Building October November 2018

Urban Development / Architecture & Design / Innovation

PM#43096012

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building.ca October/November 2018 CDN $4.95

Teaching Urbanism Future-Proof Schools Environmental Compliance

The Future (Mis)Use of Water

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FEATURES

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It’s Not Easy Being Green Is the do-the-rightthing attitude of altruist land owners enough to scale green infrastructure adoption?

By Andrew Sobchak

When I Grow Up, I Can Be A City Builder?

How schooling can contribute to the city building profession.

By Kendra FitzRandolph

Creating the “FutureProof” School “Even if we can’t see what’s coming, our schools are flexible enough to accommodate it.”

By David Lasker

Battle of the Acronyms Breaking down EASR, ECA and the environmental compliance approval process.

By Nicholas SylvestreWilliams

Safety In, Safety Out The push for COR certification has construction companies across Canada paying extra attention to their safety culture.

By Josh Lebrun

Departments

Building.CA explore Humber College Daycare A former Funeral Services Education Program space is transformed into a teaching daycare for the college.

explore The Dock Building The Royal Vancouver Yacht Club’s new building shows industrial architectural elegance crafted on a modest budget.

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Editor’s Notes Market Watch Legal Briefs From the Bullpen Powers That Be In Their Words Site Visit Spec Sheet Viewpoint

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Volume 68 No.5

Editor in Chief Peter Sobchak Art Director Roy Gaiot Associate Editor Stefan Novakovic Legal Editor Jeffrey W. Lem Contributors Kendra Teale FitzRandolph, Richard Joy, David Lasker, Josh Lebrun, Megan J. Lem, Shannon Moore, Ben Myers, Kevin Powers, Andrew Sobchak, Nicholas Sylvestre-Williams, Jeremy Warson Customer Service / Production Laura Moffatt, 416 441 2085 x104 Press Releases pressroom@building.ca Circulation Manager circulation@building.ca Sales Manager Faria Ahmed, 416 441 2085 x106 fahmed@building.ca Vice President & Senior Publisher Steve Wilson, 416 441 2085 x105 swilson@building.ca President, iQ Business Media Inc. Alex Papanou Design Consultation BLVD Agency

Building magazine is published by iQ Business Media Inc. 101 Duncan Mill Road, Suite 302 Toronto, ON M3B 1Z3 (416) 441 2085 x104 info@building.ca www.building.ca SUBSCRIPTION RATE: Canada: 1 year, $30.95; 2 years, $52.95; 3 years, $64.95 (plus H.S.T.) U.S.A.: 1 year, $38.95 USD. Overseas: 1 year, $45.95 USD. BACK ISSUES: Back copies are available for $15 for delivery in Canada, $20 USD for delivery in U.S.A. and $30 USD overseas. Please send prepayment to Building, 101 Duncan Mill Road, Suite 302 Toronto, ON M3B 1Z3.

Subscription and back issues inquiries please call (416) 441 2085 x104, e-mail: circulation@building.ca or go to www.building.ca Please send changes of address to Circulation Department, Building magazine or e-mail to addresses@building.ca Building is indexed in the Canadian Magazine Index by Micromedia ProQuest Company, Toronto (www.micromedia. com) and National Archive Publishing Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan (www.napubco.com)

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Learn by Doing

No question, a lot is asked of our educational system, and it is unfair to expect it — already burdened with thinly stretched resources — to accommodate the multitude of subjects that could potentially add value to the curricula. Which is why I don’t think there is anything immediately wrong with the private sector (or public sector, for that matter) stepping in and offering workshop-style programmes that bring real-world skills to students in a hands-on, experiential format, similar to the way automotive companies helped support auto shop in tech schools, before automation in those industries rendered those skills obsolete.

One such example, called UrbanPlan, was rolled out recently and as the name implies addresses our industry directly. Created by the Urban Land Institute and adopted by several of its regional chapters, including Toronto, it is a project-based exercise for high school classes focused on business, city planning, real estate and architecture.

Students work in small groups and develop a financial proforma and physical model of a plan for an urban infill project, and present their proposal to a mock City Council. In effect, it takes subjects like geography and economics out of their silos and applies them to something every student has an intimate relationship with: the city.

According to the outline: “Through the process, students discover the fundamental challenges of development: how market forces clash and collaborate with non -market forces to create the built environment. Through these roles, students develop a deeper understanding of the various stakeholders in the development process and the challenge of reconciling their often-competing agendas to create a well-designed, market responsive, financeable, and buildable project.”

Is it too much to expect high school students to understand and tackle city-building issues like marginal cost benefit, allocation

Peter Sobchak Editor in Chief We welcome your feedback. Send your questions and comments to psobchak@building.ca

of goods and services, and the role of incentives? I don’t think so. By introducing students to land use development and planning, they are encouraged to develop new perspectives and gain core skills through critical thinking, conflict resolution, problem solving and “developing tolerance to ambiguous situations” says ULI, explaining that the overall goal of the programme “is to encourage students to practice balancing both market economy and non-market forces in our representative democracy, which are at play when creating the built environments in which students live.”

I wish something like this existed when I was in high school. Back then, my way of learning how a city works and how to navigate and negotiate its gears was by heading downtown after school with friends and wandering areas like Queen West or Chinatown.

Those experiences seem hardly relatable in the professional realm, but they still in large part inform the lens through which I understand and relate to city issues. Imagine how much more of an intelligent participant we would be in urban discourse if those typical teenage experiences were filtered through a programme such as OpenPlan.

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market watch Spotlight: Offices

Evolving workplace trends force office occupiers and owners to adjust traditional strategies.

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New approaches from technology companies and co-working providers across North America and Europe are challenging occupiers’ and landlords’ office-space accommodation strategies, forcing players in more established sectors to adjust how they think about the size, physical form and operational function of their premises.

This transformation continues to encourage new development, which is racing to keep up with demand in some markets and being bolstered by a young, educated workforce gravitating to urban centres.

These are some of the key trends noted in Avison Young’s Mid-Year 2018 North America and Europe Office Market Report.

“Against a backdrop of economic, geopolitical and financial volatility, the commercial property markets – for the most part – are functioning under relatively sound fundamentals,” says Mark E. Rose, chair and CEO of Avison Young. “Nowhere are we seeing more profound changes than in the office sector, especially in urban areas of major metropolitan markets. The impact can be seen on city skylines, which are changing rapidly as new construction picks up pace, driven by insatiable tenant demand from organizations adjusting their workplace strategies to a growing millennial workforce and their adaptability to innovative technologies.”

Rose continues: “At the same time, sectors that have historically accounted for a significant amount of demand for office space are now being both augmented and squeezed by ever-expanding technology and co-working industries. This phenomenon is being seen across national boundaries, particularly in markets with dense and growing urban populations.”

According to the report, of the 67 office markets tracked by Avison Young in North America and Europe, which comprise more than six billion square feet (bsf), market-wide vacancy rates declined in 38 markets,

remained unchanged in seven, and increased in 22 markets as almost 74 million square feet (msf) was absorbed on an annualized basis.

The report goes on to say that construction cranes remained prominent fixtures across many skylines as nearly 74 msf of office space was completed during the 12-month period, while another 138 msf was under construction at mid-year 2018, with 50 per cent of the space preleased. “It’s great to see so much confidence on the part of developers as they respond to the supply-demand imbalance in many markets,” says Rose. “As always in this industry, the inherent risk is that circumstances could change, resulting in an oversupply of product at the time of delivery. In many cases, this scenario is the result of external economic and geopolitical factors. This time around, however, the new influences of disruptive technologies and increasing co-working space availability are also affecting how and where people work, potentially impacting the office sector from within, and challenging conventional wisdom.”

Canada’s office property markets remained sound through the first half of 2018, supported by stable macroeconomic indicators, including healthy employment numbers, GDP growth and a rebounding Alberta economy. However, U.S. protectionist policies and escalating tariffs pose a risk to the Canadian economy and global trade flows, and may lead to moderating growth ahead.

“Intense competition for office space continues to bolster office market fundamentals across Canada, especially in downtown markets,” states Bill Argeropoulos, principal and Practice Leader, Research (Canada) for Avison Young. “Demand from traditional sectors is being augmented by the proliferation of domestic and global technology and co-working firms, ongoing urbanization and a burgeoning millennial workforce, all part of Canada’s emerging innovation economy.”

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The report shows declining vacancy rates in more than half of the Canadian office markets with suburban markets outpacing downtown markets in terms of absorption (led by Montréal and Vancouver) and new deliveries (led by Toronto, Vancouver and Montréal) during the past 12 months. However, the amount of downtown space under construction at mid-year (led by Toronto) outstripped the suburbs by a significant margin.

“Urbanization — partly attributable to growth in the technology sector — has created a noticeable gulf between downtown and suburban vacancy rates in emerging tech hubs such as Vancouver, Toronto, Waterloo Region, Ottawa and Montréal,” Argeropoulos concludes. “Given tight conditions and upward pressure on rents in some of the nation’s downtown markets, and with little or no near-term supply relief, suburban markets — particularly those offering transit connectivity and other urban amenities — may be the beneficiaries of overflowing tenant demand during the next couple of years.”

Notable Mid-Year 2018 Canadian Office Market Highlights: • Canada’s 530-msf office market recorded positive absorption of almost six msf in the 12 months ending at June 30, 2018, led by strong gains in Toronto, Vancouver and Montréal, offsetting losses in the struggling, but stabilizing, Calgary market; • Canada’s overall office vacancy retreated 60 basis points (bps) year-over-year to finish the first half of 2018 at 11.5 per cent. Vacancy

15.4 MILLION SF

Office area under construction across Canada – led by Toronto (8.5 msf ), with downtown markets outpacing suburbs 4:1.

declined in six of 11 markets. Unchanged from one year ago, Calgary (23.5 per cent) maintained the highest vacancy rate, Toronto (6.2 per cent) now has the lowest, while Waterloo Region (up 360 bps to 17.1 per cent), Edmonton (down 320 bps to 14.1 per cent) and Ottawa (down 320 bps to 9.5 per cent) recorded the biggest swings; • Most downtown markets posted positive results, combining for more than 2.2 msf of absorption in the 12 months ending at mid-year 2018. Consequently, Canada’s downtown vacancy rate declined 80 bps year-over-year to reach 10.5 per cent at mid-year 2018. Vacancy was lower in seven of 11 downtown markets; four remained in single digits and below the national downtown average, while Toronto (2.2 per cent) registered the lowest downtown vacancy not just in Canada, but North America; • Aside from Edmonton and Calgary, the nation’s suburban markets expanded by varying degrees with strong results

in Montréal and Vancouver. Outpacing downtowns, suburban markets combined for positive 12-month absorption of nearly 3.4 msf, slightly behind the previous 12 months’ pace. Suburban vacancy fell 50 bps during the year to close first-half 2018 at 13.1 per cent. Though double-digit vacancy prevailed in all but two suburban markets, six of 11 suburban markets recorded lower vacancy levels year-overyear – with Winnipeg being the tightest (5.5 per cent); • New office completions slowed to 3.6 msf delivered in the 12 months ending at midyear 2018, down from nearly 10 msf in the previous 12-month period, aggravating the shortage of available space, especially in Vancouver’s and Toronto’s downtown markets. In a change from the prior period, suburban completions (led by Toronto, Vancouver and Montréal) overtook downtown completions, while Toronto recorded the most deliveries overall.

Canada overall office vacancy rates Mid-year 2018 25 % 20 15 average

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calgary

edmonton

halifax

lethbridge

Montréal

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regina

toronto

vancouver

Waterloo region

winnipeg

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legal Briefs It Happened Again!

Condo cancellations continue to make big news in Ontario, and this time it is on the new government’s radar.

By Megan J. Lem

Megan J. Lem is a corporate lawyer at Oslers LLP. The views expressed herein are the opinions of the author alone and are not necessarily the views of Oslers LLP.

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ANOTHER MAJOR CONDOMINIUM project in the province of Ontario has been abruptly cancelled, leaving thousands of prospective homebuyers, many of them first-timers, out in the lurch. This time it was the Icona Condos project being promoted by the Gupta Group at the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, a massive project consisting of two 55-story residential towers with 1,264 condos, a 17-story hotel/residence complex, a convention centre, and 20,000 square feet of retail at grade. What had been billed as “Vaughan’s tallest tower” and the “Jewel of Vaughan” is now anything but.

This follows essentially hot on the heels of the almost identical cancellation of the 1,153-unit Cosmos Condos twin-tower project, also at the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, that had been promoted by Liberty Development Corporation back in April of this year.

Between Gupta Group’s Icona project and Liberty Development’s Cosmos project, that’s almost 2,500 units abruptly taken off the market by two developers at the same location, leaving an almost corresponding number of buyers suddenly back in the market — a market which, almost by definition, has been scorching hot. According to the Globe & Mail, including Cosmos and Icona, that is almost a dozen condo projects cancelled by developers in the GTA since the beginning of 2017, totalling in excess of 5,500 condominium units.

Arguably, if the market hadn’t been so hot, then the developers might not have been so inclined to terminate the projects in the first place. And therein lies the public relations problem for developers and the public policy problem for government. It is not that the purchasers have been robbed of their deposits. By all accounts, all of the affected purchasers got their deposits back in full (thanks in part to Tarion Warranty protection rules for residential deposits), but none

of the purchasers received any compensation for the lost opportunity cost of being out of a rising market for upwards of years.

Every cancelled purchaser is now back in the market looking for a replacement condo where the market is as much as hundreds of dollars per square foot richer than it was when such purchasers first bought into their since-cancelled condo projects.

The perception in the popular press is that some developers have, essentially in bad faith, invoked financing or other such subjective conditions to terminate their projects, not really because they couldn’t get financing, but rather to capitalize on hot markets (by eventually repackaging and re-selling their cancelled condos at a much higher market price to new buyers without having to compensate the existing buyers that they just cancelled). Bob Aaron, a leading Ontario real estate lawyer and regular columnist on real estate law in the Toronto Star, said regarding the Cosmos cancellation, “[r]ight now there’s a loophole in the legislation which allows builders on the flimsiest of excuses to terminate deals when the values of properties have gone up. That does not protect consumers in a rising market.”

Furthermore, there is no indication in the Tarion database alerting homebuyers to whether a developer (or its umbrella group) has ever cancelled a condo project. For example, in the case of Kennedy Gardens, a townhouse condominium project in Scarborough that got abruptly cancelled at the beginning of the year, the Tarion database gives no warning to the public that Forme Development Group Inc. is the current name of the umbrella group for the developer that sold then cancelled the Kennedy Gardens project.

For buyers, the art, it would seem, is to get a “good” pre-construction price for their condo, but not “too good” a price, lest the developer decide that it is better-off

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cancelling the project altogether and start afresh in a hotter market with new buyers.

Odysseas Papadimitriou, a condominium development expert with Harris Sheaffer in Toronto, notes that the condo development industry should not be universally tarred with the same brush. According to Papadimitriou, “in some cases, sky-rocketing construction costs simply crush previously viable projects, and in many other cases — indeed most other cases — developers will complete projects that they have contracted to do, even if such projects are not as profitable as originally projected and/or if such projects leave potential profits on the table.”

There is currently a class-action lawsuit against the developer in the Cosmos condo cancellation and that is likely to spill-over to the Icona cancellation, but, from an industry perspective, it is quite possible that these condo cancellations will prompt

a strong regulatory response as well. Todd Smith, the Minister of Government and Consumer Services was quoted in the Toronto Star immediately after the Icona cancellation as being “…concerned about this – this is a recent development where a couple of these condo companies have gone this route, which is of course disappointing for the people that were expecting to move in to a brand new condo.

It’s a serious issue that my ministry is looking into right now.” As we have seen in other areas of recent provincial politics, the current Ontario government is not afraid to act swiftly and authoritatively where it perceives the need to do so.

In addition to Cosmos, Icona and Kennedy Gardens, the Globe & Mail reports a host of other GTA condo cancellation in the last year or so: “more than 600 pre-sold contracts in a troubled Scarborough project called The

Kennedy; close to 400 contracts were sold at a cancelled Ajax development called Central Park; more than 200 contracts disappeared in another Scarborough project in receivership called Harmony Village and there were about 168 units in the cancelled Toronto Junction-area Museum FLTS project from Castlepoint Numa.”

What’s troubling is that this may not be the end of it. While the market for freehold single-family dwellings has cooled since the introduction of the Non-Resident Speculation Tax earlier in the year, condo markets have stayed hot. Furthermore, anecdotal evidence suggests that construction costs really have shot up these past couple of years, with potential tariffs on steel yet to come. Indeed, this author would be shocked if there aren’t more high-profile GTA condo projects cancelled in the near future. So stay tuned.

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from the bullpen Middle Ground Forget the “missing middle,” we need more of the missing mid-rise.

By Ben Myers

Ben Myers is president of Bullpen Research & Consulting, a boutique real estate advisory firm that works with land owners, developers, and lenders to better inform them of the current and future macroeconomic and site-specific housing market conditions that can impact their active or proposed development projects.

Follow Bullpen on Twitter at @BullpenConsult or find Ben at www.BullpenConsulting.ca.

The two most common buzzwords in relation to housing affordability in recent years in Canada are “missing” and “middle.”

According to the website missingmiddlehousing.com, “Missing Middle is a range of multi-unit or clustered housing types compatible in scale with single-family homes that help meet the growing demand for walkable urban living.” They’re referring to duplexes, fourplexes, live-work units, townhouses, and apartments with two or three storeys. Others built forms include laneway housing and stacked townhouses.

However, many of these housing types are not allowed in established single-family neighbourhoods in major Canadian cities, and most local residents would like to keep it that way. Advocates for missing middle housing believe that you can easily add density to these older communities, with minimal disruption to the existing built character. Many developers across the country would love to see the planning constraints in single-family neighbourhoods loosened, but are skeptical that they could make the numbers work on these projects. Another two words used in relation to small scale developments: brain damage. In other words, too much work for very few units.

Instead of trying to produce 100 missing middle buildings with 15 units each, you’d produce twice as much supply if you could build 20 mid-rise apartments with 150 units each. Unfortunately, municipal planning offices are not making it easy for developers to do that either, resulting in huge clusters of high-rise condos in a few geographic pockets.

Many Canadians are not fond of high-rises, and prefer “human-scaled” developments like five- to 12-storey mid-rise buildings, but developers have found the economics to be challenging for a number of reasons. “Many of the challenges of mid-rise development are well catalogued: extensive and expensive approvals timelines, poor economies of scale for construction and soft costs, land assembly risk, and a longer sales process with end users,” says Daniel Byrne, vice president of development at Main + Main in Toronto.

“What is less discussed is the impact of the mid-rise guidelines on the viability of the interior building program,” adds Byrne, as Toronto’s 45-degree angular plane restrictions and penthouse setback requirements included in many urban design studies significantly reduces the viability of these projects. “A high-rise will typically have well over 80 per cent of the floor area of the building as units, with the remainder being corridors, stairwells, etc.,” explains Byrne. “A mid-rise building that conforms to the guidelines on a typical Avenues site is probably somewhere in the 70s. When only 75 per cent of your building generates revenue, it makes the economics very hard to work. Every unit needs to carry a much bigger allocation for these common areas, further eroding affordability. It not only makes the buildings unwieldy from an economic perspective, it’s also extremely wasteful. Do we really want to be mandating buildings where 25 per cent or more of the cement, steel, GHG are ‘wasted’ on building corridors and stairwells?”

Alterra Developments’ CEO Stuart Wilson reiterates many of the same concerns as Byrne. “Low- and mid-rise apartments have less efficient gross to saleable layouts, cost more to build than high rise due to lack of economies of scale and typically have higher operating costs once complete, as there are less owners to share fixed costs. However, these building have to compete with highrise projects for purchasers but are ultimately saddled with the same onerous municipal costs that high-rise units are.”

There is clearly a desire for more missing middle and mid-rise developments in Canada’s major markets, but even where those built forms are allowed in Toronto, developers have trouble making the numbers work due to overly prescriptive design guidelines. Municipal planning departments need to better understand development economics, make serious concessions to encourage this type of development, and plan for buildings that can actually generate an acceptable financial return, or they’re planning for nothing at all.

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powers that be You Can’t Spell “Town Hall” Without “Ow” When public meetings start going sideways, it’s best to lead the charge.

By Kevin Powers

Kevin Powers is managing principal of Project Advocacy Inc., a subsidiary of Campbell Strategies, and is focused on helping project developers facing public and government opposition.

Find him at www.projectadvocacy.ca or email him at kevin.powers@ projectadvocacy.ca

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There are few forms of participatory democracy as hallowed as town halls, when communities come together to debate issues, build consensus and vote on the proceedings. They’ve been a feature of North American democracy and local governance since the 1600s, and over time evolved into the go-to forum for community participation on any topic.

However, the storied town hall isn’t as engrained in democracy as you might think. For one, they only took place in isolated towns for their first few hundred years of existence, and weren’t adopted broadly by politicians until the 1970s. What’s more, since then most politicians have grown to loathe them.

Republican congressman Peter Roskam of Illinois is a case in point. After several combative town hall meetings, he has opted for telephone town halls and more intimate meetings at smaller venues. The reason: “Large, unstructured events tend to devolve into shouting matches,” his office said. “Both sides compete with each other over who can scream the loudest, while the people who are interested in an actual, productive dialogue are denied the opportunity to hear and be heard.”

In fact, large town halls have become such a breeding ground for opposition, a cottage industry has grown around it. One group in the United States monitors how many town halls politicians hold. It specializes in shaming laggards into hosting them, where its members promptly ambush them.

Politicians are taking note and ditching the town hall in favour of more representative, more constructive forms of dialogue.

The same can’t be said of commercial real estate developers, who remain tied to their own, equally ruinous version of the town hall: the public meeting. For decades, this has been the go-to approach for convincing the host community about the benefits of a project, whether it be a condo tower or a glass factory. Like so many things, public meetings work very well in principle. They bring together a large swath of the community in one shot. They deliver a captive audience receptive to explanation and elaboration.

Questions come up, are answered, fears are put to rest and support is built.

In practice, the outcome is a lot messier.

Instead of providing a venue for thoughtful explanation and discussion, large public meetings become a stage for fear-mongering and unfounded criticisms. Instead of answering questions and calming fears, they raise boogeymen and sow confusion.

Instead of building public support, the public meeting sets in motion a negative feedback loop that erodes it from the centre outward.

The first and most obvious casualty is the developer. Hostile crowds will have all but the most experienced presenter immediately on the defensive. No matter how well prepared, questions that come out of left field will make them appear uncertain and confused. Under pressure, many will make up answers that will come back to haunt them. And opponents will use the chance to put them on the spot and agree to promises they would never agree to outside a room of angry residents.

Project supporters and those on the fence are the next to fall. Opponents will make sure they learn many things that are unfavourable about the project, true or not. They will be made to feel their views are uninformed and in the minority. At the very least, they will feel intimidated enough to keep their support to themselves. And what’s a city planner to think about a room full of hostile residents? They are hardwired to assess whether projects fit in to the fabric of the community. The raw emotion of a town hall is going to set off alarm bells and cause them to carefully reconsider the project.

Finally, there’s the politicians, whom developers most need for support. Normally, the only politicians at public meetings side with opponents. The others know they can read the gory details in the media and then make up their minds. Yes, it’s true, no one will understand better than a politician that public meetings almost always go sideways.

But don’t expect their sympathy or their vote. They also understand better than most that when things start going sideways, it’s best to lead the charge.

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in their words Going Global Having recently submitted its bid for Amazon’s second headquarters, Toronto Global is a newly minted agency tasked with attracting international investment to the Toronto region. Jeremy Warson, Director of Development Planning at Infrastructure Ontario, speaks with its CEO, Toby Lennox, to learn more about the agency and the reasons why Toronto and the surrounding region has become such a desirable place to invest in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.

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Jeremy Warson: Toronto Global is a newly established agency, so tell me why it was created and how is it funded?

Toby Lennox: A thriving economic region has to be able to continue to attract investment into its economy for it to continue to thrive. And some years ago it was noted that the performance of the Toronto region’s ability to attract foreign direct investment was either stalling or likely falling behind some of our main competitors. And credit where it’s due, both the province and the Mayors and Chairs of the region recognized that a single agency with the resources to market the entire Toronto region on a proactive basis was a) in keeping with what was happening in our competing cities, and b) was the best way to start seeing if we could reverse that stall.

So we are focused only on attracting international companies who are looking for a location for their international growth or expansion. This means that we’re actually looking for companies to come here, set up a business, they have to make a real estate investment here, they’ve got to be hiring a minimum

of five people, and it’s a joint effort. We’re funded by three levels of government, which is the first time that’s ever happened. And we’re into our first year of operation, so we’re a little bit of a toddler right now.

JW: Interesting. So then let’s get into to why companies are so drawn to Toronto.

TL: I’m going to correct you on one thing there: the Toronto region is largely invisible in the international marketplace. We are not known for our assets and attributes. People are not aware outside of Canada that Toronto is the fourth largest municipal region in North America. You go off and talk to people in the U.S., they think we’re Pittsburgh, they think we’re Cleveland. We’re next to the largest, most complicated, most dynamic economy, and they haven’t had to really think about it. They’re incredibly insular because of the assets that they’ve got there. But I think it’s been of benefit to the Toronto region and Canada. We have just kept on keeping on. We have always been a region that has been open and welcoming and we’ve benefitted from that. Now I think the

“Hey, Amazon, look, we’re working here.

We’re happy to have you come in and join us, but we’ve got stuff to do as well.”

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challenge is that we’ve got to step it up and we really have to take a much more assertive presence on the international stage.

But we make a jump that there is a lineup of companies out there that all want to come to Toronto. That’s not the case. Yes, we are great, we are doing really well, we’re incredibly dynamic, but it is an incredibly hard job to take that out into the international marketplace, to convince a company to come to this place, because it’s not the “safe” option even though it probably is for many companies. So that’s why you need an organization like ours that is going to spend the incredibly hard work to identify companies, take a value proposition to them, walk them around, spend time in the markets, so that you can actually get them coming in. But the overwhelming reaction that we get from people when they come here is, “Holy mackerel!

I had no idea.” That’s why one of our slogans is, “Expect the Unexpected.”

JW: What are some of the areas where you think we’re challenged a bit where companies come here and they may have some question marks about aspects of the city?

TL: We don’t deal with a lot of companies that are doing what we call “relocation.”

Most of the companies that are coming here, when they’re creating jobs they’re hiring people from the Toronto region, they’re not taking 3,000 people out of Sausalito and having them move to Toronto. So, if I have concerns, it is about maintaining and preserving the constant supply of talent that we’ve got. Talent, right now globally, is such a hot commodity and we do so well at it, that that is why we’re having companies come to us. They are are coming here to be able to have access to the mammoth pipeline of talent that we’re developing. And if we ever start taking steps to squeeze that, then we’re going to be in big trouble. And you have to break that down into three pieces: attract, develop and retain.

Attract means that you have to have the types of businesses that are going to make it palatable and attractive for people to come here. Retaining talent has to do a lot with the quality of life that you’ve got here.

I think housing is an issue that we’ve got to be mindful of. And the last one is develop, and that means our universities.

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But step back. When Amazon came to us they were very interested in what our universities were producing. But guess what, they were interested in what we were producing at the kindergarten to grade five level. So they’re sitting down saying, “They understand that your pipeline starts when the kid goes into kindergarten.”

So we have to work really hard to make sure we’re doing that and I commend the provincial government here. Over the years the provincial governments, regardless of which political stripe, have actually created an education system that is producing and cranking out incredible talent that companies are coming to get.

JW: You mentioned the Amazon RFP. When that came out it garnered a lot of attention not just in Toronto, obviously, but across North America [with] over 200 submissions to Amazon, and some municipalities doing some offbeat things to try to attract attention. But what I wanted to find out is what was it like to put that bid submission together, given the high profile nature?

TL: It was a test of what we were going to be able to do as Toronto Global because a lot of the municipalities were saying, “All right, what can you guys really do?” Yes, it was an incredible privilege and opportunity to be able to present the value proposition of the Toronto region to Amazon. But our strategy is, a) great, if Amazon comes here, terrific; b) if they don’t there’s other parts of Amazon that we know are looking around; but c) it was an opportunity to showcase the Toronto region to a whole lot of companies by taking advantage of the kind of profile.

But the thing that I didn’t expect was that, actually, in doing this, we’re holding up a mirror to ourselves. We were saying to people in the Toronto region, “Hey, look, guys, this is what we are now. This is what we’ve become.

This is what we can be and can promise to be in the future.” And we’re not the Toronto region of the 1970s or the 1990s. We are now a global player. We are a dynamic, incredibly vibrant city. We’re streets and miles ahead [of Calgary or Montréal]. With all due respect of them, we are an entity in an economic region that is entirely something else.

And we have to get comfortable with the fact that that is what we are.

You know, it’s funny because the reaction that we got from people saying, “Whoa, 50,000 people!” And I’m going, first of all, that’s the scale of what Amazon’s talking about, it’s their second world headquarters, 50,000 people. Well, do you realize that that’s over a 10-year period? Secondly, it’s not like they’re all showing up at the airport in their pyjamas with their pillows looking for a couch to sleep on. They are going to be hiring locally. And third, we are growing.

Our immigration numbers are 90,000 a year.

So the one thing that was impressive about the Amazon bid was we do not need Amazon to come here to be an engine or stimulus of civic growth. We don’t need that.

And, you know, the sort of attitude we have with it is, “Hey, Amazon, look, we’re working here. We’re happy to have you come in and join us, but we’ve got stuff to do as well.”

And that’s the thing that is phenomenal about the Toronto region right now, is this sort of almost casual growth that’s going on.

You know, Markham is building a new downtown. They’ve got the new downtown in Vaughn. You’ve gotta see what’s going on in Mississauga. I mean, this is transformative stuff that is not depending upon massive external stimulus to start happening. You know, there are cities in the U.S. that put billions on the table in order to entice Amazon. Why? ‘Cause they had to. Now is Amazon going to come here?

I don’t know, but the business case is there for them to do it.

Jeremy has a background in urban planning and has worked in real estate development, market research and planning for 20 years, in both the public and private sectors. He’s currently Director of Development Planning at Infrastructure Ontario.

Re-purposed with permission from ULI Toronto.

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It’s Not Easy Being Green

Simple supply-a nd dema nd are dictating the slow implementation of green infrastructure in C a nada.

While municipalities promote its public persona a nd fix its impotent economic model , is the do the -right-thing attitude of altruist la nd ow ners enough to scale adop tion?

By Andrew Sobchak Building.ca

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There is a lot of pressure on green infrastructure. Part climate change savior, part urban revivalist and part path to civic prosperity, in some circles, green infrastructure is expected to lead the Great Urban Unbuilding of Canada’s next century. But despite testing technology throughout North America since the 1990s, the application of green infrastructure as a stormwater system here has failed to take root in any meaningful way.

The critical mass for green infrastructure lies in retrofitting existing, dense urban land where stormwater controls do not exist in a surprisingly large proportion of Canada’s urban centres. Adding control in this way would be a panacea for cities, but one that, for now, remains out of reach until a viable economic model can be implemented, one

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which simultaneously fuels public demand and incents private supply. In the absence of a model, the momentum of green infrastructure relies almost entirely on early adopters and the altruist land owner.

Demand Vancouver is Canada’s Rain City, culturally and meteorologically. Inundated by over 1.1 metres of rainfall in an average year, it is by far the wettest of the nation’s big cities. Rain City as a nickname will be immortalized in policy when staff presents to council in early 2019 the Rain City Strategy, a “reimagining” of how water is managed in the region. Utilizing soils, plants, trees and built structures — a toolbox filled with green roofs, bioswales, rain gardens and more — the city’s goal is to

PREVIOUS PAGE AND ABOVE The development plan for Technopôle Angus has just obtained LEED v4 Platinum certification for sustainable neighbourhood design, and is one of the first green neighbourhoods in the world to be an employment hub. Located in the heart of a central residential district of Montréal, this new mixed-use green neighbourhood will transform a former industrial park into an urban village where businesses and families coexist in a vibrant and environmentally responsible community.

Images: Société de Développement Angus

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Green infrastructure was, until recently, a solution to a problem most Canadians didn’t know they had. capture and clean 90 per cent of the city’s rainfall before “returning it to our waterways and atmosphere.” Melina Scholefield, the city’s manager of green infrastructure implementation calls it a ‘holistic approach.’ “It’s about transforming how we do business, and trying to be integrative to achieve multiple benefits with a single investment,” she says.

By the time the Rain City Strategy receives council approval, Scholefield expects Vancouver to have over 220 green infrastructure assets draining 15 hectares of land. Over 20 assets will have come on line in 2018 and a total of 253 assets will be on line by the end of 2019. This count sounds significant but, she notes, the city has been dabbling in green infrastructure for about 20 years. “But we only did it as one-off projects, pilot projects and demonstrations. We failed to make the leap from one-off projects and leadership here and there to a new way of doing business.” Falling short of a tipping point, Scholefield says, was a by-product of community apathy toward innovative or just simply optimized water management. “People think, ‘We are in a rainforest; there is lots of water.’”

Vancouver is to Canada what Canada is to the world. Nationally, our perception of water as infinitely abundant or, worse, an urban waste product, has set back green infrastructure implementation here by at least a decade. The slow process of changing that perception has required a combination of aggressive education and, sadly, natural disaster. Alberta and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) floods in

2013, for example, killed five people and cost a combined $2.68 billion. In Vancouver, a severe summer drought in 2015 shook the foundation of the Rain City ideal but ultimately helped advance the new water management strategy. Green infrastructure was, until recently, a solution to a problem most Canadians didn’t know they had.

Supply The Credit River watershed, which drains into Lake Ontario between Hamilton and Toronto, has a split personality. 87 per cent of the watershed’s population lives below Mayfield Road in Brampton and Mississauga; all of the watershed’s significant surface water impairments can be found there as well. According to the Watershed Report Card 2018, surface water quality grades in Brampton and Mississauga ranged between C (Fair) and F (Very Poor).

To the north of Mayfield Road, they were much better: B (Good) or C. Roughly one third of the watershed received a failing grade thanks in part to sprawl and bad timing.

Brampton and Mississauga grew fastest — double- and triple-digit population growth decade over decade — in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, a period mostly preceding the arrival of water quality-focused stormwater management regulations in the early-to-mid 1990s. A 2017 Region of Peel study estimates only 20 per cent of Mississauga and 58 per cent of Brampton have any form of stormwater management control. “If we totalled it all up in the GTA, we are probably in the range of

70 per cent of existing developed land has no stormwater control whatsoever,” says Deborah Martin-Downs, CAO of Credit Valley Conservation (CVC). “As we continue to develop, that number comes down a little bit, otherwise the downstream areas were developed without anything: [runoff drains] straight into the sewer, straight into the creek or straight into the lake.”

Martin-Downs calls the retrofitting of existing urban areas with green infrastructure the “biggest bang for the buck” due to its distributed nature of water management and multi-benefit payoff. “The bigger infrastructure, like stormwater management (SWM) ponds or even underground retention, is hugely expensive and land intensive, and land is very expensive in these areas. So, green infrastructure is the way to go in boulevards, in the margins of a property, certainly with green roofs.” But the rate of retrofitting in the Credit River watershed has been almost entirely reliant on what the CVC and partner municipalities can squeeze onto public land. At last count, the CVC estimates 30 green infrastructure projects focused on stormwater have been implemented in the watershed. Martin-Downs says municipalities haven’t yet figured out the market levers to interest the private sector. “The wholesale change is not really being incentivized by anyone at this time.”

“It doesn’t pay for a single land owner like a homeowner, an industrial site or commercial site to make a change,” she says. “In the greenfield situation, [green infrastructure] is

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Comparing annual LID costs to SW fee credits #

$12,000

dollars/year

LID O&M cost

308

10,000

Payback period (years) Annualized LID capital cost

91

8,000 6,000

117

121

4,000

68 30

2,000

Grass swale

The annual cost of lid measures Assumptions: Lot size = 5,000 m2; impermeable area treated with LID measure = 1,000 m2 Costing with STEP-LID-Tool version 1.1.xism Annualized capital cost estimated using an 8% discount rate over 25 years (equivalent to a mortgage payment) Payback period = total capital cost ÷ average 5W fee credit (capital cost shown in the figure is annualized, not total)

more cost effective, but for already developed sites, there is no return on investment for doing it.” Martin-Downs notes that even if there is a stormwater fee, which municipalities like Kitchener-Waterloo, Guelph, Mississauga and Brampton have implemented or are looking at implementing, it would be 10 years before land owners earn back their investment.

“If the charges were hundreds of thousands of dollars it would be one thing,” she adds.

“But we’re talking a couple thousand dollars, so on an annual basis it is not a huge budget item they have to be concerned about. So how do you incentivize the change to ask people to go back into existing developments

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where owners are not changing their land use and incorporate stormwater controls where previously there were none?”

Last year, CVC commissioned an economist to answer this question and in February the answers came. Titled Economic Instruments to Facilitate Stormwater Management on Private Property, it recommends a “paradigm shift” in how municipalities approach stormwater management. Specifically, to improve the uptake of green infrastructure, it proposes a blend of sticks (e.g., land appropriation for easements; new ordinances and design standards), carrots (e.g., municipal credits; offsets; grants; subsidies and loans) and simply reducing

annual credit on the sw charge for lid implementation Assumptions: Lot size = 5,000 m2; impermeable area treated with LID measure = 1,000 m2 5W charges for 2017 and a credit of 45 - 50% on the SW charge (credit varies by municipality)

Source: Credit Valley Conservation

Bioretention

Average

Rain harvesting

Mississauga

Infiltration trench

Kitchener

Green roof

London

Permeable pavers

Waterloo

0

the current costs of green infrastructure.

Increasing stormwater fees so they, as MartinDowns says, impact budgets for businesses is one way to push the green agenda, but potentially at fatal political consequences.

Instead, CVC believes significant cost savings can be found through property aggregation. Since the release of the report, they have begun testing the economics of aggregation by applying a green infrastructure strategy to a 38-ha network of 13 highly impervious commercial and industrial properties in Mississauga’s Southdown area. Much of the cost of implementing green infrastructure comes with design, certification, permitting

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earmarked in 2016 and 2017 to support green over the next 10 years. CVC hopes some of this funding will be available to directly improve the stack of incentives for small- and medium-sized land owners who control the majority of target land. But the risk of this funding getting caught up in one-off large-scale capital projects or pilot projects is significant, a pattern consistent with the current state of trickle-down funding. “We don’t need to do demonstration projects anymore,” says MartinDowns. “We know they work. We know all this stuff works. We need to find a way to mainstream it. And a grant here and there without a sustained funding stream for retrofitting of old infrastructure doesn’t allow it to become mainstream.”

For now, CVC are excited about aggregation. To make it work, the process only requires a champion with a long-term vested interest in the viability of the green infrastructure assets and network, the CVC says. This could be a drainage superintendent from the host municipality, a conservation authority program manager or a property owner. But this model also opens the door for neighbourhood-scale non-profit organizations, signalling the potential future importance of homeowner and business improvement associations in urban water management.

THIS PAGE The corner of 63rd Avenue and Yukon Street in Vancouver was identified as an opportunity for green space in the Marpole Community Plan.

Boulevard improvements include a rain garden that will manage rainwater using native plants, grasses, and trees.

Images courtesy of City of Vancouver/Wendy de Hoog.

and tendering. By aggregating properties into one neighbourhood-scale management concept, the hope is the economic case, and landowners’ buy-in, becomes viable. Credits for implementing green infrastructure can then be applied to reduce the stormwater fees paid to the city: a combined $120,000 per year for this network of properties. CVC also believes stormwater fee credits need to be combined with other incentives by “stacking benefits” through water and energy conservation channels.

In May, the federal government launched the $2-billion Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund to “help communities better withstand natural hazards such as floods, wildfires and droughts,” a complement to the $26.9 billion

Early Adopters On September 6, in Canada’s second largest green building development just east of downtown Montréal, there was a celebration of sorts. The much-vaunted eco-district Technopôle Angus was turning 20 years old and developer Société de Développement Angus (SDA) was hosting une petite fête. The visionary two million square foot redevelopment project rose from the dust of industrial collapse. In 1992, Canadian Pacific Railway shuttered its Angus Shops (a railcar manufacturing and repair facility) vaporising 12,000 jobs and much of the vibrancy in the surrounding Rosemont-La Petite Patrie borough. Named Canada’s “Best Overall Project” in 2006 by the Canadian Urban Institute, Technopôle Angus has had transformational impact, now housing 2,800 workers from a tech-focused cohort of 65 companies in 13 LEED-certified buildings.

Phase II pairs the existing commercial space with 119 new residential units in the six-floor Cité Angus condominium to complete the vision of a socially focused neighbourhood

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with green finish. “The main objective,” says Charles Larouche, SDA’s executive vice president, “is to attract and keep middle class families in the city.” 80 per cent of the Cité Angus units have three or four bedrooms, most are more than 1,000 square feet and 85 are designated as affordable housing. As of September, 90 per cent of the units were reserved and decontamination of the site was set to begin in October. “We intend to start construction in the spring and deliver a year later in 2020,” Larouche adds.

The sweeping nature of Technopôle Angus’s redevelopment was an unprecedented opportunity to bring green infrastructure into Montréal’s urban core. Green and blue roofs, rainwater harvesting systems and bioretention zones are all dispersed throughout the 895,000-sq.-ft. Phase II and are designed to capture 95 per cent of all rainwater falling on the site. Water retained in a 60-m³ reservoir will be reused in washrooms, for landscaping, gardening and car washing, reducing the potable water demand by an estimated 40 per cent. In winter, the snow will be pushed to the central courtyard and kept onsite. “Our wish is to use the accumulation of the snow in a big snow bank as an opportunity to create events, games or activities,” says Larouche. “No de-icing agents will be used.

In the spring the water will be collected and canalized to the bioretention zones for treatment and filtration.”

Green infrastructure operating costs will be similar to those of a conventional stormwater management approach, but Larouche expects capital costs will be 15 per cent less. However, to get shovels in ground, Phase II still required significant government subsidy. In March, the provincial government announced it would be contributing $20.5 million to cover roughly half of the green infrastructure costs. Larouche admits if the funding had not been awarded, a tough decision loomed. “It would have been very difficult to complete the project that way.

We were trying to provide a social good [by offering affordable housing] and environment-

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al benefit. We would likely have had to choose between one and the other.”

What allows SDA to realize a project like Technopôle Angus is their not-for-profit status.

“We do not seek the same returns on investments a normal real estate developer would seek,” says Larouche. A self-described ‘social economy enterprise,’ SDA’s core business is “urban renewal projects that deliver significant spinoffs for the local community and embrace sustainable development.” Formed in 1995 only to lead Technopôle Angus, SDA has since expanded their project portfolio, leaving behind a trail of community-minded landmarks throughout the city: Carrefour de l’economie sociale, a 33,000-sq.-ft. social enterprise hub opened in 2005; a 59,000-sq.-ft. home for culture and art organizations opened in 2012 called 2-22; and Carré Saint-Laurent, a 260,000-sq.-ft. development, including a 40-stall food hall; Centre d’Histoire de Montréal and office space for 900 provincial employees, is set to open in 2019 as a revitalization anchor at the corner of Saint-Laurent Boulevard and Sainte-Catherine Street.

Market Forces The slow growth of green infrastructure in Canada is best understood when measured against North America’s green building movement, whose genesis in the 1990s is a useful yardstick. Green buildings gained early momentum in large part due to the efforts of non-profit organizations like the National Resources Defence Council and newly minted US Green Building Council, who set out to galvanize industry players with a “respect for resources” and to “demonstrate responsible construction practices” through the LEED steering committee.

Although a sophisticated schedule of incentives — a combination of tax credits, fee rebates, subsidies, permit accelerations and others — has been developed over time for those looking to build LEED-certified, accreditation is aspirational and entirely voluntary. The green building movement did not

wait for regulation to create change in the industry, the industry created change from within while regulations followed.

“I see a lot of parallels between how we’ve been able to transform the state of practice around green buildings and what we need to do now with our water systems,” says Melina Scholefield, who, prior to her current role in Vancouver, led the city’s sustainability group and green building portfolio.

“On the water side, I just think we are not quite as mature, but there is a lot to be learned, what are the types of factors which enable and catalyze actions.”

Dodge Data & Analytics has been tracking how motivations to build green have changed over time. According to their most recent biennial World Green Building Trends, “client demands” and environmental regulations were the primary drivers in 2016, but 10 years ago the forces were different. In 2008, building designers sought green solutions because they were the “right thing to do.” Consultants were prophets and proponents were visionaries.

The number of survey respondents signalling altruism as a primary motivator declined 17 per cent by 2015, indicating, the report suggests, “a more mature market driven by the benefits of green.”

Green infrastructure in Canada now may be where the green building movement was in 2008, but the example creates hope a robust industry can be developed with the help of the non-profit and private sectors. Economics, and the regulations that follow true innovation, will, in the long term, drive the adoption of green infrastructure past a tipping point, but the early adopters and altruist land owners who buy into technology regardless of cost will dictate momentum in the short term.

“One day, green infrastructure will be like it was many years ago with green buildings, when it was a big deal to say we were going to go to LEED Gold with all our buildings,” says Scholefield. “Not too long thereafter, builders were building Silver or Gold just as a matter of course.”

October/November 2018

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When I grow up, I can be a city builder?

How schooling can contribute to the city building profession.

By Kendra FitzRandolph

above The “6 From The 6ix� at Loretto Abbey CSS in Toronto work on their plan. They are (clockwise l. to r.): Sophie (Financial Director); Sabrina (Site Planner); Mena (Marketing Director); Samantha (City Liaison); Paula (Neighbourhood Liaison); Sophia (Marketing Director).

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UrbanPlan is a project-based learning curriculum development for high schools focused on disciplines such as city planning, real estate and architecture

We live in our cities and experience

the complexities of them each and every day.

We know what it takes to make a strong and resilient city. We are a dynamic group of professionals, wear many different hats and work in many different jobs, but we are all city builders. Being a city builder, however, is not a likely choice for students when they start to think about what they want to be when they grow up.

When it comes to city building, our school system should teach the next generation of professionals what opportunities they have available to become a part of that process.

Our school systems should show our next generation of leaders that they can become city builders If the next generation desires to be city builders, we can be confident that we will have a strong and dynamic workforce that is excited to solve the complex problems of city building in the 21st century. They can plan for better transit, improve community relations, build our cities to be more resilient both socially and physically, and create opportunities for creative design solutions to urban planning problems. Yet currently in most curriculums there is no clear path to learning that city building is an achievable profession and as a result, we are missing out on a very talented pool of future city builders.

The High School Experience Howard Cappadocia, Department Head of Social Science at Loretto Abbey CSS in Toronto, says that Ontario’s high school curriculum is not as explicit as it could be, with respect to city building. “This is because most schools in the public system do not have programs that specifically target the urban environment and if these programs are available, they are available only to those bound for a four-year undergraduate degree.

Therefore, the majority of students do not have the opportunity to take a human/urban geography course as part of their curriculum.”

It seems as though, in the high school system, everything is there, it is just disjointed. It isn’t that school boards do not emphasize the skills and topics that promote city building. There are references to urban places all throughout the curriculum, but there aren’t courses that focus specifically on it. This issue is not something that can be easily changed. Cappadocia believes that a more immediate opportunity at the high school level may be through a new program he was introduced to this year.

UrbanPlan is a project-based learning curriculum development for high schools focused on disciplines such as city planning, real estate and architecture, the objective of which is to provide the tools for high school educators to develop an interdisciplinary approach

to looking at the urban form. As part of the program a student will take up one of five roles: Financial Analyst, Marketing Director, City Liaison, Site Planner or Neighbourhood Liaison. Through 15 class hours of program participation, students will form development teams and respond to an RFP to redevelop a 5½ block urban infill, mixed-use redevelopment project site, and present their proposal to a mock City Council that awards the development contract to the “winning” team.

Through the process, students discover the fundamental challenges of development: how market forces (supply and demand, availability of capital, risk/reward expectations, etc.) clash and collaborate with non-market forces (regulation, politics, advocacy groups, etc.) to create the built environment. Through these roles, students develop a deeper understanding of the various stakeholders in the development process and the challenge of reconciling their often-competing agendas to create a well-designed, market responsive, financeable, and buildable project.

Created by Urban Land Institute and embraced by many of its District Councils, including the Toronto one, UrbanPlan is supported by volunteers who are professionals in all disciplines of land use and development, selected for their depth of experience and knowledge. Attendees have included a wide range of stakeholders in

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there is no singular path to become a city builder and one does need to be a bit of a jack-of-all-trades

above An example of a city block diagram used in the UrbnPlan learning curriculum. The team believes their plan “appeals to all demographics and encompasses a livable, recreational and workproviding environment.”

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both private and public sectors, such as planners, developers, members of the Toronto District School Board, architects, and members of the Toronto Transit Commission and Toronto Community Housing Corporation.

Cappadocia is one of a handful of high school teachers that has incorporated this program into Geography, which is a required course at the Grade 9 level. In his program, he provides opportunities for professionals to come to the school and talk about their

work to the students. “Students respond to guest speakers,” he says. “There is a huge impact when another individual comes to speak to the student. This is where the magic happens. This is where the kid says ‘Hey, I can be just like that person.’”

While the program is time-heavy and non-traditional and may make educators shy away from the unknowns, Cappadocia believes that this program will be very successful across the school board. “I would never have

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Volunteering with UrbanPlan investigated this type of program for my students had a former graduate of the school not approached me with the syllabus,” he says, referring to Alexandra Rybak, now a director at ULI Toronto’s District Council.

Entering University What about when the student enters college or university? How can educational institutions create more opportunities for students to learn about the field of city building? Dr. Aditi Mehta, an assistant professor, teaching stream, in the urban studies program at the University of Toronto, believes that high schools are failing to encourage city building-related jobs as a legitimate career path and this problem is heightened once they enter university. “When I was in high school, I thought I wanted to be a journalist and I interned for a magazine where I did an essay on the Big Dig in Boston. I really enjoyed learning about those issues, but I had no understanding of the world of urban planning and there was no clear course in my high school to show me how I can make this interest my career. It wasn’t until my second year in undergrad that I learned that urban studies were an option and, even then, I had to figure out this field on my own.”

Now, Dr. Mehta teaches in the Urban Studies undergraduate program at Innis College. She describes the department in a similar manner to that of many other undergraduate urban studies schools. The department is interdisciplinary with courses spanning from sociology to media studies. This gives students the opportunity to learn to be critical in their urban environments.

Students enter into the program in their second year at the University. Administration looks for students who have taken and received above average marks in a range of foundational urban courses from their first year, some combination of urban geography, economics, political science and sociology.

Many of the students go on to get Masters in Planning, while others also enter into

related fields such as Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Real Estate.

Dr. Mehta believes that the most important component of her program is the internship experience that the school offers to the students, a central element of their urban studies experience. In the program, the internships are intimately related to their focus in their academic study. The department will build coursework and in-class discussions, and a more formal academic inquiry around the placement experience to really emphasise the connection between the academic study of cities and the various jobs that exist within the broad field of city building. “I believe that the internships, and the courses connected to them, are one of the best formats we have to expose to students the large variety of options for a planning career, both within and outside of professional planning,” says Dr. Mehta. “It gives students a real taste of what practical city building and planning looks like and allows them to gain a sense of whether that is the right direction for them.”

Careers in the medicine, engineering and legal professions are valued in society and lucrative opportunities for the next generation.

This is the same for careers in city building.

The difference is that there is no singular path to become a city builder and one does need to be a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. But there is an incredible opportunity for the next generation of jacks-of-all-trades to become professionals and make a lasting impact in society.

What needs to happen is to provide this dynamic group with the tools, early on in their learning, to know that this opportunity exists.

We need to speak to our students with our many hats and then afford them the opportunity to try out the various jobs within our field.

The greatest opportunity lies in high school curriculums becoming the catalyst students can use to better understand the field of city building, so that the next generation will know the workforce and more will enter it with as much a desire as they have to seek out other fields such as law, engineering and medicine.

Since the UrbanPlan program was initiated in Toronto, there continue to be opportunities for like-minded individuals to contribute to the discussion around city growth and development through volunteer training. Volunteers accepted into the program are invited to a one-day training session for hands-on experience with the program and tools. Trained volunteers serve in the classroom as Facilitators and as members of a mock City Council for final student presentations.

The training and volunteer time commitment includes: •S ix to eight hours preparation to the training session; • one-day training session; •M inimum of one hour of classroom time annually. Typical commitment is three hours per semester.

The role with the greatest impact, most responsibility, and least time commitment is the Facilitator, who challenges the students to think more critically about the UrbanPlan issues and the specific responsibilities of their respective roles. Facilitators draw deeply on professional experience and are rewarded by creating excitement and inspiration in students for the urban development process.

Effective Facilitators have: • Development project experience; • Patience to question rather than coach; •T ime and willingness to learn the details of the UrbanPlan project case.

Facilitators meet twice with students during the semester. Classes are 45 to 90 minutes, depending upon the school.

For more info visit www.toronto.uli. org/urbanplan

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Creating the “FutureProof” School “Even if we can’t see what’s coming, our schools are flexible enough to accommodate it.” By David Lasker

A marijuana snooze-ateria? A

cellphone keep (in the archaic sense of “keep” as a fortified castle tower or dungeon)? We can all play the mug’s game of guessing which new facility will be deemed essential in tomorrow’s public schools.

Indeed, +VG Architects, an Ontario firm with offices in Brantford, Ottawa and Toronto, strives to “future-proof” its schools. No one there, however, is so rash as to predict what will be the fashionable school facility du jour decades hence. Instead, they keep obsolescence at bay with an armamentarium of school-design essentials that includes open-concept space planning inspired by collaborative office design, “phenomenal transparency,” and built-in flexibility that accommodates an infinitely wide and varied range of teaching scenarios.

“We want to create designs that are not just driven by the needs of today’s curriculum but can adapt to future needs,” says +VG Associate partner Ed Bourdeau. “Even if we can’t see what’s coming, our schools are flexible enough to accommodate it. I liken our approach to a loose-fitting rather than fully tailored suit. You won’t outgrow your suit if you put on a few pounds.”

When his boss, Brantford-based partnerin-charge Paul Sapounzi, speaks about the firm’s public-school practice, he almost sounds like Dr. Pangloss, the enthusiastic, eternal optimist in Voltaire’s 1759 satire Candide, for whom “all is for the best” in this “best of all possible worlds.” School design is at a historic sweet spot, an unprecedented

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Goldilocks moment or perfect storm, Sapounzi explains, where imaginative planning and cost-effective building materials have converged. “Thanks to the bricks-and-mortar technology we now have at our disposal, we can build architecturally ambitious schools at affordable rates that meet the Ministry of Education funding model.

“Open-concept learning, for instance, was a really good intention in the 1970s, but school designers back then were never able to make it work. Everything was in one big concrete box with no windows. Everyone worked together in a hippie-commune setting, closed off from contact with other classrooms and the outdoor context. These facilities were bulky, noisy containers with a multitude of kids with very little delineation between age groups and programs.”

For him, it’s back to the future. “At +VG Architects, we’re going back to open concept.

But, this time it’s visually open, with phenomenal transparency,” says Sapounzi. Here, he uses a term coined by architectural theorists Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky in their essay “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” published in a 1964 issue of the journal Perspecta, that’s on the reading list of many a modern-architecture course. The term pertains when “one sees two or more figures partly overlapping one another….The figures are endowed with transparency; that is, they are able to interpenetrate without an optical destruction of each other. Transparency however implies more than an optical character-

THIS SPREAD +VG Architects worked on St. Mary’s in joint venture with Sault Ste. Marie-based IDEA Inc. (formerly EPOH). +VG was responsible for the floorplan and interiors; IDEA for the exteriors. In the soaring, 40-foot-high, wedge-shaped daylit atrium the learning commons distributes functions and dissolves boundaries between what traditionally have been discreet, disconnected spaces — the cafeteria and library — while providing direct, open access to the other key areas of gym and auditorium.

Photography by Shai Gil

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istic; it implies a broader spatial order.

Transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations.”

Sapounzi continues: “We have achieved open-concept learning by using glazing systems that remove visual barriers, and by adapting collaborative office-planning techniques. It results in a school that has a phenomenal transparency when you enter it. All the facilities communicate themselves visually and psychologically to the child, which provides an intuitive sense of wayfinding within the building. You feel like you’re part of a village, a community, a healthy Jane Jacobs-approved urban environment.”

The Wow Factor Goes To School Visitors to +VG’s St. Mary’s Consolidated High School in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., often express surprise that the project was built on a standard Ministry of Education budget. So they say upon entering the focal point of the building, the learning commons; to an impressionable child, the sight must be particularly exhilarating. The soaring, 40-ft.-high, wedgeshaped daylit atrium looks like it belongs in a prestigious, upscale graduate school or university, not a public high school for the HuronSuperior Catholic District School Board.

The design of the learning commons distributes functions and dissolves boundaries between what traditionally have been discreet, disconnected spaces—the cafeteria and library—while providing direct, open access to the other key areas of gym and auditorium. “We were able to make the learning commons as big as it is by merging the cafeteria and library,” says Bourdeau, who headed the St. Mary’s design team.

“There’s a room at the side where the bookstacks are secured. As for the library’s reading and lounge spaces, we thought, let’s throw them out into the cafeteria.

“This spectacular room acts as a magnet,” Bourdeau adds. “If kids aren’t in class, they want to be there, either studying, collaborating on class projects with their friends, or enjoying the pretty vista through the glass wall of the distant hills.”

Upgraded carpet tile and groupings of seating and desks delineate the library zone within the larger space. The nearby audio-video zone is a quieter place, intended for students who don’t want to be in the thick of the commons free-for-all.

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Reinforced by its central location, the learning commons encourages academic achievement by fostering serendipitous interaction between teachers and students, in addition to student-to-student interaction, which generates a sense of school community.

The design strategy, incidentally, solves the traditional problem of the school cafeteria as a dead zone before and after lunch period.

The small stage facing the cafeteria, intended for impromptu presentations, enhances the sense of buzz.

The upmarket appearance of the learning commons owes much to the careful allocation of the budget for finishes. “Some of the wall covering is real redwood veneer, but its use is very limited,” says Bourdeau. “We did a good job of painting gypsum board and matching it closely to the veneer. From 30 feet away, you can’t tell if it’s wood or drywall.”

Thanks to Wi-Fi throughout the school, students can take notes on their laptop computers, regardless of where meetings take place.

(St. Mary’s provides laptops for students who don’t own one.) On this point, Sapounzi allows how “You can have bloody Wi-Fi terminals throughout the schools. Who cares? We’re past that technology now. The technology that’s really interesting today is, how do you use sound attenuation, transparency, and secure barriers that still provide a high level of visual communication and psychological sense of community and togetherness in the school without compromising the variety and types of learning environments children need?”

Cutting-Edge Design for a Cutting-Edge City Another way to future-proof a school is to fully embrace the future, and one would think a city like Waterloo, Ont. — the home of Blackberry, the University of Waterloo, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and numerous Silicon Valley North businesses— is the perfect incubator for that. As it turns out, however, “more local buildings acknowledge Waterloo’s Mennonite and industrial-era heritage than its high-tech status,” says Bourdeau.

So, as project architect for Vista Hills Public School, he told his client, the Waterloo Region District School Board, “Our design will represent Waterloo’s cutting-edge modernity, and it will look forward to the future in an optimistic way. We try to represent the future in

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THIS SPREAD (Clockwise from top left) At Vista Hills Elementary School in Waterloo, Ont., a cowling of white aluminum composite paneling, inspired by the curvy outline of a smartphone case, wraps around the curtain wall and extends two feet in front of it.

A Mondrian-esque boogie-woogie of colourblocking in primary colours adorns the side elevations. Playful, futuristic pendant lighting seemingly out of the early-Sixties animated sitcom The Jetsons, arrayed apparently at random, add an element of fun as one walks through the main entrance.

Photography by Mario Madau

our school projects rather than recreate the past or a pastiche of the past and future.”

Bourdeau’s inspiration plays on a motif near and dear to school kids. “At the time we were designing Vista Hills, the iPhone had just come out in white,” Bourdeau recalls. “We had this idea that, hey, we can do a white curvy outline around black glass and extrude it for this portion of the building.” The white material is aluminum composite paneling, which extends two feet beyond the plane of the glass curtain wall. Mullions in red, green and blue break up the broad glass expanse.

“The colourful curtain-wall elements take the place of the apps on the phone,” he says.

“We were trying to come up with a suitable

image that expressed the high-tech reality of Waterloo, the city of Blackberry, the two universities and the Perimeter Institute instead of the Waterloo of the Conestoga wagon and Mennonites, which we felt had already been represented enough in public buildings.”

Inside Vista Hills is a pod-style classroom layout: the Waterloo Region District School Board prefers four classrooms grouped around a common area to the familiar configuration of classrooms strung along a corridor like pearls on a necklace. The common area acts as a resource for all the classrooms in the pod and includes a sink, storage cabinets and is outfitted to support computers. The room is frequently used as a breakout space for small groups to collaborate on their projects.

Both schools share similar core interior elements such as full-size gymnasia tall enough for volleyball and have a floor plate large enough to allow regulation basketball games with flanking bleacher seating, learning commons and maker labs, the latter an area for collaborative, hands-on learning using new technology and equipment, such as 3D printers, laser cutters, soldering irons or sewing machines, that students may otherwise not have access to.

“Now, finally, we have the architectural part of the technology to create these varying levels of visual and psychological collaboration,” says Sapounzi. “You can slip into private, public, group and focus lecture settings. From one case to the other, there’s a freeness of fluidity. That’s the key to future-ready schools.”

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Battle of the Acronyms Breaking down EASR, ECA and the environmental compliance approval process. By Nicholas Sylvestre-Williams

Nicholas Sylvestre-Williams is a principal at Mississauga, Ont.- based Aercoustics Engineering Limited, an acoustic consulting and engineering firm specializing in acoustic design, noise control and vibration control.

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Government rules and regulations can be challenging for any business. From tax to employment law, it can be difficult for a company to be compliant in every area.

Environmental rules can prove the most baffling because they probably apply to you but you may not know it. You may not own a factory or production facility, but you cannot assume the rules don’t apply to your company.

In Ontario, any business that releases pollutants into the air, land or water or stores, transports or disposes of waste or even emits noise emissions is required to have an environmental approval from the renamed Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks (MOECP). This means everything from light manufacturing to commercial printing facilities and bakeries need to be in compliance. Environmental compliance is not a new concept. Since the Environmental Protection Act (EPA) came into force in the 1970s, an Approval from the Ministry of the Environment was required but non-compliance was high mostly due to a lack of awareness and understanding of the rules.

While the application and approval process has become more streamlined recently, there is still a high level of non-compliance from people who don’t realize the rules apply to them. Some have operated for more than 20 years and only recently realized they needed a permit when a Ministry official came onsite and ordered them to secure one by a set deadline or face a stop work order. Securing your environmental permit is not only important to your operations but your reputation as well.

Sinking Under the Old System Under the old system, businesses applied for a Certificate of Approval (CofA). This is now known as an Environmental Compliance Approval (ECAs) and is essentially the same as the CofA. Every company needs an approval to operate.

Previously, applicants had to wait years for their application to be reviewed and hopefully approved. Some reported waiting as long as five to seven years. It was rare to get approved within the year because the Ministry was inundated by applications from facilities big and small regardless of the risk level.

Legally, it meant the business could not break ground on construction or operate without the appropriate approvals. However, the Ministry was well aware of the backlog and the high level of non-compliance so if operations proceeded without it, there were usually little to no consequences. In an effort to streamline the process, reduce wait times and bring businesses into compliance, the Ministry launched a modernization process, which created two compliance pathways rather than one.

EASR vs. ECA: Determining the Right Approval for Your Operation The new system now has two forms of approvals: Environmental Compliance Approval (ECA), and Environmental Activity and Sector Registry (EASR). There are a number of similarities between the two. They both require air and noise studies to be conducted before any permit application can begin. Both will provide an approval to discharge contaminants

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into the environment but the one you apply for depends on the nature of your business and what you are emitting.

Generally, an ECA is required for larger and more complicated operations with a higher potential for environmental impacts.

For example, oil refineries, sewage treatment facilities or ready-mix concrete manufacturing fall into this category.

The EASR applies to most commercial and light industrial facilities and is used for more common activities or operations that pose lesser risk to the environment and human health. This includes automotive refinishing facilities, commercial printing facilities and bakeries. All eligible activities that do not have an existing ECA are required to be registered with the EASR, unless they are entirely exempt. For example, this does not apply to residential or basic commercial properties such as an office building.

Even with these definitions, some facilities can cause confusion. A large shopping mall, for example, may have to apply for an EASR or could be completely exempt. It depends on the tenants of the building. If the building has a maintenance shop or any light commercial facilities, you may need an EASR. However, if the mall is setting up an HVAC system, the heating and air con-

ditioning might be completely exempt from any provincial requirements.

Noise Noise is considered a contaminant and as such, environmental approvals also apply.

The EPA governs the two levels of approv-

als and it was initially focused on limiting pollution and contaminants. For quite some time, the Ministry did not have a formal reporting mechanism to handle noise issues.

At that time, if your facility had no air emissions but did emit noise, you did not need to apply for a permit. Noise was essentially the “stepchild” of the process and wasn’t formally included into the regulations until the early 2000s when the Ministry started to address noise as a form of pollution. Today, facilities such as transformer stations that have noise emissions but no air emissions are required to go through the EASR process.

Noise was essentially the “stepchild” of the process and wasn’t formally included into the regulations until the early 2000s.

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Once you secure your ECA or EASR, keep in mind that any changes to the facility require an update to your documentation.

Timelines for EASR vs. ECA There are some similarities in the application process. Both the ECA and EASR require air and noise studies and a technical report, but currently only the EASR is required to be completed by a professional engineer.

The big difference comes down to timing of approvals. The EASR application is uploaded online and the permit is granted instantly. Unlike the previous permit system, companies invest their time with the consulting team they bring in to prepare and submit documentation which is generally a matter of a few weeks. This is the new standard and reduces the number of applications reviewed by the Ministry.

The ECA application usually takes longer because it is reviewed by the Ministry before the permit is granted. However, it is much quicker than in the past. Having now cleared the backlog of applications, the Ministry has a one-year service guarantee, which means they will review and provide an approval for higher risk ECA applications within one year.

However, there is one word of caution. The Ministry`s clock starts when you submit the application, but if they have any questions or issues with the application, the clock stops and restarts once the issue has been fixed.

For this reason, getting the application done correctly the first time is imperative. Engaging a qualified professional engineer the first time to prepare the report can usually avoid Ministry follow ups and delay.

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Municipal Requirements In addition to provincial requirements, companies also need to be sensitive to potential municipal regulations. The city may require permits as well. For example, the City of Oakville has a bylaw requiring facilities which emit certain contaminants to obtain a municipal air emissions approval before they can begin operations. It’s critical for building owners to research and understand any applicable rules at the municipal level.

Changes that Impact Existing Approvals Once you secure your ECA or EASR, keep in mind that any changes to the facility require an update to your documentation. For example, if you change the cooling towers in a facility — even if it is the same size, capacity and rating — the Ministry requires you to provide an update because permits are often provided based on the specific make and model of the unit.

When there are changes, you must update your documentation, reports and modelling.

This is critical when purchasing a facility with the intention of making some improvements up front. Ensure you secure an engineering consultant to revise the modelling, update the report and submit to ensure you are still operating in compliance.

It’s worth noting that even if there are no changes at all, the reports must be updated every 10 years.

Hiring Help: Avoid Poorly Prepared Reports While the Ministry faced a backlog of applications, it also had to deal with thousands of poorly prepared reports. While streamlining the process, the Ministry provided a clear outline about the information to be included on applications and created a mechanism for flagging reports that did not meet the standard. By requiring professional engineers to complete the report, those falling below the standard can be reported to the regulatory body, the Profes­ sional Engineers Ontario.

Once you determine which permit applies to your operations, take the time to find a professional to complete your requirements.

An experienced engineering consultant with a firm understanding of the regulations can make the overall environmental compliance application process smoother and assist with conducting the appropriate noise studies and drafting technical reports.

Getting it right the first time is the objective. If your noise report is found to be faulty, you could lose your permit or even be forced to shut down operations until the revised report is approved.

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special feature

The City of Calgary, lighting the way

By The Communications Bridge

W

ith a mission to provide a safe and well-maintained road system within the city, the Roads group, a business unit of Calgary’s Transportation Department, recently led an initiative last summer to begin illuminating five communities with more than 2,500 new energy-efficient LED street lights.

The Expectation The plan is to eventually retrofit 90,000 fixtures citywide in a second phase of the initiative. “Calgary is a growing city, so every year we are adding upward of 3,000 fixtures, which increases the strain on our operating budget in the range of five per cent,” said Canace Bain, senior leader of traffic design for Roads. “Our first goal is to save energy. Over the last three years of our operating cycle, the energy spending has always exceeded the budgeted amount. It’s important to note our utility rates are going up as well, and so not only are our citizens impacted by an increasing cost of energy commodities in Cal-

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gary, we as a service provider and as a major consumer of energy here in Calgary are impacted too.”

Bain also noted the city has grown from the inside out for over a century and has unique roadway designs because of this. The neighbourhoods chosen for this project were from different periods from the 1930s to the 1980s, each with different lighting strategies and lighting geometries to consider. The challenge was to find a lighting product that would meet all of the needs of the different communities and still achieve a minimum lighting level on various roadway types.

As the Roads team was learning, advances in the optical arrays in LED street lights would make it easier to aim light where it was needed, as opposed to “throwing” light in all directions like the city’s older street lights tended to do. The LED fixtures the team evaluated also delivered different light distribution patterns to the ground, making it less of a challenge to optimize new lighting layouts around the city’s existing light poles without having to relocate or install new poles.

General feedback from the citizens of Calgary and its dark skies community was also that the city was over-lit in many aspects. In older communities, however, prevailing tree canopies left citizens feeling as if those neighbourhoods were too dark.

Thus, the retrofit became an opportunity to make lighting consistent across the city.

The Solution GE’s Evolve LED roadway lighting fixtures were considered alongside other North American manufacturers and scored the highest across the majority of products the city evaluated from an efficiency and efficacy perspective. Roads considered various aspects of GE’s product solution, including light distribution and glare, the appearance of the fixture, how easy it was to install, and how easy it would be to maintain in the future. GE was also chosen to supply more than 2,500 street lights for the initial project because of its manufacturing capacity.

Results and Benefits Based on its phase one evaluations to date, the Roads team has seen a 52 per cent reduction in street lighting energy costs (based on 1,771 fixtures running at 115,191 watts). “We’re performing a detailed lighting analysis alongside phase one installations, so it’s more than using a simple rule of thumb to measure savings,” said Bain. “It turns out the models we’ve put together are showing an over 50 per cent reduction, which we think is pretty good.

Currently, we spend $12.5 million a year to light Calgary’s roadways and that number is growing. With those kinds of improvements we can be talking about millions of dollars of reductions with a payback period of just five to eight years by the time we roll out the technology across the city.”

The development of a new and replicable lighting design standard that can go across all of Calgary has been another significant achievement for the city. “We’ve created a unique lighting model and design approach that lets us leverage the LED technology that’s available and the different lighting effects that can be achieved. LED technology has allowed us to focus light where it is more important on our roadways and on the pedestrian route,” said Arsheel Hirji, leader of sustainable infrastructure for Engineering and Energy Services at the city of Calgary.

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Safety In, Safety Out The push for COR certification has construction companies across Canada paying extra attention to their safety culture. By Josh Lebrun

Many construction companies have

learned that what was acceptable in the past is no longer good enough to get the jobs they once had. Contracts with government and even large general contractors are on the line. While companies are feeling the urgency to invest in improvements to their safety culture before it’s too late, their challenge is prioritizing safety initiatives to get the highest return on their investment.

Every safety leader knows increasing employee participation in safety activities improves safety outcomes, but most still struggle to execute on the right initiatives that lead to an exemplary safety culture. Through research based on over 250 million data points over a three-year period, eCompliance discovered that safety cultures tend to fall into one of four categories: Low Compliance Culture: Hazards rarely manifest into incidents, so safety is not top of mind for most employees or management.

They are likely in a low-risk and low-compliance workplace, like an office;

Josh Lebrun is president and COO of eCompliance, a software developer focused on worker safety.

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Reactive Culture: These companies tend to encourage employees to participate after an incident happens. For example, someone trips in the office and everyone does a desk check. But that’s the only safety activity they do all year; Task Force Culture: Safety is strictly enforced, but the safety activities are primarily done by the safety team (task force).

Workers and supervisors are not empowered or involved. This may result in an “us versus them” mentality where the safety team is considered the Safety Cops; High Participation Culture: Leadership extends beyond the safety department. It’s exhibited by all employees, with a high velocity of activity. All employees seek out risk and work proactively to eliminate it.

The study found that the top safety teams empower their frontline supervisors and foremen to perform key safety tasks like inspections, hazard reporting and toolbox talks, leaving safety teams to focus on triaging risk and executing on risk reduction activities.

As a result, companies in the top quartile of employee safety participation reduced incident rates by more than 3.5 times their low participation peers. Yet while all construction safety leaders agree that their end-goal is a High Participation Culture, many companies get stuck on this journey.

Barriers to Building a High Participation Culture Over a period of four months, qualitative interviews were conducted with companies in the study and it was discovered that companies with top quartile participation and leading safety outcomes go through five steps to build a High Participation Safety Culture: 1. CEO Commitment: The CEO makes a sincere and public commitment to safety; 2. The Rise of the Safety Leader: The CEO publicly backs the safety leader, giving them the organizational credibility to drive the change management; 3. Employee Buy-in: The safety leader gets front-line employees to recognize that their participation keeps themselves and their peers safe, while helping the company succeed economically; 4. Safety Reflex: Leadership reacts and acts on risk data from the new activities. They execute risk reduction activities and communicate back to the front-line in a timely fashion; 5. Safety Velocity: The organization scales activities. The safety team analyzes areas of high-risk and their time is prioritized to reduce risk at a high velocity.

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Companies typically flag several roadblocks along this path, the most common being Safety Reflex. Imagine this scenario: the CEO of a construction company announces that safety is now their number one priority. They hire a great safety leader who is able to get employee buy-in to implement a new system to report hazards. Now, let’s say a labourer at this company notices damaged equipment.

He reports this hazard to his supervisor. One of two things can happen from here: the unsafe equipment gets fixed in a timely fashion; or it doesn’t.

If the equipment gets fixed right away and the safety team communicates their praise to the labourer for participating, he is empowered to do it a second and third time. He sees the

time he’s committing is actually benefiting him. He will tell coworkers about it, increasing the likelihood that others will identify and report on risk.

Conversely, if nobody follows up with him and the equipment remains broken for a few days, the employee loses faith that his activities will lead to a positive outcome. He will stop taking time out of his day for the new hazard reporting initiative. He is also likely to tell his coworkers about his negative experience. “Safety is just a tagline.

Management doesn’t actually care about our safety.” This renders all the previous change management work obsolete. This mentality can spread like a virus, poisoning your safety culture.

Doing Safety Reflex the Right Way Let’s take another look at the scenario with the damaged equipment. Why didn’t it get fixed? It is doubtful that management was lazy, forgetful, or negligent. It is more likely they weren’t prepared to deal with the sudden influx of safety-related work. The challenge in Safety Reflex is the safety team might have previously received only one hazard report per week, but they’re now receiving 10 per day.

The safety leaders will get stuck with a pile of paperwork on their desk, stalling their drive for a high participation safety culture if they don’t have a system to get information from the labourer to themselves in a timely manner, or a process to triage the risk, communicate back to the front-line and execute on risk reduction activities. Safety Reflex is one of the most crucial parts of building a High Participation Safety Culture. The simple act of a manager responding to an employee is as important as any training program, slogan, or safety leader.

This doesn’t happen overnight. Some of the companies studied systematically rolled out their new safety initiatives in a narrow group, like one department or job site at a time. They implemented it, found the bugs, made the fixes, and learned how to roll things out more effectively across the entire company. But don’t be naïve or complacent; these efforts can be undone at any point if employees start to believe their actions and efforts are being ignored by management.

There is no doubt that building a High Participation Safety Culture requires a company-wide shift. The frontline needs to be actively engaged, management needs the ability to send timely responses to the frontline, and safety leaders need the appropriate tools and systems for that communication to take place. The good news is that it’s easier than you think if you have the right strategy, leadership and tools to succeed. If any of those things are lagging behind, you might find yourself stuck and unable to improve safety.

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site visit Leading

by Example A new engineering building at the University of Toronto brings endurance and efficiency into focus.

By Shannon Moore

THIS PAGE The Myhal Centre for Engineering Innovation & Entrepreneurship is the newest building on the University of Toronto’s St. George campus, and overlooks iconic Convocation Hall. The Myhal Centre was designed with the engineer of the future in mind, incorporating tech-enhanced classrooms, fabrication facilities, design studios, research labs and spaces for student clubs and teams.

Photo by Roberta Baker

Ten years ago the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto recognized a pressing need to construct a new facility that would foster research excellence and support the potential of its growing students and staff. In response, Toronto’s Montgomery Sisam Architects and U.K.-based Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios designed a nine-storey, 160,000-sq.-ft. facility that welcomed its first class in September 2018, setting a new standard for a Faculty which is known as the number one ranked engineering school in Canada and among the best in the entire world.

The Myhal Centre for Engineering, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship — named after donors and innovation advocates Rayla and George Myhal — was designed according to the priorities of function, collaboration and energy efficiency. In addition to a grand, four-storey atrium and open-air terrace, the

exposed concrete and abundant wood facility contains a slew of tech-enhanced spaces: eight design studios, five active-learning classrooms and a two-storey aerial robotics laboratory.

The facility also contains a 468-seat classroom auditorium with an 18-m. long digital screen and a unique seating configuration, the first of its kind in North America. Here, students sit in small groups around tables, allowing them to collaborate, share ideas and engage more actively with each other and their instructors. “The building encourages informal and spontaneous interaction,” says Robert Davies, principal at Montgomery Sisam Architects. “It is often through chance encounters that innovation occurs and entrepreneurial thinking flourishes.”

Though the building is the 14th in the University’s engineering precinct, it is among the most energy-efficient on the downtown

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THIS SPREAD (Clockwise from the top of this page) Flexible space encourages meeting and collaboration, such as Level 1, or Level 0, home to The Engineering Society Arena’s ‘garage’-style spaces that house several of the clubs and teams led by engineering students, such as the Human Powered Vehicles Design Team and their speedbike. Members of the University of Toronto Robotics Association (UTRA) fly a drone in the two-storey Norris Walker 5T7 Robotics Laboratory.

Photography by Daniel Ehrenworth / Roberta Baker

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campus; and while LEED Certification was initially considered, the design team opted for Tier 2 Toronto Green Standard Performance Measures and energy savings instead. From a 80-kW photovoltaic roof system to solar panels, cisterns for rainwater irrigation, LED lighting, a high-performance building envelope, passive heating and cooling systems, and more, the building measures in at 25 per cent efficiency improvement over the Ontario Building Code, with a first-year cost savings of nearly $10,000: an

impressive feat for a building of its size with a hyper focus on high-tech upgrades.

Equally impressive is the way in which the building responds to the historic fabric of its surrounding campus. Though modern in material, the Myhal Centre is demure in form with a purposeful approach that ensures a non-competitive aesthetic when compared to its neighbouring Romanesque Renaissance and Gothic Revival structures.

“We were interested in an architecture that aspires to an idea of engineering precision

while encouraging the messy and chaotic activities of human beings,” said Davies.

“The new Centre is an architecture that is disciplined and quiet, understated; not about itself, but about the activities that will occur within it and change over time.”

Through its understated architecture, impressive tech features and progressive energy-efficiency, the new Myhal Centre leads by example for the aspiring engineers and inspiring faculty who will utilize its resources for years to come.

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spec sheet Product Round-up New & noteworthy for building specification.

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Architectural Linear Series | Arriscraft Arriscraft, a subsidiary of Wienerberger AG, has introduced a new elongated brick for the North American market meant to rival what is being made available from Europe. The Architectural Linear Series brick is 2-3/8” high by 23-5/8” long (depth is standard at 3-¾”) and comes in a distressed finish that is ideal for modern designs, with rustic appeal. www.arriscraft.com

Roof Hatch | BILCO The BILCO Company’s thermally broken roof hatch features a thermally broken frame and cover designed to minimize heat transfer, provide super energy efficiency, and resists the harmful effects of condensation.

Thermally broken roof hatches feature R-20+ insulation and special gasketing with enhanced weather and wind resistance. Counter-balanced lift assistance allows for easy one-hand operation, and the hatches also include a heavy-duty slam latch with interior and exterior padlock hasps. www.bilco.com

CMYK | Patcraft The new CMYK collection of colourful resilient and visually textured LVT tiles feature a smooth, high-performance surface available in 12” x 24” tiles in a range of 24 vibrant colours and versatile neutrals tones to support branding, wayfinding, colour blocking and mixing vision. The highly flexible and durable planks feature a 20-mm wear layer treated with Patcraft’s ExoGuard top coat offering scratch resistance, improved ease of maintenance and polish optional maintenance. www.patcraft.com

Aspect | Allsteel Aspect supports how companies work by creating space division through openness and visual transparency, while facilitating acoustical privacy. A continuous reveal and low profile trim seamlessly frames the exterior of each element.

Vertical fillers offer a clean aesthetic and eliminate the need for caulk. www.allsteel.com

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Torres | Landscape Forms A graceful, minimalist design is the common language among the area, path, wall, and catenary LED lights that comprise the Torres line of LED lights designed

by Rodrigo Torres in collaboration with Chip Israel of Lighting Design Alliance. Torres took an iconic streetlight image and shaped it into a sleek, elongated form with superior visibility, high colour rendering, and minimal glare, together with an eco-friendly warm white (3000K-4000K) LED light, lending security and comfort to outdoor spaces. www.landscapeforms. com

Pencure OTC | W. R. Meadows This unique, dual-action, non-yellowing acrylic curing compound for fresh, exterior, broomed concrete is clear, transparent, and easy to apply.

Formulated to simultaneously form a membrane to cure the concrete while also penetrating into the surface to aid in the reduction of water and salts into the concrete, Pencure OTC is ideal for surfaces such as driveways, patios, and parking lots. www. wrmeadows.com

CleanAire HEPA | HEMCO CleanAire HEPA and Carbon Filter Paks are designed to be mounted inline in the exhaust ducting from a fume hood or contaminant source up to 1500 cfm. The filter pak includes a galvanized steel housing with hinged and gasketed access door for filter changeout and molded composite resin inlet and outlet plenums with duct connection collars sized to meet specification. www.hemcocorp.com

Galaxy Tab Active2 | Samsung Now available in Canada, the rugged Galaxy Tab Active2 tablet is designed for mobile workers who conduct business outdoors or beyond office walls, including in the field, industrial locations, and harsh weather.

MIL-STD-810-certified — the military standard for durability during excessive pressure, temperatures, vibrations and drops — and IP68-rated for water and dust resistance, physical buttons are included for easy operation with work gloves, and the display can be used while wet. www.samsung.com

Vector Space Sense | Honeywell Backed by a cloud-based infrastructure, this new software solution shows where, when and how building spaces are used at any given point in time by following a three-step process that starts with gathering space utilization data from multiple sources such as smart lights, Bluetooth beacons, mobile apps, and other sensor-connected devices and equipment.

The solution then applies analytics to the collected data, using customized algorithms and space utilization models to deliver actionable insights. https://buildingsolutions.honeywell.com

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view point Walk with Joy ULI Toronto’s Executive Director ponders the setbacks facing Ontario cities under the new government.

By Richard Joy

Richard Joy is Executive Director of ULI Toronto. Previously, he served as Vicepresident, Policy and Government Relations at the Toronto Board of Trade, and was the Director of Municipal Affairs and Ontario (Provincial Affairs) at Global Public Affairs.

Follow him on Twitter @RichardJoyTO or email at Richard.Joy@uli.org

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The mind boggles at how far back the agenda for a new deal for Canadian cities has suffered under the first few months of a new provincial government in Ontario, and it has nothing to do with ideology or partisan party politics.

A generation ago there was near universal consensus that as major urban metropolitan regions are the foundation of provincial and national economic growth, social wellbeing, and environmental stewardship, greater powers and own-source revenues need to flow to the constituent municipalities of these regions. They also required stronger governance structures to coordinate at both the micro and macro levels.

Hampered by the historic constitutional reality that Canadian municipalities are creatures of their provinces, efforts to empower cities like Toronto and Vancouver have had to find legislative work-arounds, like the City of Toronto Act and the Vancouver Charter. We’ve grown to rely on provincial governments treating cities like an order of government, even if they are not actually constitutionally so.

It is ironic, therefore, that another more modern constitutional reform, the Notwith­ standing Clause, has been invoked in a manner to fully reverse the modern convention that a province should treat Canada’s largest city with “mutual respect, consultation and co-operation.” While Toronto may be suffering constitutional whiplash, resulting in the forced slashing of its council size, this transgression is far from the only act of anachronistic paternalism of recent years. Just over a year ago, for example, the previous government denied Toronto the ability to toll its own roadways. The Vancouver region was also subjected to a doomed provincial referendum thwarting its attempt to raise revenues for regional transit.

Compounding the pernicious tendency of provinces to meddle in what should be the exclusive interests of their large metropolitan cities is the structural handcuffing of regions to properly govern themselves. No large urban metro in the world has less municipal

authority over regional matters than the Toronto Region, including such areas of jurisdiction over planning, transportation, economic development, policing, infrastructure, and the environment.

It’s been over 20 years since Dr. Anne Golden’s landmark Report of the GTA Task Force urged regional governance reforms to accommodate the reality that Metro Toronto’s population had spilled over its municipal boundaries. Today, Toronto proper is just 40 per cent of the GTHA (including Hamilton), and yet there are no municipal structures to coordinate this massive urban geography. 15 years of provincial Liberal government did nothing to address this deficiency, and the recent meddling in Toronto’s governance to the exclusion of the rest of the region seems to cement the fact that Ontario doesn’t understand or respect the basic needs of its big urban region.

In fairness to the governments of both political stripes, municipal leadership across the region has also been absent. With rare exception, there has been virtually no call for regional reform over the past 20 years.

Mayors and councils seem content to govern within their political boundaries, even if their constituents live, work and play across them. Several businesses, social and civil society groups have filled some of the regional leadership vacuum, and an embryonic regional body, Toronto Global, was recently created to promote the region internationally. None, however, offered much by way of a protest to the aggressive or neglectful provincial interventions that have threatened the vitality of this region.

It’s a frustrating fact that in 2018 the 20-some year struggle to empower Canada’s big cities is further behind for the effort.

Every step forward seems to be met by two steps backwards.

A new, smarter deal for cities is neither a left, right or centrist idea. A new, smarter idea for cities is, however, an essential idea if Canada is to position itself for growth and competitiveness in the decades ahead.

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Introducing IKO Commercial’s new 2-IN-1 Insulated WRB System.

When IKO Enerfoil® or Ener-Air™ polyisocyanurate insulation sheathing boards are used with IKO AquaBarrier™ Tapes, this innovative two-in-one system eliminates the need for house wrap. So it’s twice as smart because it saves you time and money.

And the higher thermal values of both Enerfoil and Ener-Air products means they require less space than less efficient insulation systems to deliver the same level of performance or better. So don’t just get smart, get twice as smart, and choose IKO’s new 2-IN-1 WRB System for your next job.

To learn more today, contact an IKO Representative, or call 1-855-IKO-ROOF (1-855-456-7663) or visit IKO.COM/COMM.

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