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Instructional Infrastructure
August, 2010
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Beneficiaries Tap Into a Package of Programs
Infrastructure funding announced in the 2009 federal budget is distributed through a number of different incentive programs. These include:
- The Infrastructure Stimulus Fund is a $4-billion fund for provincial, territorial, municipal, community and private sector projects capable of meeting a completion deadline of March 31, 2011.
- The Green Infrastructure Fund will distribute $1 billion over a five-year period for green projects, with a particular focus on sustainable energy.
- The Recreational Infrastructure Fund provides $500 million over a two-year period to renew community recreation facilities across Canada.
- The Social Housing Renovation and Retrofit Fund provides $1 billion (with a required $850 million of matching funds from provincial and territorial governments) for repairs, modernization, redevelopment, energy-efficiency upgrades and/or modifications to support residents with disabilities.
- A $400-million fund for construction of new housing for low-income seniors and $75 million for construction of new housing for people with disabilities
- $400 million for new housing and renovations on reserves, and $200 million for new housing and renovations in the north.
- The $2-billion low-cost loan fund provides municipalities with loans to support shovel-ready projects. This is aimed at reducing borrowing costs for local governments, which can use the loans to finance infrastructure projects directly or to fund a municipality’s cost-shared contribution to projects receiving funding from the Infrastructure Stimulus Fund.
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Learning Space for New Generations of Trades and Designers
By Barbara Carss
Infrastructure spending will translate into infrastructure capacity in the case of the new Algonquin Centre for Construction Excellence at Algonquin College in Ottawa. The $79-million, 180,000-square-foot facility will bring 20 existing apprenticeship, diploma and baccalaureate programs under one roof, and provide space to increase fulltime enrollment in construction and design related programs by 600 places.
Currently, approximately 1,900 students pursuing this training are scattered in five different buildings – some now so obsolete that they will simply be demolished once the new facility opens in 2011.
“We are trying to produce graduates who would go into the workforce and work together and yet we’ve been unable to do that at the college itself,” says Claude Brulé, Executive Dean of Technology and Trades at Algonquin College. “The new Centre supports those relationships and it creates a focal point for the industry. It will allow us to create programming that is really at the leading edge of where the construction industry wants to be.”
Construction began in the fall of 2009 and is on track to meet a March 31, 2011 completion deadline established as a condition of funding from the federal Infrastructure Stimulus Fund. The federal and Ontario governments are each contributing $35 million toward capital costs, while the City of Ottawa donated the land, valued at $2 million, for the project. Algonquin College is raising the remaining $7 million through a fundraising campaign and project financing.
SKILLS FOR AN EVOLVING SECTOR
Program expansion responds to projected labour requirements in an industry where more than 50% of existing tradespeople are expected to retire by 2020. At the same time, steady technological innovation and the growing demand for designers and trades who understand green building techniques calls for new types of skills that workers will be expected to master.
In that vein, College officials have also proposed a new baccalaureate program – a Bachelor of Applied Technology in Building Science – to fill a market and educational niche that existing university programs haven’t addressed. “We want to make sure we have laddering opportunities for students to go from two-year diplomas to three-year diplomas to a degree,” Brulé adds.
The Algonquin Centre of for Construction Excellence will be one of the teaching tools. Its high-performance attributes – which are expected to help the Centre secure LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum certification – will demonstrate how energy savings, emissions reductions, storm water management and waste recovery and reduction can be achieved. In particular, advanced monitoring systems will deliver multi-layered data that will allow students to observe, measure and compare how individual systems and the building as a whole consume resources at differing levels of occupancy, in varying climatic conditions and under other demand pressures.
“The minimum standard we had set was LEED Gold and that was set in our RFP, but we left the door open for proponents to go beyond Gold,” Brulé explains.
The design-build contractor, EllisDon Corporation, and architect, Diamond & Schmitt Architects, made a convincing case that a combination of elements that could qualify for LEED Platinum certification would also add significant value through long-term operating savings. These include: a five-storey biowall of plants for enhanced ventilation and indoor air quality; a closed loop heating and cooling system; solar panels to augment the power supply; high-efficiency building envelope, windows, roof and insulation; and rainwater harvesting to supply the toilets.
CAMPUS AND COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS
The centre additionally secures LEED points for facilitating pedestrian movement and proximity to public transit – an outcome that addresses safety concerns on a campus alongside two of Ottawa’s busiest arterial roads, Woodroffe Avenue and Baseline Road. College officials had long been nervous about impatient jaywalkers crossing several lanes of speeding traffic as they made their way between the OC Transpo bus station on one side of the road and the campus on the other.
The new Centre is now under construction on that bus station site (while the station operates out of a temporary location) and will be connected to a rebuilt OC Transpo facility. In future, it will be a transfer hub between Ottawa’s existing rapid-transit busway and an envisioned light rail transit system now in the planning stages.
Meanwhile, the centre’s location on the opposite side of the roadway from the preponderance of Algonquin’s faculty buildings allows for a convenient addition to the above-ground pedestrian bridge system that links most campus buildings at the second-storey level. Pedestrians will be able to walk safely above the traffic, and be protected from the outdoor elements as well. “This will be a continuation of the mode of circulation from building to building at our campus,” Brulé notes.
Classes are slated to begin in the new facility in September 2011. That provides five months after the deadline for completion to install and commission equipment, landscape the grounds and prepare for the influx of students and staff.
“Having March 31, 2011 as the deadline for substantive completion has been a factor that has likely dictated some of the construction processes and choices of materials,” Brulé acknowledges. “Everybody received their funding around the same time and all those projects are going to have the same deadlines so there’s also a lot of competition for labour and supplies.”
Competition for labour is arguably a positive circumstance, however, for an institution dedicated to turning out a skilled workforce to support the sector. Algonquin has other capital projects planned and/or underway for its satellite campuses in the Ottawa Valley towns of Pembroke and Perth – projects that have also indirectly benefitted from the Infrastructure Stimulus Fund.
“We had planned to go ahead with this building with or without the additional influx of the infrastructure stimulus funds, but it would certainly have complicated the financing without it,” Brulé says. “Instead, the infrastructure funding has allowed us to refinance other expansion projects we have for the campuses.”
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