Brownfield News readers may have a sense that Canada is just stepping out of the starting blocks on redevelopment, but there are number of projects and methods already underway here. We'll explore those and take a look at a brownfield evangelist, Brian Villemaire, an associate broker with Royal LePage, the country's largest commercial real estate firm. With this issue’s focus on railroads it’s a good time to look at one of Canada’s larger redevelopment projects—the Canadian National locomotive repair shops in Moncton, New Brunswick.

Moncton has long been the railroad’s East Coast hub and the repair shops once employed some 6,000 people who fixed and rebuilt locomotives from throughout the road’s eastern region. As diesel engines replaced steam, employment at the shops dwindled from its peak in the ’40s and ’50s and the shops were closed in 1986. The land sat idle until the Canada Lands Company assumed responsibility for remediating and redeveloping the site in 1995. Work on the 300-acre site, which stretches from downtown to the city’s outskirts, started in 1997 after studies of past uses and potential reuse by the Lands Co. were completed. Remediation at the site included removing asphalt roadways and concrete foundations, removing and treating soils contaminated with machine oils, greases and fuel, tracking degreasing solvent residues, excavating previously landfilled scrap metals and wood, surveying surface water and storm sewer drainage and uncovering original streams.

Brownfield News Photo Villemaire

Planning for future use has moved into high gear and the city has already agreed to residential zoning for the Franklin Yards part of the site in order to take advantage of a large city park adjacent to the yards. Other plans include expanded parklands and an information technology park.

The Canada Lands Company is a federal crown corporation formed in 1995 which manages and/or disposes of federal lands on behalf of the government of Canada. As a public/private company, CLC reports to Parliament through the Minister of Transport and has contributed more than $93 million to federal coffers, created over 100,000 short-term jobs in construction and related fields and 50,000 long-term jobs in a variety of other fields. The CLC has achieved that success with an investment of approximately $19 million on environmental activities aimed at bringing lands back to productive use. CLC methods are fairly typical of any brownfield redevelopment company—it buys land, at market value, that is no longer required by government departments or other crown corporations and agencies. It works to increase the land’s value and marketability and then prepare the land for sale, sell it and make cash distributions on an annual basis to its shareholder, the government of Canada.

Another contributor to the redevelopment of brownfields in Canada is Brian Villemaire. Brian began working with brownfields in 1978, an era when there was no real awareness of environmental issues on land. “There was no testing of any type, no environmental questions asked, and the lexicon we know today did not exist then,” says Villemaire. The site was a typical industrial location which turned out to occupy him for the better part of eight years as he worked to divide the site into separate parcels in order to find buyers who could afford to purchase them. Not too long after the sale was finished litigation over environmental issues began. That was also the start of Villemare’s education in brownfields.

“I had no idea at the time that there were any issues with the site,” says Villemaire. “No one would have because that wasn’t a question you asked.” As part of the litigation Villemaire was asked to go through the records pertaining to the site and the sale and after reading “ten to twelve banker’s boxes of material” he knew that there was nothing that would have made him change his mind about the pedigree of the site. “That, and the Love Canal/Hooker Chemical episode, was part of my awakening,” he says. “A bunch of housewives pressured the White House to do something. After that I started seeing the whole thing becoming a part of every transaction.” Villemaire, who is in the midst of trying to sell more than one contaminated site as we spoke, says he has gone from being unaware to be being heavily involved as a part of his practice with Royal LePage, Canada’s largest real estate firm.

While he has been active in a lot of projects, Villemaire says that “A lot of my success has been more evangelical—educational. By working with local governments as well as provincial and federal governments and also by doing a lot of university teaching I think I have begun to spread my experience around and put it to work.”

Changing Canadian redevelopment laws to create more incentives is one thing Villemaire prosthletizes for because, as he says, “doing deals on these sites is difficult in Canada as we lack the inducements and incentives.” Villemaire sees some movement forward because of Bill 56 in Ontario which he thinks will stimulate redevelopment, but suffers from a lack of incentives or money for brownfield redevelopment. “The law is a stimulus but it doesn’t give us a hold harmless on liability and the government didn’t provide any funding for brownfields,” he says. “The bill cuts through a number of issues—it cuts through the planning act and it gives municipalities more room to be creative but does not provide any capital with which to work. Sites which have neutral value or are fiscally upside down will not be undertaken by the private sector without active assistance.”

Villemaire has been working with several of Canada’s largest banks to convince them to get involved with redevelopment. As in the U.S., Canadian banks won’t lend on contaminated property. Still, he sees some encouraging signs: “We asked a couple of banks to join as pioneers and get sites back into use but, at this time, they are concerned that their involvement may be construed as hypocritical.”

Villemaire’s evangelism takes on a different tone when he deals with the Canadian government. “We need leadership and program initiation from the federal level. We can not expect the municipalities to craft these initiatives in isolation. Although they are hosts to these sites—and have the daily visual reminders—we have not given them the tools to eradicate the problem,” he says. “When dealing with sites in which the clean market value and costs are synonymous or worse, yet the clean market value is exceeded by the front-end costs, we need Ottawa’s direct input. Furthermore, many of the problematic sites in Canada are directly controlled by the federal government.”

Villemaire states that “I was recently involved with a senior level government official and made these opinions categorically known. I was very pleased that, after carefully listening to my summation, my position and opinions were supported by this minister. “I believe this bodes well for future active participation by Ottawa.”

Another reason for his interest in brownfields is that he spent a lot of time with American Indian groups in the American Southwest and saw their reverence for the land. “As a graduate student at university I got a job stringing phone cable in the Southwest and I came to realize that Indian people respect the land and hold it in reverence, which taught me a lot about how we should value it,” he says.

Villemaire’s commitment to brownfields is a serious one. So serious that people say “Brian doesn’t play golf, he does brownfields.”