The decision by RESCON announced in December to file an application in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice challenging the authority of the City of Toronto and its Green Standards is a shot across the bow few industry observers foresaw.
RESCON president Richard Lyall feels there was no alternative except to adopt a highly adversarial position against municipal standards he feels make home construction slower, more complicated and expensive.
It’s a strategy that leaves Kelly Alvarez Doran, co-founder of energy efficiency consultancy Ha/f Climate Design, feeling “baffled.”
“Maybe green standards make for an easy target,” he told the Daily Commercial News. “Yet, they are only one of several things a project needs to go through. I find it very disingenuous.”
Others have called RESCON’s move “shocking and incredibly short-sighted.”
Lyall has been prolific in his comments about green standards and energy efficiency initiatives that step beyond the Ontario Building Code.
“We don’t need each municipality cooking their own system and forcing builders to follow it,” he says. “Cities cannot dictate to builders how to build buildings or what materials they use.”
Municipal involvement with the National Building Code (NBC) dates back 60 years when an NRC 1964 Technical Paper described the NBC as “an advisory document.” adding “the provinces of Canada delegate the authority to their municipalities for the control of building in different ways.”
Ontario first introduced its building code (OBC) in 1975, revising it over time. As Ottawa-based Efficiency Canada told the Daily Commercial News, six provinces including Ontario allow municipalities to adopt higher tiers above the province’s minimum code.
Efficiency Canada begs to differ with Lyall’s claims that continual code and standard changes are resulting in higher costs of construction.
“While early attempts to construct high-performance buildings were associated with marginal construction cost premiums, the BC Step Code has demonstrated that, on average, these premiums are already falling.”
Beyond the construction phase, several studies have established that addressing both operational and embodied carbons at a project’s outset actually reduces the cost of ownership over time.
Meanwhile, Lyall claims the OBC is “one of the greenest in the country,” is “getting greener and greener,” and is among the most stringent building codes in North America.
Major revisions to the OBC came into effect on Jan. 1, although gradually.
For example, from Jan. 1 to March 31, 2025, permit applications may be submitted using the 2012 Building Code, if the applicant demonstrates that working drawings were substantially complete by Dec. 31, 2024. Full compliance with the 2024 OBC begins April 1, 2025.
However, Ontario has failed to relate to energy efficiency under the National Building Code’s four-tiered energy format.
As pointed out on Efficiency Canada’s 2024 Efficiency Scorecard, “Ontario has no timelines for achieving net-zero energy-ready buildings by 2030 and has not adopted a tiered code that could accelerate the uptake of energy-efficient building practices and enable municipalities to adopt higher standards for new construction.”
“If Ontario aligned with the tiered code framework, municipalities could adopt higher performance levels under a common system,” Brendan Haley, Efficiency Canada’s senior director of policy strategy told the Daily Commercial News.
Lyall also says municipal green standards have been imposed “arbitrarily,” make Ontario “like the Wild West,” and “cause chaos in the residential construction industry.”
Even though the TGS is updated every four years, he says changes have been “subject to the whims of Toronto’s city council” and established “faster than the time needed to complete most housing projects, meaning a new benchmark is often instituted in the middle of the construction process.”
Many of Lyall’s claims have been disputed by experts like Evan Wiseman of The Atmospheric Fund (TAF), Doran, and others familiar with energy efficiency and the TGS in particular.
By acting within established precedent and establishing its own higher standards of energy efficiency and embodied carbon, Toronto specifically has established itself as one of the most progressive municipalities in North America, Doran said.
Ultimately, the limits of that municipal authority will be determined by the Court.
John Bleasby is a freelance writer. Send comments and Climate and Construction column ideas to editor@dailycommercialnews.com.
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