alliance of 14 unions.

There hasn’t been much Canadian research on the construction industry’s role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, so the CBTU commissioned a study by think tank the Columbia Institute to investigate potential job growth as Canada moves towards a low-carbon economy.

According to the study, Jobs for Tomorrow – Canada’s Building Trades and Net Zero Emissions, a low-carbon economy could create almost four million direct building trades jobs by 2050 — and that’s a conservative estimate. These jobs include boilermakers, electrical workers, insulators, ironworkers and masons.

Here is a breakdown of the study’s job creation estimates.

• New eco-friendly construction and retrofitting could create almost two million direct non-residential construction jobs.
• Building small district energy systems in half of Canada’s metropolitan areas could create over 547,000 construction jobs.
• Building $150 billion worth of urban transit infrastructure, from rapid transit tracks to bus lanes, could create 245,000 direct construction jobs.
• Moving to an electrical supply grid composed primarily of hydroelectric (40 per cent), wind, solar, geothermal and tidal power generation (43 per cent), and legacy nuclear (five per cent) could create over 1.1 million direct construction jobs.

“This neither means nor implies the sudden end of the use of fossil fuels,” said Blakely,“but it does mean a shift in how fossil fuels are used and in what quantities.”

Lowering Canada’s reliance on fossil fuels will protect against price shocks, the report found. For example, the OPEC-induced crash of oil prices in 2015 resulted in more than 35,000 people losing their jobs in the oil patch.

Canada’s population is projected to grow to 48 million by 2050 from the current 36.3 million.

Ensuring a greener future is going to take collaboration, said business manager Lee Loftus of the B.C. Insulators Union.

“This is a conversation with the federal government, every [provincial] government in Canada, and the municipalities,” said Loftus. “Every one of those governments has a role in helping us execute the changes that need to take place, from procurement to development to bylaws.”

Photo: Topher Donahue, Aurora Photos

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There’s a new kind of building going up in an old East Vancouver neighbourhood. An eight-storey, 85-unit rental housing development is nothing new for a city that is constantly being torn down and built higher, but an apartment here comes with a perk.

“You could technically heat that apartment with a hairdryer,” says Ed Kolic, the developer behind The Heights, the new Passive House-certified development. When completed, it will be the biggest of its kind in Canada; globally, second only to a new building in New York.

Low-energy houses like this could make a serious dent in Canada’s carbon emissions, cutting up to 2.7 per cent from the total, while simultaneously becoming an engine for economic growth.

“In all of the climate change literature globally, the quickest and fastest way to take action on climate change is to look at the energy use in buildings,” says Charley Beresford, director of the Columbia Institute.

The federal budget, released Tuesday, provides nearly $750 million for investments related to energy efficiency.

“It’s quite a refresher from a Harper budget,” says Karen Tam Wu, director of the Pembina Institute’s buildings and urban solutions program. “What we want to see is, how will the government take the dollars that have been allocated to energy efficiency in buildings and actually incentivize uptake of green buildings at an accelerated rate?”

The largest single pot of money to come out of the budget for these improvements is a $573 million commitment to improve the energy and water efficiency of social housing over the next two years.

“We’re going to have to scale this to major energy upgrades across the country, so by focusing on a social housing initiative, it’s a great way to pilot this idea at a smaller scale,” Tam Wu told DeSmog Canada.

The government has earmarked $128.8 million for Natural Resources Canada to ramp up its energy efficiency standards for products, buildings and vehicles.

A further $40 million will go towards improving the climate resiliency of buildings — meaning buildings like Kolic’s, with their insulation-focused design, may come into fashion in places that are facing intensified winter storms, such as Eastern Canada.

Provincial Governments Lag Behind in Regulations

But provincial governments, with a few exceptions, haven’t yet provided the mechanism that would allow municipalities to push their residents toward more efficient homes.

The Columbia Institute released a report last week calling for provinces to make it easier for municipalities to provide up-front cash for homeowners to retrofit their homes.

If home energy retrofits sound like an un-sexy way to fight climate change, wait until you hear the name of what could be the best shot at achieving that: Local Improvement Charge (LIC) enabling. Despite the name, though, it’s a powerful tool.

Basically what LIC means is that municipalities can loan homeowners the money to improve the insulation in their homes, then gradually make the money back through increased property taxes. It’s an existing system that local governments use to make other improvements, like fixing a sidewalk, then recouping the cost from the people who benefit.

In Halifax, where an LIC program has been piloted, 388 homeowners saved an average of about $14,000 over the lifespan of their new systems (about 25 years). A similar program in Nelson, B.C., (albeit with repayments going to the electrical bill rather than property taxes) resulted in 35 per cent less energy use for the retrofitted homes; nearly 40 per cent of them took advantage of loans to do it. And Manitoba Hydro claims to be on track to retrofit a whopping 86,992 homes by the end of the year under its 15 year-old Power Smart Residential Loan program.

Retrofit Investments Deliver Bang For Buck on Jobs

In return, the municipalities get to help meet their climate targets — but there’s evidence for another benefit to supporting green building projects. Depending on which study you read, for every million dollars invested in building retrofits, somewhere from between 13 and 17 jobs are created. That’s compared to about five jobs created for every million dollars invested in fossil fuel projects.

A report commissioned by Natural Resources Canada, Energy Efficiency: Engine of Economic Growth in Canada, found that savings on heating costs meant that for every dollar invested in energy efficiency, another $3 to $5 would be added to the economy. Overall, the report says, this could mean hundreds of thousands of new jobs in multiple sectors as the savings make their way through the supply chain.

There’s another way all levels of government can take advantage of efficiency gains, Tam Wu says.

“What all levels of government should be doing is leading by example,” she says. “And that’s what we want the provincial government to do, by setting a bold target for what level of emissions reductions we can achieve through our buildings.”

Municipalities Lead the Way on Efficiency

Regulations have been moving faster at the municipal level. Vancouver, for example, requires that to rezone a lot for a new development, the proponent has to build the new building to demanding LEED Gold or Passive House standards. Even remote Bella Bella, where most of the electricity comes from diesel generators, a new modular building Britco built in the Lower Mainland and shipped to the Central Coast community takes the energy equivalent of six light bulbs to heat.

“[Britco] had never done that before,” says Tam Wu. “That kind of energy savings just totally makes sense in remote communities.”

The private sector overall seems ready to respond to increased demand, and that demand has shown to be easily created by incentives from all levels of government.

In Brussels, which developer Kolic cites as inspiration for his Vancouver development, new EU regulations forced the city to get serious about efficiency. With new funding and the spin-off businesses that created, Brussels quickly went from hopelessly inefficient and outdated to having 5,000 new buildings meet the Passive House standard.

“It went from having the worst standard of energy efficient buildings to becoming a world success story within a period of ten years,” Tam Wu says.

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The days of infinite growth in Alberta’s oilsands are over with the Alberta government’s blockbuster climate change announcement on Sunday, which attracted broad support from industry and civil society.

“This is the day that we start to mobilize capital and resources to create green jobs, green energy, green infrastructure and a strong, environmentally responsible, sustainable and visionary Alberta energy industry with a great future,” Premier Rachel Notley said. “This is the day we stop denying there is an issue, and this is the day we do our part.”

Notley and Environment & Parks Minister Shannon Phillips released a 97-page climate change policy plan, which includes five key pillars.

1) Carbon will be priced economy-wide at $30/tonne by 2018.

2) Coal-fired power plants will be phased out by 2030.

3) Oilsands emissions will be capped at 100 megatonnes (Mt) per year (recent Environment Canada figures predicted a 2020 output of 103 Mt from the sector), which amounts to allowing current construction to go ahead, but that’s it. That means to expand production beyond current projects, per barrel emissions will need to be reduced.

4) Methane emissions from oil and gas operations will be cut by 45 per cent in 2025.

5) 30 per cent of all electricity will be generated by renewables by 2030.

It is a staggeringly significant proposal, one that far surpasses anything the former Progressive Conservative government imagined in the course of its 43-year reign. The announcement — delivered at Edmonton’s Telus World of Science — was benefitted by appearances from CEOs of Suncor, Canadian Natural Resource Ltd. (CNRL), Shell and Cenovus, something far-right activist Ezra Levant dismissed by alleging the massive energy companies “don't represent the industry.”

Environmental groups such as the Pembina Institute and Clean Energy Canada were also on stage. Getting all of those players in support of one climate strategy is a huge testament to the leadership of University of Alberta energy economist Andrew Leach, who chaired the climate change panel.

Climate Change Policy Plan Garners Broad Support

With the exception of the rabidly conservative Wildrose Party and former deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk, it seemed every serious player in politics and industry celebrated the announcement. The NDP-affiliated Broadbent Institute, headquartered in Toronto, concluded: “On a public policy Richter scale, Alberta’s new Climate Leadership Plan is an 11.”

Shell Canada announced that “these measures provide predictability and certainty and will help ensure that producers can responsibly develop and grow this significant Canadian resource while also addressing global concerns about climate change.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau congratulated Notley in a tweet now favourited over 1,300 times as “a very positive step in the fight against climate change.”  Political blogger Dave Cournoyer accurately dubbed it a “pigs fly” situation.

All of this means a whole lot given the impending Paris Climate Change Conference (COP 21).

Canada ranks 15th out of 17th countries for greenhouse gas emissions according to the Conference Board of Canada, with Alberta contributing 36 per cent of national emissions in 2013 despite only accounting for 11 per cent of the country’s population.

The expected spike in oilsands expansion was widely expected to nullify all other sources of emissions reductions in the Canada. The fact that Alberta, and by extension Canada, is now going into COP 21 with a detailed plan to address the province’s largest source of emissions – oilsands development and coal-fired power plants – speaks volumes about the desire to be taken seriously on the world stage.

Climate Plan May Increase Social Licence for Oilsands Operations

Another component that ostensibly drove oil execs to hop on the green bandwagon was the need to accrue “social licence,” or the support required to build pipelines to export its products. The veto of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline represents what happens when such social licence isn’t secured.

By addressing runaway emissions, Alberta-based companies might actually stand a chance to build infrastructure like the Energy East pipeline, which would transport 1.1 million barrels of diluted bitumen from Alberta to Quebec and New Brunswick every day.

“The province’s climate strategy may allow our sector to invest more aggressively in technologies to further reduce per barrel emissions in our sector and do our part to tackle climate change,” said Tim McMillan, Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers’ president and chief executive officer, in a statement.

“We encourage the province to follow a balanced approach, recognizing that our sector can only become a global supplier of responsibly produced oil and natural gas if we are competitive on the world stage.”

The fight over pipelines is unlikely to dissipate. While Sunday’s announcement was a giant step in the right direction, it’s still not enough to avoid catastrophic global warming, according to a statement from Greenpeace.

“These policies are important first steps, but much bigger emission reductions will be needed for Alberta to do its part to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius,” Alberta climate and energy campaigner Mike Hudema said.

Hudema also noted that the province still has no short or long-term emission reduction targets.

“Targets give an important signal to business, let the world know where Alberta is headed, and help ensure that direction leads to the reductions that science and equity demand,” he said.

The Pembina Institute has historically supported a higher carbon tax than what was proposed on Sunday – with $40/tonne in 2016, $50/tonne in 2017 and $60/tonne in 2018 — but the plan is an indisputably major upgrade from the Specified Gas Emitters Regulation (SGER), which taxed Alberta’s largest emitters (103 at last count) at the equivalent of $1.80/tonne.

George Hoberg, professor in the forest department at the University of British Columbia, notes there’s still plenty of work to be done but that: “Today is a day for celebration. Alberta has bent its carbon emissions curve, and provided a lever to Canada to show real climate leadership.”

Ultimately, the future of Canada’s environmental reputation may rely on the work that Trudeau and Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna complete during and after the Paris conference. But Sunday’s announcement out of Alberta sets quite the standard.

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