Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear in front of you, honourable members of the House of Commons subcommittee.

I am Hans Jain, president of Atria Development Corporation. My family has been in the building development and property management business for over 45 years. We're focused on building traditionally multi-family residential buildings.

We are a fully vertically integrated firm from land acquisition, planning, design and construction to property management and asset management. Our building design process is fairly vigorous. We look for structural efficiency, design efficiency, efficient floor plates and unit sizes, making the overall project more economical, but also allowing for better-designed units that feel better for the people who live in them, who call their apartments home.

We also try to capture cost savings both during the construction process and later on in the building operations, in how we run our building systems. As we're long-term holders of the asset, we're very focused on the quality of what we build and the efficiency long term.

As a company, we're also committed to advanced technologies to meet the challenges that we face transitioning into a low-carbon economy, by building more energy-efficient buildings, reducing the environmental impacts of our construction and creating healthy and accessible environments for residents. Atria has received the Rick Hansen Foundation gold standard award for accessibility across our building stock.

Atria was the first developer in Ontario to incorporate electrochromic glass in our windows. The glass will tint, depending on the amount of sunlight, reducing heat gain and glare, and eliminating the need for blinds. It reduces cooling loads up to 20%. This product is both energy efficient and also provides a better living experience. This was a substantial expense. Each piece of glass has both Internet and power. It can also be controlled by the tenant living in the apartment. This is something that we like to invest in.

Building on this experience, Atria is incorporating geothermal power for both heating and cooling in all our buildings, paired with a high efficiency Mitsubishi variable refrigerant flow HVAC system. It's called VRF.

Currently, we're building two towers in Scarborough Town Centre called the Town Centre Place. This will be the largest geothermal field in Ontario. We've completed that. There will be two towers of 30 and 40 storeys. This continues with everything from our appliances, the plumbing fixtures....

We also use SmartONE technology, which allows residents to control features such as temperature, lighting and security from their mobile app. Again, it's providing efficiency, and the technology also provides comfort and control with the individual homeowner.

We're also exploring ways to further reduce our carbon footprint in our building operations and also material use. We are in the process of doing one of the largest mass timber rental buildings located in Oshawa, Ontario. We'll be purchasing that mass building structure from Element5 located in St. Thomas, Ontario. The exterior panels will be state of the art, and they'll be manufactured off-site by UnitiWall, which is the latest technology for exterior wall panels. We think that's where there will be adaptive reuse of our project, but we're also adding nine storeys of mass timber structure.

For context, originally we had designed the structure in concrete and steel—traditionally—but given that the weight of concrete and steel is heavy, we could only get six storeys. With mass timber, which is lighter, we were able to move to nine storeys and add an additional 70 to 80 units to the project. It also will speed up the process and the timelines. I think that manufactured solutions with technology is something that needs to be focused on and adapted.

Just to let you know, with the strategy of adaptive reuse, where we take old buildings, we converted an 1896 YMCA into 136 rental units, and we completed another building from 1879 in Peterborough also. We have a practice where we take old buildings and convert them into residential units. We think that's another aspect of moving development along.