Why cleaning up Canada’s building industry could be a big win for the economy and climate

Jul 15

A sprawling new condo development is under construction in Montreal's Angus neighbourhood on June 21, 2024. (Photo by Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for Canada's National Observer)

By Darius Snieckus

New net-zero building designs and decarbonizing retrofits could lay the foundation for a green building boom — but the challenges are formidable.

It should be an environmental and economic win-win for Canada. Build net-zero office towers, homes and commercial buildings to help meet the country’s climate action ambitions and supercharge the high-carbon sector’s green transition, generating investment and creating jobs. But miss this chance and Canada could be locked into a planet-heating, fossil fuel-fired built environment for the foreseeable future.

“Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

It’s a business adage that could have been coined for the challenge of transforming Canada’s carbon-intensive construction and buildings sector in time to meet the country’s ambitious — and increasingly imperiled — climate action goals.

Ottawa has spent over two years fine-tuning its Canada Green Buildings Strategy, a masterplan to slash greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the “built environment” — the 16 million homes and nearly 500,000 buildings where people live and work — to reach net zero in the sector by 2050.

It's a huge task for the country’s third heaviest polluting industry after oil and gas and transportation, once emissions from building heating and cooling systems powered by fossil fuels are factored in.

Add “embodied carbon” — the CO2 emitted when manufacturing the materials used in construction, chiefly concrete and steel — and the sector accounts for nearly 30 per cent of Canada’s carbon emissions.

“The industry has been slow to change,” green buildings advocate Thomas Mueller told Canada’s National Observer.

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