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What will become of Canada's empty offices? – CTV News
The COVID-19 pandemic has generated significant short- and long-term changes to the way people live, play and, especially, work.
While some aspects of pre-pandemic life – like socializing indoors without a mask and travelling – have made a comeback, offices across the country have yet to return to their pre-pandemic occupancy rates.
Whether companies will abandon the remote and hybrid workplace models that became popular during the pandemic is to be determined. But two things are clear: Office vacancy rates have been rising since the beginning of the pandemic and office-to-residential conversions are becoming more common in mid-size and large Canadian cities.
In its latest National Market Snapshot, investment management company Colliers took stock of office vacancy rates in 12 Canadian cities during the third quarter of 2022. According to the report, the average office vacancy rate across Canada is 13 per cent, compared to just over 8 per cent at the start of the pandemic.
Calgary has the highest vacancy rate, with 27.5 per cent of offices sitting empty. Edmonton’s rate sits at 19 per cent, Regina’s at 17.5 per cent, Montreal’s at 14.7 per cent, Saskatoon’s at 14.5 per cent, Halifax’s at 14.1 per cent, Waterloo’s at 13.3 per cent, Winnipeg’s at 12.7, Ottawa’s at 10.6 and Toronto’s at 10.1. Vancouver boasts the lowest vacancy rate, at 5.8 per cent.
Penny Gurstein is a professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning who specializes in real estate and housing. She believes what’s happening is the acceleration of a trend that began before the pandemic.
“I think COVID really just sped up the trend toward more flexible working arrangements that’s been going on for a while,” she told CTVNews.ca in an interview over the phone on Wednesday. “Businesses that are trying to attract a younger workforce have recognized that something their employees want is more flexibility, so they don’t need as much office space.”
As office vacancy rates creep, building owners, developers and city planners are increasingly warming to the idea of converting empty and outdated office spaces into homes. This saves them from needing to demolish and rebuild underused assets, and fills demand for housing.
This concept isn’t new either.
For decades, developers have transformed banks, schools, factories and churches into condominiums and apartments, and there are several examples of office conversions in Canada prior to the pandemic.
An advantage of repurposing existing buildings is that it reduces some of the environmental impact of construction. Between three office-to-residential conversion projects completed since 2019 and an upcoming fourth project, Alberta-based Strategic Group estimates it will have saved 56,000 tonnes of building materials and 17 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
A photo from Strategic Group shows the kitchen and living room of a unit in the Cube housing development, which saw an empty office building in downtown Calgary converted into a residential building with 65 one- and two-bedroom apartments. (Strategic Group)
“That’s the equivalent of taking 37,000 vehicles off the road each year,” Ken Toews, Strategic Group’s senior vice president of development, said in a phone interview with CTVNews.ca on Wednesday.
Toews explained that construction accounts for 11 per cent of global climate emissions, according to the World Green Building Council, so part of the appeal of repurposing existing buildings is to help bring that number down.
Of course, there are also financial considerations.
Once a building’s vacancy rate creeps up to 20 per cent, it starts to lose money, explained Steven Paynter, principal at Gensler Architecture and Design.
“There’s a lot of buildings at that point now,” he told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview on Wednesday. “In the last six months, as the vacancy rates have climbed up and people are not renewing their office leases, all of a sudden everyone wants to talk about it and wants to get these projects moving.”
Gensler saw this coming at the beginning of the pandemic and created a scoring system to help developers determine which buildings are well suited for conversion and which aren’t.
Buildings with a small floor plate are ideal because it’s easier to design residential units in a space with an elevator-to-window depth of around 35 feet than, for example, 80 feet. Buildings from the 1970s tend to have these smaller floor plates. Buildings with plenty of windows and pre-existing parking are also an asset, since it’s difficult and costly to retrofit these features.
“We’ve done a lot of work on this,” Paynter said. “We’ve studied over 350 buildings around North America now, and what we’ve found is, if you’re lucky. About 30 per cent of the time these projects will make economic sense.”
Nevertheless, Paynter expects to see office-to-residential conversions in every major North American city before long, though it’ll take more time to happen in some cities than others, mostly due to municipal zoning and approval policies.
Cities need to approve applications for office-to-residential conversions, and some cities have zoning rules that protect office space. For example, Paynter said Toronto has designated employment zones where the amount of office space is protected. This adds another barrier to making conversions.
“At the moment it’s hard to do these types of conversions in Toronto because of the city rules,” Paynter said.
The federal Liberals are aware of this barrier, and in the 2021 election, campaigned on a promise to commit to $600 million to support office- and retail-to-housing conversions, and to work with municipalities to create a fast-track system for permits to allow faster conversions.
Paynter said he hasn’t noticed any movement on those promises yet, but in the meantime, some municipalities have taken up the mantle.
Through its Downtown Calgary Development Incentive Program, the City of Calgary offers a grant for office-to-residential conversions of $75 per square foot. The program launched in August 2021 and has approved five conversions, with two more likely to receive approval soon.
Calgary has also made progress speeding up the zoning approval process for office-to-residential conversions, said Toews.
Since 2019, Strategic Group has completed three office-to-residential conversions in Edmonton and Calgary, creating more than 200 new residential units, and is about to break ground on a fourth.
A photo from Strategic Group shows the kitchen of a unit in the e11even housing development, which saw an empty office building in downtown Edmonton converted into a residential building with 177 rental units. (Strategic Group)
“We’ve been pretty excited about conversions for quite a while,” he Toews said. “I knew we were on the right track when we were working on adaptive reuse for buildings, but I didn’t realize it was that big a deal.”
Toews said it took only a month to receive zoning approval for one of its Calgary conversions.
“It’s pretty cool,” he said. “Calgary has taken a different approach and it’s refreshing because a lot of developers get disenchanted with low approvals.”
Calgary’s city council sees office-to-residential conversions as a solution to excess office space and a way to develop more vibrant downtown neighbourhoods. The federal government sees them as an opportunity for property owners and communities to trade excess space for market-based rentals.
Gurstein sees them as a potential opportunity to create affordable housing, one she hopes won’t be wasted.
“If they ensure at least some affordable units geared-to-income, those kinds of things, I think that’s totally reasonable,” she said.
“But unless there is sort of something in place to ensure there would be affordability in there, I don’t really see it as addressing affordability.”
U.K. tabloids and Loch Ness monster believers are abuzz after an expat Canadian couple photographed what some say could be the legendary water creature.
Parry Malm and Shannon Wiseman aren’t fully convinced themselves, but say they are coming around to the idea — particularly if it keeps their kids happy.
The family, which currently lives in the English city of Wimbledon, spent Easter vacation sightseeing in Scotland. To prepare for the trip, they loaded up on books about the Loch Ness monster.
While staying in a nearby cabin on a cold, blustery day in early April, the couple decided to visit a body of water where the sea creature is rumoured to live.
And that’s when they saw something moving through the waves.
“Its head was craning up above the water and it was slowly but gradually moving toward us,” Malm, who is originally from Coquitlam, B.C., said, quipping that it was “bigger than a Sasquatch but smaller than Ogopogo.”
A Canadian expat couple took a photo of something in the water of Loch Ness while on vacation in Scotland recently. They thought it might be a seal or an otter but their kids believed it could be the Loch Ness Monster, a claim that was picked up by U.K. tabloids. Parry Malm and Shannon Wiseman speak about the attention they’re receiving.
“So we obviously play it up. We have two little kids who are almost three and almost five,” he continued.
Wiseman, originally from Calgary, asked her sons, “Do you think it’s Nessie?” while taking a picture of the blurry object.
Little did they know that the image, and their names, would soon be plastered in U.K. tabloids as the first sighting of the Loch Ness monster of 2024.
Hundreds of years of history, but no official proof
Sightings of some sort of unexplained creature in Loch Ness date back to around 500 A.D., though modern sightings re generally traced to 1933, when a local newspaper reported a couple’s claims of seeing “an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface.”
Some have argued it’s a freshwater plesiosaur, though studies have found the creature went extinct before Loch Ness was formed. A DNA study of hundreds of water samples from Loch Ness found that if anything, sightings of the creature were most likely a giant eel.
Even a massive hunt in 2023 using state-of-the-art technology failed to turn up anything definitive.
Hundreds of ‘monster hunters’ are headed to the Scottish Highlands to take part in the biggest Loch Ness monster search in half a century. Andrew Chang explores why the event is a win for Scotland’s tourism industry in a post-pandemic world.
But the allure remains, with hundreds of tourists visiting the water every year in the hopes of seeing the creature — or at least coming away with a story to tell.
Among the believers is Gary Campbell and his daughter Page Daley, who have maintained a website since 1996 titled “The Official Loch Ness Monsters Sightings Register,” which aims to document all potential sightings of the creature, filtering out photos they are able to identify as waves, logs or other animals — as detailed on their page, “What’s not a sighting.”
Malm submitted their photo “just for a bit of a laugh” and, the next day, he says he got a reply telling him he had taken “the first confirmed sighting this year.”
The photo was posted to the website and picked up by U.K. tabloids including the Scottish Sun, Irish Star and the Daily Mirror.
‘We’re not tinfoil-hat-wearing people’
The couple is enjoying the attention and say their boys are fully on board with the notion they saw the Loch Ness monster, even if the adults aren’t quite convinced.
“My instinct says it might have been a seal but I am told that seals do not go in that lake,” Wiseman said.
“I mean, we’re not tinfoil-hat-wearing people,” Malm added. “There’s probably a perfectly logical explanation for what it was. Maybe species X lost its way home or something like that.”
But he says he’s not completely closed to the idea.
“There’s every possibility that there’s some sort of unexplained species that, from time to time, makes an appearance.”
For Wiseman, the fun comes in sharing an extraordinary memory with her kids.
“I want their childhood to be filled with the magic of the unbelievable,” she said. “And this is just one of those things: It is unbelievable, and they believe it so I believe it — and I am all in on that.”
Malm agrees: “What it sort of reaffirmed for me is there’s still things in the world that can surprise and delight you,” he said.
The head of one of Canada’s largest police forces met with a Sri Lankan inspector general of police who two weeks earlier had been found by the South Asian country’s highest court to have “participated in the torture” of an arrested man.
Photos published by Sri Lankan media, including the Ceylon Today, an English-language daily newspaper, show Peel Regional Police Chief Nishan Duraiappah in uniform posing alongside senior Sri Lankan officers on Dec. 29, 2023 at police headquarters in the capital Colombo – a visit a Peel police spokesperson says Global Affairs Canada and the RCMP had been made aware of ahead of time.
One of the law enforcement officials in the photos was the inspector-general of Sri Lankan police, Deshabandu Tennakoon, who earlier that month was ordered to pay compensation for taking part in “mercilessly” beating a man.
Peel Regional Police Chief Nishan Duraiappah signs a guestbook at Sri Lankan police headquarters in Colombo, as the country’s inspector general Deshabandu Tennakoon stands behind him. Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court found he took part in the torture of an arrested man. (Credit: Ceylon Today).
Ceylon Today
On Dec. 14, 2023, Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court ruled Tennakoon was involved in the brutal arrest of a man suspected of theft, holding him in what the court called the “torture chamber” of the police station for more than 24 hours, striking and suffocating him, and rubbing chili powder on his genitals.
Dr. Thusiyan Nandakumar, a physician who also runs the London, U.K.-based outlet the Tamil Guardian, called it a “stain on Canada’s reputation.”
“To see someone of (Duraiappah’s) stature receive a guard of honour from that very same institution that’s responsible for so many abuses was shocking, to say the least,” Nandakumar said.
Duraiappah declined Global News’ request for an interview. In a statement, a Peel Regional Police spokesperson called his trip to Sri Lanka “personal” and said there is “no ongoing initiative or collaboration between Peel Regional Police and any organization in Sri Lanka.”
Peel Regional Police Chief Nishan Duraiappah wears his uniform and walks by Sri Lankan soldiers in a visit Peel police describe as a “personal” trip. (Credit: Ceylon Today).
Ceylon Today
Duraippah was photographed multiple times during his visit wearing his Peel police uniform.
Rathika Sitsabaiesan – a former NDP MP and Canada’s first Tamil member of Parliament – says when someone wears a uniform, “you’re representing the organization for which you are the chief.”
Duraippah is the only police chief of Sri Lankan descent outside the South Asian nation, according to Peel police, which operates in Mississauga and Brampton, Ont.
“(It’s) very harmful to me as a Canadian, as someone who grew up in the region of Peel, and all the people who continue to live in Peel and who identify as Tamil, in my opinion,” Sitsabaiesan said.
The Peel spokesperson said Duraiappah accepted an invitation from Sri Lankan police officers while he was on a family vacation to the country of his birth.
More on Canada
The spokesperson would not confirm when asked if Duraiappah had met directly with Tennakoon beyond the photos, which show them holding a plaque together and Tennakoon standing behind Duraiappah while he signed a guestbook.
It’s not clear whether the event photographed was the only meeting or whether any additional ones were held, including whether Duraiappah and Tennakoon met outside of the moment they were photographed together.
Another Peel spokesperson added that “the Chief discussed the requests for meetings received with Global Affairs Canada and the RCMP.”
The RCMP says the force provided information to Duraiappah about Tennakoon, including about the recent court ruling, ahead of time.
“The Government of Canada did not organize the visit, which was considered a personal visit. However, given the RCMP’s close working relationship with Peel Regional Police, the RCMP Liaison Officer for Sri Lanka offered to facilitate Chief Duraiappah with arrangements involving police agencies in Sri Lanka,” an RCMP spokesperson said in response to questions from Global News.
“Information was provided to Chief Duraiappah for his situational awareness about recent developments in Sri Lanka, including the Sri Lankan Supreme Court’s ruling on Chief Tennakoon.”
Global Affairs Canada also said the visit was “personal.”
“The Government of Canada did not organize the visit” and “as is customary for meetings with high-level officials, staff from the High Commission of Canada to Sri Lanka accompanied the Chief as a courtesy,” Global Affairs Canada spokesperson Marilyn Guèvremont said.
Sitsabaiesan says “alarm bells should have gone off” given the country’s human rights record.
In October 2022, Canada adopted a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution calling on Sri Lanka to address the “human rights, economic and political crises” in the country.
The following year it sanctioned four government officials for “human rights violations on the island” and commemorated the Tamil Genocide Remembrance Day for the first time – marking the deaths of tens of thousands of Tamils during the country’s 26-year civil war.
“Canada is well-versed in the crimes that took place. It’s not something that Ottawa is blind to,” Nandakumar said.
While it’s not unusual for western officers to visit, collaborate or train police forces in developing countries, some have recently distanced themselves from Sri Lankan authorities.
In 2021, Scotland ended its training program for officers in the country over allegations of human rights abuses.
In January of this year, the United Nations criticized Sri Lankan police for their “heavy handed” anti-drug crackdown, with reports of arbitrary arrests, torture and public strip searches.
Tennakoon’s recent appointment as police chief shows “much about how law enforcement authorities in the island operate with impunity,” Neil DeVotta, an expert on South Asia and politics professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, said in an e-mail to Global News.
Nandakumar says the Peel chief’s visit to the Sri Lankan police headquarters raises questions about judgement.
“When a senior Canadian official goes to meet with forces accused of such egregious crimes … to see something like that take place, it was very disconcerting.”
“I think an apology is needed,” he said.
The RCMP say a body that was recovered by authorities in Washington state is believed to be one of two kayakers reported missing off Vancouver Island on Saturday.
Const. Alex Bérubé said the identity of the body found on San Juan Island, just south of the border, is still to be confirmed by the coroner.
A search has been underway in the waters off Sidney, B.C., about 25 kilometres north of Victoria, since the two kayakers were reported missing.
RCMP previously said Daniel MacAlpine, 36, and Nicolas West, 26, went missing while kayaking from D’Arcy Island to View Beach on Saturday afternoon. They were in a teal blue, fibreglass, two-person kayak.
Police said members of the Central Saanich Police Department and Peninsula Emergency Measures Organization search and rescue were involved in the search, and the Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre and Canadian Coast Guard were also assisting.
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