Thank you very much.
It's a great pleasure to participate in this on behalf of the Canadian Urban Institute.
Very briefly, we are a national urban policy and research institute. We receive no direct funding from any government in Canada. We generate and raise all of our money ourselves through services and membership, and we have worked for 20 years now in the area of energy sustainability.
You would probably know some of our projects. We were the catalyst that brought together the deep lake cooling technology in Toronto, which we brought back to Canada. I think it's probably one of the most successful and greenest energy solutions in Canada, and we've done extensive work on it.
I'm going to try to save some time by giving you our most fundamental recommendation at the beginning, and then I'll repeat it at the end, because I know you're very busy and have heard a lot. In-between I'm going to turn it over to my colleague, Brent Gilmour, who will give you some examples of what I'm going to describe.
We spend less money than any other country in the world on planning for land use, transportation, and energy. If you went through the entire OECD and tried to find one of the biggest differences between countries, you would find that we do less planning than almost any other country—and it's a disaster. When we spend large amounts of infrastructure money, we usually do it with less planning than almost any other country, with some disastrous consequences. Arguably, federal government involvement in infrastructure over the years has been one of the biggest subsidies to sprawl compared with any other source. I will leave that for questions, if you want to ask. But the federal government can wreak havoc on a city planning process.
Our biggest recommendation is that you fund plans, not projects, and you put more money into energy, transportation, and land use planning, and you drive integrated planning. Every single municipality, large and small, has an official plan. You've heard from Okotoks and Guelph. You've heard about the work we've been doing with the City of Calgary. With many of them, including Calgary, the aim was to integrate energy planning into official city planning processes. If you go to Calgary's website, it shows the Calgary's plan is probably the best plan any large city has now done. The savings in costs between a business-as-usual development of energy, land use, and transportation systems in that city is about $30 billion. And given that the public purse is tight these days, it would seem that smart grid and smart growth should be met by smart spending.
I won't get into the details of it. If you'd like us to, we can in questions. But I think it gives you the integrated solution. In the case of Calgary, halfway through this process they stopped their official planning process and redirected 30,000 hectares of development and changed their density requirements. We're talking about Canada's oil capital. The reason they did that was not just to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions—which they'll do by about 50% under this plan—but also because the cost of building out cities in the traditional way we've been doing the last 30 years was just prohibitively costly to Calgary, and you couldn't justify it to citizens and taxpayers.
So you have to integrate economic, land use, and transportation planning, because it's actually a matter of the synergies between good land use and transportation planning and energy planning. So if you worked with provinces, because this is a provincial area of jurisdiction.... Every official municipal plan in Canada, I believe, without exception, has to be approved by a provincial government, and becomes—usually by cabinet—provincial legislation and policy, implicitly and explicitly. You should take the models that municipalities and provinces across Canada are already doing and fund these and the plans, so that they decide what energy technologies do, based on good research and good planning. Then you can make the selection, not on a project-by-project basis, but based on an integrated understanding of how demand-side solutions should work, first, and supply-side solutions, second. And they can select how to do it most cost-effectively, or how they can get the least expensive and most effective technologies that are most durable over time. That's how you produce the greatest economic and green environmental dividend. That's our essential recommendation.
I'll turn it over to my colleague Brent, who'll give you some examples focusing on Calgary's energy mapping and energy sustainability plan.