As new custom homebuilders working in the Toronto area, Joshua and his partner, Alvaro, were getting more and calls to build outbuildings on existing residential yards, home additions to add space for family and rentals, and fully separated basement living space – so-called Alternative Dwelling Units. The work has proven to be lucrative and relatively uncomplicated, with municipalities speeding up approvals even over Josh’s five years in business, so the partners have decided to make it a focus of their business. Josh joined The Hammer to talk about his journey to his point and share some tips and observations on the emerging ADU trend.

As executive director of Career Colleges of Ontario, Kate Bartz wants us to know that career colleges play a vital role in providing the skilled workforce of the future and will be an important part of the province’s mighty effort to build hundreds of thousands of homes in the years ahead. She spoke to Pat Flannery about what career colleges have to offer and how she hopes to partner with the province and our sector going forward.

Achieving good indoor air quality for our clients is something we probably need to think about more than they do. A homeowner may not give the topic a second thought…until their throat starts scratching and their nose starts itching from a poorly designed HVAC system. Mohamed Fouda sits on ASHRAE committees writing indoor air quality standards and joins The Hammer to advise us on how to protect homeowners’ health and happiness even as building envelopes get tighter.

For more information, contact Mohamed at [email protected].

Silica is one of the most common hazards at construction sites. Workers exposed to airborne respirable silica are at an increased risk of developing lung diseases like silicosis, lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Meghan Friesen, Occupational Hygienist with the Ontario Health Clinics for Ontario Workers, discusses the hazards and health effects of silica, exposures in the construction industry, and the free online Silica Control Tool. 

High-profile wildfires doing substantial property damage to urban areas in B.C. and Alberta have spurred NRCan to look at creating Canadian building standards for wildfire resistance. The consultation process has just begun, but it seems likely that some day soon we may see new codes requiring resistant windows, doors and other components in wildfire-prone areas. What might these rules look like? How do we determine if a product is sufficiently resistant to external fires? And what is the science behind making frames and glass that resists fire and prevents heat transfer to the home interior? Robin Urquhart has worked on rebuilding communities destroyed by wildfires and joins The Hammer to share his deep knowledge of this topic.

The difficulty, expense and delay in getting projects approved has been identified as one of the big reasons Ontario is nowhere near its homebuilding goals and not likely to be any time soon. Enter Arash Shahi and his non-profit One Ontario initiative to offer a database of municipal zoning bylaws and regulations that shows where building can happen and whether your project qualifies. One Ontario has the data and the software tools – what it needs now is provincial backing to legitimize regional planning authorities using it. Shahi explains what One Ontario is, what information it can provide and how it could be part of the path forward to getting this province out of its homebuilding logjam.

Gil Yaron of Light House is spearheading the launch of the Building Materials Exchange on Vancouver Island and Lower Mainland, B.C., with plans to expand. It’s a website where members can post excess materials from inventory or jobsites and offer them for sale or free to whomever wants them. The important wrinkle is the business-to-business nature of the site, allowing contractors to deal with other contractors and not so much the general public. There are the obvious environmental benefits of reducing waste, but avoiding charges at the landfill and being able to find free or inexpensive materials is a pretty attractive business proposition, too.

Canada, and especially Ontario, faces a housing crisis in which we are building less than half the new homes each year we are expected to need. But even so, housing starts dropped in Ontario in 2024. Radical action is clearly needed, and RESCON CEO Richard Lyall has some ideas. He joins The Hammer for some tough talk about the need for big cuts to development fees and taxes; new investment in infrastructure; harmonization of codes and standards; slashing of red tape in approvals process; the need to fight U.S. tariffs and more.

Jared Kress of Metropolitan Floors and Chris Maskell of the National Floor Covering Association of Canada join The Hammer to set us straight on the impact insulation class (IIC) for flooring. This is the number that tells us how much a flooring product prevents sound transmission to the space below from footsteps. Some condo boards and architects are specifying crazy numbers for these ratings, but what you get in a lab is often not what you get in the field. Kress and Maskell take us through how the rating is calculated, what impacts the actual performance in your project and what you need to tell clients who think your floor can be made absolutely silent.

Steve Johnston of Omnigence, a private equity firm investing in the construction sector, has a stark warning. He sees a real risk of long-term stagflation (inflation coupled with low productivity and high unemployment) in our present conditions and government policies. His white paper lays out the broad details, but he joins The Hammer to talk about the specific effects in Canada’s homebuilding sector and what will be needed to avoid them.