OTTAWA – The climate officer for the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation said the federal agency had “a lot underway” to encourage more sustainable housing.
Steven Mennill says that a first priority will be to develop standards for what makes a residence more or less sustainable.
“We don’t really have a good source of data and a good way to measure some of these things,” Mennill said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
While the agency has decent metrics for a building’s energy efficiency and overall energy performance, it says there are other variables in assessing a home’s environmental sustainability that don’t have not yet assessed.
“We don’t have a measure of housing and its ability to walk, access to public transit, or the ability to live a life without driving everywhere,” he says. “We don’t really have a good understanding of the costs of providing infrastructure and maintaining our homes, and there’s a lot of carbon built into those things.”
Although Mennill did not provide details on when new programs will be introduced, he said the agency intended to be “very active” next year.
Dallas Alderson, director of public affairs and policy at the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada, says it’s important to pair the need to increase the nation’s housing supply with climate policy.
“I think it’s really important to remember that not all supplies are created equal,” she says. “It’s really important to ask where are we building, who are we building for and how are we building it? “
Mennill says the hope is that creating these standards will help different levels of government develop better housing policy by having information on the climate impacts of these decisions.
“We find that when we talk to city governments and city planners, there is a need for better information on some of these things, so that they can advocate for a different style of development or building that is more compatible with the climate, “he says.
Since the Liberals’ national housing strategy began in 2017, new funds have become available for new construction and renovations to existing buildings.
A program that provides loans for the construction of affordable housing requires housing providers to integrate energy efficiency into their applications and demonstrate that the project is better than the national standards of the energy code, in terms of energy consumption. energy and performance in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
Mikaela Harrison, press secretary to Housing Minister Ahmed Hussen, said the government’s goal is for the housing sector to be “keen to test new energy technologies and solutions” that make homes more affordable, sustainable and inclusive, according to a written statement.
Jeff Morrison, executive director of the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association, says a move he would like to see come from CMHC is to allow housing providers to include the incremental costs associated with building more. ecological in their funding requests.
Incremental costs, says Morrison, refer to the costs of using new energy efficient technologies beyond standard building technology.
Morrison says that while housing providers typically recoup these costs through savings on the building’s energy bill, being able to declare these amounts in advance when seeking funding may encourage providers to opt for this technology.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on November 9, 2021.
This story was produced with the financial assistance of Facebook and the Canadian Press News Fellowship.
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