The fact that we’re speaking of low-impact development is just manna from heaven for me, as a civil engineer, as the low-impact development lead for the city of Windsor for the last number of years prior to my election. I’ve built a number of low-impact development projects in my career, including some that actually didn’t work all that well, and you learn from every project that you’re involved with.

I can certainly appreciate where the member from Kanata–Carleton is coming from. The Ministry of the Environment’s stormwater management guidelines were last updated in 2003. That’s separate and distinct from these, but really, a lot of time goes by for the passage of these guidelines. If anyone ever wants to print them out it’s probably about an inch thick of paper that you’ll get—a lot of text. Actually, it’s an interesting read, but at the same time, as a practitioner, it may not be the most practical effort to look at those 2003 guidelines and say, “Okay, I’m going to design properly.” In fact, that was one of the biggest challenges I had as practitioner: How do I understand the consequences of my design? What were the best ways to design a project?

This is where the Credit Valley Conservation Authority as well as the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority really took it to heart to create a different ecosystem specific to low-impact development. It’s called Sustainable Technologies. The website is sustainabletechnologies.ca. They published a guide in 2010 which ultimately became recognized throughout the province by practitioners as being the best standard that we have for looking at low-impact development and how we should build, including—one thing that was novel for 2010 was doing the overall cost in terms of the life cycle of the project. That’s something I actually haven’t seen in many previous sets of guidelines. That came from Credit Valley Conservation’s sustainable technology consortium.

Since the publication of that guide in 2010, Sustainable Technologies has evolved. They’re no longer going to publish a guideline document. What they’ve done is go to a wiki type of system where, as new elements of the knowledge base come online, they can be added, they can be evaluated and you can learn from the experiences of others in a more dynamic fashion. These guidelines aren’t the sole evolution to wiki; I’m a Scout leader on the side, and Scouts Canada has moved to a wiki for their ongoing changes as they delve into topics such as child protection and child safety etc.

Just to elaborate a bit about what low-impact development truly is: It’s taking out the stormwater component of what otherwise gets sent down to the waste water treatment plant. I built two parking lots as my first projects for low-impact development, each of which had an infiltration trench, which was effectively acting as a reservoir at the edge of the parking lot. All the water would trickle down from the pavement, end up in this big, deep gravel pit and then it would be dispersed underground so it didn’t end up going through the sewer system. You would contain the work on site.

In the most recent project I was a part of, that I designed, we used tree cells—the same kind of concept, but outside of some of our planted trees we were going to direct some of the stormwater that would have gone onto the streets into these tree cells. The tree would actually drink the water and grow more and be more prosperous because of that low-impact development.

I’ll commend the federal government for the DMAF program that they had because they asked for low-impact development to be brought forward as part of their funding allocations, so it actually gave a challenge to us as practitioners: How do we actually make this work? What are the best tools in the tool box for these technologies?

The member opposite is quite right: My community of Windsor–Tecumseh is pretty low-lying. It’s adjacent to Lake St. Clair. We had not only a significant threat of flooding; when the wind was high we actually had overland flooding coming from the lake, and it made it onto Riverside Drive.

Basement flooding is something that we’re all well aware of. I can think of a couple of days that stand out during my time as a municipal councillor. Those days when we had a big storm and people were flooded out, really, those were unproductive days in my day job to respond to those times. Sure enough you want to help your neighbours pull out. Basement flooding is a public health issue. You end up developing mould if you have a flooded basement. You also have so much damage, so much that gets trucked to the landfill. Think of carpets, think of drywall and the different pieces of furniture that are affected. So it’s imperative that we do our best to take stormwater out of the system, provide for those high-risk storms the most capacity possible within the pipe. That’s truly where low-impact development comes into play.

I was very thankful to actually see that the Ministry of the Environment is in the process of looking at the low-impact development guide, and in tandem with the Credit Valley effort with the wiki.

When it comes to the guide, I had a chance, in preparation for this debate, to read through it, and I was reminded immediately of the 2003 stormwater management guide, and, when push came to shove, for the designing of a project—really, the guide was a great tool to show the background and the whys, but for the actual implementation, I did have to rely on resources that were outside of those guidelines. The guidelines set what the expectation is, but it doesn’t really tell you how to get there. It does tell you the different types of technologies, and it’s a useful tool to have, and it should exist. And I fully support having the Ministry of the Environment—I know the government does; otherwise, it wouldn’t have been actioned and it wouldn’t be on the registry at the moment.

What’s the future of this document? Is it going to be a living document? The 10-year update cycle? I look at the 2003 guide, still not updated, but it’s also still relevant in some ways because it’s not something we would rely upon to actually figure out how we’re going to develop the low-impact development projects. Looking at the guideline that’s on the registry today, I would say—really, the same. It is there to provide the background, the whys and the opportunities that exist, but when push comes to shove, you are going to have to look to something that’s a bit more dynamic in order to make the design decisions that you need, as a practitioner, to actually implement the low-impact development.

The member opposite mentioned the Windsor Star, and, coincidentally enough, there’s an article from February 10, 2002, titled “Riverside Residents ‘Delighted’ with New Anti-Flood Improvements.” This is actually the last article that I appeared in as an engineering subject-matter expert before being elected. It gets into a couple of cases. We had, in Tranby Park, two reservoirs; there’s a permeable parking lot, an on-ground dry pond at the back of the park—my colleague Tiffany worked on that. There were references to the initiatives that I had done and a couple of others in the neighbourhood, with permeable pipes underneath residential streets such as Matthew Brady. My boss at the time cited that these projects were absolutely making a difference. Actually, members of the community were quoted as saying they’ve noticed changes to their frequency of flooding as a result of the implementation. I won’t go that far, because sometimes the intensity of the storm is different in a given location, and that may not actually be the reason why they’re experiencing relief. But on a theoretical basis, for sure, when you take stormwater out of the system, that means that water is not occupying the piece of the pipe, and you’re gaining valuable capacity when you have a high-intensity storm in your neighbourhood.

Ultimately, those low-impact development projects are more frequent; however, they are more maintenance-intensive. They don’t have the same lifespan as normal projects that have the big, full sewer, full reconstruction. You do have to take out the sediment. You collect a lot of sediment when water gets collected into a sewer system, or, in these cases, the infiltration trench. You need to clean out the aggregate that’s used as a filter, and that has a frequency of probably about a 10-year time frame.

So there are some tricks of the trade that are part of designing low-impact developments, that are more dynamic. You have to gain that knowledge and experience as you try these out. They aren’t in wide application; they should be. And I certainly commend the member opposite for bringing this forward, because there’s a lot of unmet potential with the development of low-impact development guidelines.

I referenced the wiki earlier, and this is actually—to speak of how dynamic it is, we will gain knowledge, just as I did. My first project, I’d call a failure. What was happening is, the water table ending up being so high close to the Detroit River that my infiltration trench had groundwater enter it, and so when the water came and drained into it, there was nowhere left to go. The capacity was eaten up by groundwater. Okay, lesson learned. As a designer, we’ve since fixed it by having an overflow sewer. That bit was installed years later.

This is the kind of knowledge that a practitioner will gain. They learn from their mistakes, and we gain our knowledge base. So a practitioner will not be reliant on this guide to keep them up to date. This guide will show what the outcome should be, but really, the experiences we live will be put into the wiki, sustainabletechnologies.ca, and really, that will be the tool for keeping practitioners up to date.

As I say, I applaud the efforts of the member opposite. From a functional perspective, a practitioner will not need an update in 10 years. They’re not going to rely on this to do their design. They’re going to be looking at a more dynamic source of information, whereas this will be the archival piece. It is not destined to be something that will have much added to the knowledge base as a result of a 10-year review.

With that, I won’t be able to support it. I certainly appreciate the effort by the member opposite.