Climate Ready Infrastructure: Future-Proofing Community Assets

Full Panel
Transcript

Note to readers: This video session was transcribed using auto-transcribing software.  Questions or concerns with the transcription can be directed to citytalk@canurb.org with “transcription” in the subject line.

Chris Chen Welcome, everyone. Thanks so much for being here. My name is Chris Chen. I’m with Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada. The aim of this discussion is really to provide you with a better sense about how to accelerate climate and infrastructure progress at the local community level. That is a complex challenge in the sense that there’s thousands of communities across Canada of all different kinds of capacities and levels of maturity in terms of their climate work or their infrastructure work. But there’s also a lot of great work that’s happening on the ground. The Federal Government recently launched the Climate Toolkit for Housing and Infrastructure. Some of the key partners are here on today’s panel. But this is a really great panel in the sense that these are some leading practitioners about how to actually implement change on the ground. And it’s a very  critical piece for success in the sense of being able to take a national program, a project and being able to tailor it, as our Deputy Minister sometimes says, in terms of very placed based way.

Chris Chen Where, as Mary was referring … Is making money smaller – basically really leveraging the work in the best sense in terms of laddering it with the other great initiatives across Canada. And quick introduction about some of our panelists. I’ll start with far end –   it’s Sadhu Johnson who is formerly the Chief Administrative Officer for the City of Vancouver. And prior to that was the Chief Environmental Officer for the City of Chicago. He brings a really creative … Just brings a lot of experience to sort of doing this work on the ground. Irving Leblanc, who’s the Chair of the Board of Community Circle, and prior to that was the Director of Infrastructure, the Assembly of First Nations. Jennifer Angel, the Chief Executive Officer for Evergreen, which is, as many of you may know, is a leading organization to help communities develop climate ready public spaces. They do that themselves and they support others doing that as well. And as some of you may also know, that she is, Minister Fraser just recently announced the Canadian Infrastructure Council and Jennifer is the chair of that. For many of you who have been in this space, you probably know Jeb Brugmann. Jeb, over three decades ago started ICLEI, ICLEI International, was the secretary general for that for over a decade and now is the CEO of Resilient Cities Catalyst. And next to me is Ewa Jackson, the managing director for ICLEI, Canada, and one of Canada’s leading practitioners for municipal climate adaptation and resilience. And in the spirit of kind of like focusing on some of the solutions about how do we accelerate climate and infrastructure progress on the ground, I’m going to ask the panelists, I’m going to encourage them just to interject and sort of just have a conversation among themselves about what are you most excited about in terms of the work that you’re doing? What are you excited about in terms of successes, about practices that you think are scalable? Maybe I’ll start with Sadhu …

Sadhu Johnston Thanks. Before we do that, I want to I want to address an issue. How many of you were totally confused when Mary was talking about Fluevog shoes? Okay. It’s about half the room, Mary … OKay, this is a pair of Fluevog shoes. They’re made in Vancouver or designed in Vancouver. So that’s … just wanted to kind of clarify what Mary was talking about there. For those of you that aren’t in the club there yet, I guess. Okay. So back to the subject, Chris. Having been on the ground in Chicago, I started about three years after there was a pretty major heat wave and almost a thousand people died during that heat wave. It was a real wake up call, one of the first major climate events that we realized cities play a key role in addressing the changes that are coming and that we’re seeing already and that set me down a path of … the mayor sent me … You know what does climate change mean for Chicago? And so we started doing a plan and really trying to look at what are the global trends and what does that mean in a very, very specific little community. And that took a couple of years. It was one of the first, as I said, took a couple of years and we’re working with academics and you know, when you look at that across our North America, every community can’t do that. And so I’m really excited at the way that that kind of technologies is being downscaled and made available to all communities. And I think the insights tool that hopefully you’re going to hear more about today helps small communities that don’t have the resources, don’t have the money, helps them figure out, okay, that bridge flooded and is gone now we need to replace it. How do we replace it better? And to the multi solving question – How do we solve multiple challenges by replacing that bridge? Address habitat for fish. You know, futureproof it. So to me, just the availability of these technologies, and I think that’s why this program, Chris, is so important, is making expertise available to smaller communities that don’t normally get it.

Ewa Jackson And since you gave me a segue, I’ll go next. So we’ve been working with communities of all sizes for decades now around climate action. Historically, greenhouse gas reduction, when we were first established and then increasingly since 2007 or so on adaptation. And I think the realization that Canadians experience it is through infrastructure and an acceptance of that excites me. And working with them to prioritize that infrastructure and that experience needs to be climate ready. It needs to be inclusive, it needs to be and it needs to contribute minimally to greenhouse gas. And what we’re seeing is that cities have taken up that challenge irrespective of what’s happening with their provincial governments, their territorial governments, the federal government. Municipalities act. And they tend to be a bit less partisan on the issue. So we did a project with Cooperators and I think he’s wearing that hat, Don over there … where we brought together a dozen municipalities from across the country ranging in size from the Mississauga’s to the New Glasgow’s – a town of just under 5000 in Nova Scotia, to identify creative infrastructure solutions to address climate impacts that they’ve identified. And so whether it was Mississauga and a district energy system to protect their CBD from power disruptions and reduce emissions, or New Glasgow thinking about water provision and increasing water access, they rose to the challenge and they identified those solutions. You know, in other work, the District of North Vancouver on the multi-solving piece. Thanks, Mary. You know, they wanted to reduce congestion. They wanted to reduce storm water. So they rezoned their streets to get public transit busses to the sea bus faster so they wouldn’t get stuck in traffic by building up bio-swells. So they put in some green infrastructure, reduced storm water runoff and reduced congestion for public transit. And then to this notion of soft infrastructure, which I don’t like the term, it’s hard in a different way. It’s not concrete. It’s spongy infrastructure. You know, the city of Beaconsfield, which is investing in public spaces to increase social connection, to become more resilient. So those are benches and libraries and parks so people have places to gather and build community. Somebody earlier talked about building empathy. I think that was in this morning session. That’s how you do that. And so I think infrastructure is now being seen as a solution to all these other problems. If we do it with not just a “move water, move electricity” mindset. So I think those are the pieces that excite me and that we’re seeing happen. And we can scale in programs like Chris and like the Climate Insight platform and many other programs are meant to do that, to scale the good things we are seeing and not to just focus on just how damn hard it is.

Jeb Brugmann Can I pick up on that? Is that all right, Jen? Because it’s really to this point of scaling and where Chris comes in. So as Ewa just said, and I think as many of you here know, Don and many others, like there’s been a lot of work in municipalities across Canada for a long time on the climate challenge, especially mitigation, but adaptation as well, and a lot of innovative work. We’re talking decades of work. So I think a lot of the discussion as things got teed up this morning, it highlighted the challenge that we still have, but sort of could have left us feeling a little bit like, you know, is anything happening? Amazing amount of stuff’s happening. That doesn’t mean we’re meeting the challenge, but it does mean that we have the mobilization and a lot of lessons to bear. And I think this is where Chris comes in as a new service is number one, to focus on small municipalities across Canada. As we all know there, it’s fine to have a sustainability director or an energy efficiency office in a larger municipality, But when you’re a small municipality and the director of infrastructure is Department of One, it’s very difficult to integrate a difficult new issue into a basic need, you know, stopping the dripping ceiling in the library. So and the institutional issue of how the federal government can interact with that small municipality in a federal system that we have here is a thorny one as well. So what’s so inventive about what each HICC has done in creating Chris … it has created a kind of a creative work around to the impediments that would prevent small money from flowing to very place specific projects that have very unique climate mitigation opportunities in terms of energy efficiency, but in particular incredible new exposures arising in terms of climate adaptation. And what I’m excited about with this program is, is that we are able, over the course of it, three years or so through the Institute in this partnership to support about 600 projects across the country in small municipalities. That’s an opportunity to build a community of practice that doesn’t exist. So we’ve got a lot of cases and a lot of expertise that’s come out of them, but we don’t have an organized who was at zero is saying tying things together, community practice in particular, how small places across the country can really learn together about how to build capacity they need locally and how to integrate climate adaptation into the bridge that needs to be repaired. So this is a really unique moment, I think, for scaling up this work across Canada, and we’re really lucky to be part of it. And one last thing I’d say early partners signing up to this service roster that we’re creating have been the large companies. They also need to learn. So part of the community practice as we get to work with the WASPs and the Arabs and the A comes and then many, many smaller engineering and service provider firms that have a more regional market focus and how they can learn how to help communities deal with a multi hazard challenge of climate change under a set of scenarios. As Anna below said, every site is a site, but that’s exactly the case In any little project of a bridge or a road or a hockey arena, a small community, they’re all totally unique. We all need to learn how to customize this kind of integration of climate and infrastructure in those unique sites.

Jen Angel Yeah, I mean, I would, I would say like to the multi solving. Yes. Like the way we sort of think about projects. And evergreen is a hands in the dirt organization. We build projects and support others to build them. But the the projects aren’t the end, they’re the means and the end. Ideally, there are multiple public priority public policy priorities that are solved at the end. But I’m actually equally interested about governance, innovation and how to use projects that as a way not just to build capacity in community or to solve for some of these priorities of climate and health and other other things, but also as a way to unlock private capital, to unlock community ingenuity, which I thought Zita talked about beautifully this morning, and to ensure the solutions that are being built are actually solving the problems on the ground. And I think infrastructure is somewhat uniquely powerful because it’s tangible. It’s ribbon cutting while it’s enduring as a as a tool to bring people together. And I’ll lastly say, like before I worked at Evergreen, I led a provincial crown corporation in Nova Scotia that built infrastructure at the intersection of public, private and community sectors. And to me, the single most important ingredient in a successful capital project is not related to the technical complexity. I mean, even when we’re talking about climate and the and the scale of climate challenges before us, which we do not fully understand, the single most important ingredient is trust. And I think if we work together cross-sector, we will both unlock, you know, stack or leveraged investment to make public investment go further. But we’ll also maybe figure out a way to work better together to solve lots of other things.

Irving Leblanc Thanks for that … So first of all, I want to acknowledge that we are meeting in the traditional territory of the Algonquin and we thank them for allowing us to meet here. So what are we … what am I getting excited for? I think in some ways, hearing about this Chris program, I think it’s a good step. And I’ll say that because all of our speakers introduced about thousands of municipalities or something. But what’s always forgotten is there over 600 First Nations in this country that need the same type of service. So previous programs, you know, the feds, the Infrastructure Canada and now HICC, I think, hard to keep track, is coming up with maybe some additional resources. But what has been happening in the past is that some of these programs have been carve outs. And where my previous work at the Assembly of First Nations was to work with those departments to understand how to work with First Nations. And that’s a big challenge, is getting away from the “we’re from the government. We know a better” approach and the being able to have those resources to be able to be prepared for whatever is going to come down the pipe. 600 First Nations, over 600, and depending on how much resources are available, I mentioned earlier about maybe a $200 million program from Infrastructure Canada. There’s a 10% carve out, that’s 20 million for 600 First Nations. So it doesn’t go far. So it’s really the  ones that have some capacity that can react quicker. They also don’t usually go to the website and says we’re not taking any more applications. It’s already filled up. But I think it’s a good thing to be able to access those technicians, engineers, consultants that have that expertise and be able to provide that. But the only thing I caution is that there are other organizations that have been set up to support First Nations, and I think it’s important to recognize those that were set up. They may not have that capacity. There’s probably a secondary group that needs to be worked with rather than …  It’s good to go in directly to First Nations but there’s also others that have been set up to do that. So just a little bit of  caution on that part. So thanks, Migwitch.

Chris Chen I want to pick up on something that … a couple of threads. When Jeb talked about sort of the unique challenges or unique context of very small municipalities. I know that when I’ve been hearing from Canadian Urban Institute, as they’ve been contacting and working with some of the small municipalities, they’re getting calls with people in their you know, they’re got like 15 minutes in their own in their snow gear, about to go plow something. And then they’re also taking a call about how to do, you know, what projects that they want to work on. But I want to talk about the … connect to the capacity of the smaller communities with what Jen was alluding to in terms of potential changes in governance. And I don’t know whether that’s also just with processes as well, but I want to get your thoughts on that. I know that you’ve worked a lot with different communities and …

Ewa Jackson Yeah. And Jeb alluded to, I think how the toolkit is meant to overcome some of those challenges. I think one that was mentioned earlier is procurement. And one of the big challenges and I think, Irving, what you were mentioning is linked to that, accessing the funding. And so knowing about it in time, having the ability to respond to something at the drop of a hat. So those larger nations and those larger municipalities have the luxury is not the right word, but the ability to do that and have larger teams to work with procurement, to put out tenders to acquire, you know, the technicians, engineers, etc.. So, you know, the roster is a way of overcoming that. Procurement challenge is important as a way of overcoming the obvious funding challenge, right? It’s a program where funding flows through HICC to see why to administer. But then that matchmaking choice, you know, when you only have 15 minutes on that phone call, it’s very hard to determine, is this the consultant I should listen to or is that the next one that calls for my next 15 minutes? Or the one that’s been sending me 57 emails. So to have a trusted match or a vetted match of some sort through a process I think is really important. But the other piece, and I’m not sure this is going to answer your governance question, but I really feel it has to be said, is that none of this, whether it’s information provided through a one too many solution like climateinsight.ca Or through Chris, and that sort of matchmaking service should be seen as supplanting the expertise at the local level. And Zita said it, Irving just said it, I think that’s really important. Nobody knows why that road always floods better than the person who lives beside that road or has to maintain that road. Scientists and engineers may be able to say something about it, but the truth of how that’s experienced in place in community can only be known. And so I think this is another real opportunity of all of our work, is to create a culture of not top down in all of this, but really painting a picture that gets coloured locally through local experience, local knowledge and local processes and contexts. And then Jeb, to your point, which I think is really valuable, to then knit that together. So the town planner in New Glasgow has a point of connection to the town planner elsewhere who understands that charge because he’s also, you know, the local shop owner as well as the guy driving the plow. So creating those connections, I’m not sure it gets to the governance question.

Jen Angel But yeah, I mean, I can pick up on the procurement thing, first of all, because I think it’s a critical point. I think there is a, I won’t say it’s a trend, a condition in government, and it’s well-meaning and it’s about de-risking projects in particular projects. And they often go off the rails, especially the, you know, the very large scale projects and. When you have a prescriptive procurement, you out of the gate shut down innovation. When you are as you take out the risk or as you attempt to take out the risk, you take out the possibility of a solution you may not have thought of yet. And so an example of that that I was involved in was delivering rural broadband in Nova Scotia. And there had been previous attempts which were specific to the type of equipment that was to be provided by the respondent, which, as you can imagine, by the time the tender hit the road, the equipment was obsolete. And instead it’s like we want to deliver high speed Internet that meets these, you know, performance standards over this period of time for this sort of price. Tell us how to do it. And so then you then you actually unlock the ingenuity of the private sector. They tell you what it’s going to cost. So they’re happy that they can deliver the solution for an amount that’s worth their while and they take responsibility for the solution as well. And I think that applies across infrastructure. And it gets back to trust, like government ought not to be the ones prescribing either the solution or the particular suitability of a solution for a community. And so how we design to governance, how we design better mechanisms for, you know, P3 or across cross-sectoral partnerships in infrastructure, I think is fundamental to their success, not just for them to be, you know, successfully deliver projects, but also for them to be, you know, have the social capital needed to be invited into community because they were locally created, have the support of community over time. So they’re locally stewarded like the success of a project at the outset and also over time depends on the extent to which community and other expertise is  unlocked in its delivery.

Irving Leblanc If I can just comment on your comment there about what the government should or the departments … government shouldn’t dictate. You know, they have some strict rules about how the proposal ought to be formed. I think that’s a big part of working with First Nations, is understanding, first of all, understanding how First Nations work, whether they understand but also their capacities. I think it’s really important to understand that need to work with First Nations and bring them onto the project and also on to the advisory group that you are working with. It’s not a group of consultants who partnered together to say … And then they walk away. And that’s what’s been the problem with the federal government programing for the last 50 years. The government engineers have come in, they’ve built it, we know about, and then they walk away. But I think there has to be, in terms of moving forward, if there is going to be an opportunity to do that, is something has to be left behind. Whether the capacity … I’m not sure who mentioned that. We don’t have the capacity right now in many First Nations, we don’t have consultants on retainer, come and help us any time we want. We have to go to the government saying we want to do this. Can we have some resources? And I think that’s where, you know, this Chris, might be able to fill in that gap, saying, “okay, it’s easier to access this and be able to move faster, but also to be able to react faster and be able to get your projects approved. Maybe not all not all of them, not all First Nations, but at least have a better chance of getting the projects moving forward.

Sadhu Johnston On the governance theme that you’re probing there, Chris. I think just the. And just to stop and acknowledge the name HICC Housing, Infrastructure together in a name. You know, having been in government for 20 years, it’s … we fall into our silos like, no, they do that and we do this and that. And another group does this. And, and it just, just to stop and acknowledge we have those two things together. And a climate initiative is being led out of that department. And so it’s like you’re really, you know, breaking down those silos, I think is a really important part of what we need to be doing in this next era of future proofing our infrastructure. We were talking through the service with a very, very small community, 600 people, and they had some funding, $500,000 to renovate an old building in town where it was a a museum, an art gallery, a lot of different community services. And they were going to do a renovation. And they had some money to do upgrades. And we said, well, are you integrating any green building feature or any energy efficiency? And she said, “No, we hadn’t even thought about that. But the energy costs are killing us.” And so, you know, a service like this where you can bring in expertise to help them think about how could they spend those dollars that they have to achieve those those multiple benefits and reduce the costs of running that facility and so I think that … just the breaking down of the silos where it’s just $1 goes to do one thing … $1 goes to do 2 or 3 things in this case.

Chris Chen I’m going to sort of paraphrase a question that we got from online, but it has to do with how do we measure impact. And I think that term that you’ve used is multi-solving. How are we measuring that? Are there good examples of that?

Jeb Brugmann Well, if that is part of the service that we’re designing is to make sure we’re learning and measuring along the way. And of course, the measurement isn’t only how many projects that we get a service to this year and how many scopes of work we’re actually fulfilled. It is, of course, to measure how climate issues show up in whatever becomes the next stage of project preparation. I should say the amounts of money that are available are small enough that what we can do with the Chris service scope of work, that some design or engineering firm or a climate expert of some kind or another can help a small municipality with will allow them to evaluate what their options are largely and allow them to get to the next stage where hopefully then resources can be obtained and perhaps we can continue to coach them in one way to secure resources on the selected option. But we will want to measure to what extent climate related issues are in the next stage of project design. But we’ll also want to measure to what extent the municipality continues to integrate those issues and how new practices are being incorporated. And I just come back to the point again because I think for this room, I don’t know how many of you are have touchpoints with municipalities. Less than 30,000 across the country probably were pretty much a larger urban agglomeration crowd here. But it is an amazing opportunity for us to think about how to build this community of trust and practice with those who are now wanting to pick up the work that has so long been done in Edmonton and Toronto. And I would say I want to call out to Peterborough, which was the first Canadian member of it since the former mayor is here. But it is a way for us to build this broader envelope of work across Canada, and we want to measure against that as well. To what extent are people self-organizing around this and new associations? To what extent are we working with First Nations associations on provincial municipal associations? So there’s a big capacity building component here too.

Ewa Jackson And I wanted to touch on the multi solving element of that question, because the work we’re doing in the city of Beaconsfield I think is really interesting for this. So the city of Beaconsfield is doing a municipality on the West Island of Montreal fairly small, and they wanted to increase social connection. And so they’re doing this through a mix of art infrastructure, you know, park benches, parks, community gardens and programing. And one of the first things they did or we did with them was to measure social connections. So we went out and talked to thousands of people asking, how likely are you to borrow a cup of sugar from your neighbor? How many neighbors names do you know? Are you likely to borrow a tool? Are you likely to ask? And we’re building that measurement. It’s a three year project to the end to say how through participating in these different interventions, are you now more do you know more people’s names? Are you more likely to ask for something as simple as a cup of sugar egg and or lend them support in the event of an extreme weather event? Now, poor Beaconsfield has been tested twice with massive events during our project. And so my very long winded way of answering the question is we designed to measure the outcomes at the start of the project and you will never be able to measure what are often labeled as co-benefits. But our fundamental benefits of these projects, unless you design for that measurement at the start of your intervention. And I think too often we’re trying to measure outcomes without having thought about, well, what’s our baseline? We can’t have an outcome if we don’t know where we started. And so I think all projects, infrastructure projects in particular need to measure and to your point for the outcomes that you want them to achieve and not just for the dollars invested, the speed with which you built it and how many cars go over the road.

Jen Angel Yeah. So we’re measuring public space impacts in terms of subjective wellbeing and climate impacts, in particular storm water management, biodiversity support, urban heat, island effect and we have. So we have a free tool kit on our website, I think it’s launched or if not, it’s launching shortly, which was developed with a number of partners and to your point needs a baseline. So pre and pre and post and is there a meaningful change? We also have a tool that we’ve been working with a number of Canadian citizen called AI for the Resilient City, which uses predictive modeling and tells you the impact of particular land use decisions, you know, turning from gray to green on urban heat island effect that 100 meter by 100 meter granularity. And we’ve been involved with the city of Calgary. We’ve worked with some cities in Ontario. We’re talking to Halifax right now. But there’s … to the earlier conversation about AI. There are ways to use machine learning, at least for good. And this is one of those ways for people. People, including non climate experts, can see very clearly if I turn that asphalt into instead something like a community garden a rain garden or something. This will be the impact on the urban heat island effect in the neighbourhood. So it’s getting to human behavior, too. And I think that’s part of the climate challenge. It’s how do we bring this to a level that, you know, everybody on your street can understand because it’s a number of small actions and nature based solutions are increasingly being well understood for their power to be very effective. Yeah. You know, responses to climate change. Indigenous folks have known this for a very long time. It’s something that can be scaled beginning at a neighbourhood level with at very little cost. If people just have the tools to do it and they’re not they’re not expensive tools.

Irving Leblanc I just want to want to add to that discussion about how do you measure how you measure the work that’s being done. One of my task before I left the Assembly was complete the closing the infrastructure gap by 2030, which was our minister’s mandate. And the result was $349 billion needed to close the infrastructure gap by 2030. And unfortunately, how long it took is only about seven years left to do all that. But in terms of measurable, looked at $135 billion needed for housing, if you incorporate all the new green energy projects or work into that number of housing that need to built, you can measure that. You can also measure the … getting away from diesel generation in many of these First Nations and still have diesel generators. How does that respond to how much effect that has on the energy use and on the environment? So you start adding up those numbers. $349 billion if it ever came through. I mean, a good chunk of that will be done through climate resilient buildings and others. So I think it’s not hard to add up what those results are going to be if we get that kind of money.

Chris Chen I’m going to put Sadhu on the spot a little bit. It’s because I’m thinking about most councils, local governments have council term priorities and strategic plans that flow from that. And then, in terms of the processes can be pretty lockstep. How do you fit in all of this in terms of thinking about multi solving the way that you’re now shifting infrastructure services to just, you know, providing a specific service like getting you from point A to point B to having green infrastructure components, beautifying the environment, all those kind of things.

Sadhu Johnston Yeah, good question. Mary mentioned CUIs focused on the staff and I think that’s a key way council can pass a directive and then it goes to the staff. And I think that kind of makes or breaks the policy or the approach. And so if staff are trained up on these approaches and have the resources like this crisp program where they have access to experts, that staff work can deliver multiple solutions, it’s not necessarily you’re going to get a counsel motion and then it’s, you know, focusing and prioritizing and recognizing which directives from counsel you’re really going to put a ton of energy into and which ones you’re going to put a little less into which ones can provide that that momentum to move forward. I was talking that started talking about Chicago and that little inquiry from the mayor saying, what’s climate change going to mean? That set us down a multiyear journey. And so it’s hanging on to those things that you get from council or your political leaders and seeing where you can build on them to address those challenges. And ultimately, it comes down to the staff being empowered and resourced and educated and how and how to do that. And I think that’s a key part of this whole thing. Most of the people in our in our government working on the issues, we’re asking them to work on graduated university before climate change and future proofing and resilience before any of these things were a common term. And they’re at their desks or at home now working on these things and haven’t really gotten the resources to up their game and be upskilled in order to do it. So I just I think that’s a really we all need to be focusing on how do we support those people on the ground in these thousands of communities. We heard earlier it’s 4000 communities. In our country. The vast, vast, vast majority of them are 10,000 or less population. They don’t have a bunch of staff that are all trained up on this. So we need to be figuring out how we support them to do that. And with that. Just this well, I got the mic here to say there is a booth out there for this climate ready infrastructure service. And I hope if you’re an expert working in the space or, you know, an expert working in the space, come by. I would like to sign you up. If you know of a community at First Nation that could use this support, come by and talk to us. You know, we really this is today’s the launch, but we do have an opportunity to provide this kind of support to many of the communities that have kind of been left behind. And this is a chance to up our game that way.

Chris Chen There’s a question that came in, I just want … something that can quickly address here is can First Nations governments apply to the Climate Ready Infrastructure Service or only tribal councils?

Sadhu Johnston And if you have a question, I’d love to talk to you about it … Some of the conversations we’ve been having – a community will come in the door with one thing that they need help with. And then we probe a little bit and talk and say all this, you know, we could actually maybe provide more value by scoping the work this way. So that’s … we’re really committed to and this is not an application process where you sit in the back room for three months, fill out a form, and then we approve or not approve. Come and talk to us. We have a small team. Jeb and I are on it, plus the CUI team. We can talk through what issues you’re facing on the ground in your community and where expertise might be able to support that.

Jeb Brugmann Yeah, I just want to build on that is to  highlight with the CUI team that’s here. We’ve designed a very efficient process, so we’re getting companies and individual service providers signed up onto the roster available now. But there is this kind of collegial exchange that goes on when a municipality approaches us with an idea and we really work through at this point in time, what’s the support you most need? And then find that expert counterpart to work through on it. So we’ll see as we scale how we can continue to have that high touch kind of way. But it does dawn on me with this group here, if you have been someone working on climate related issues within a municipal context or a project context outside of a municipality, and there’s an opportunity to have those kind of conversations, really just to be a partner in crime, to help people who haven’t yet been able to consider how to integrate these things into the way they do their work to really help understand how to think through the process and get the right benefit out of the service itself.

Chris Chen Thank you very much. I think  that’s our time. It’s this … a lot of the points that are raised here really, I think, touch upon the next session, which is going to be about infrastructure and culture.