There are about 700 private delegations taking place between municipalities and the province this week at the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) conference, and green is one of the recurring themes.
On Aug. 19, Collingwood’s mayor, councillors and town staff met with Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing (MMAH) parliamentary assistant Matthew Rae and others from the ministry to plead with the province to incorporate green design guidelines into the newly revamped Ontario Building Code that goes into effect Jan. 1, 2025.
Mayor Yvonne Hamlin led the 15-minute presentation to ministry staff.
“I said that the Collingwood Climate Action Team came to us and asked if we could put greener standards into our requirements,” Hamlin told CollingwoodToday. “(We want) buildings to be constructed with green standards so people don’t have to try to renovate their homes after the fact.”
“Our staff looked at it and we don’t really have the legal tools to do that,” she said.
Green development standards are voluntary or mandatory measures created by municipalities to encourage design that is environmentally, socially and economically sustainable. They can include measures such as bird-friendly designs, inclusion of greenspace/parks in new development, electric vehicle charging, proximity to transit, street amenities and mixed-use development.
In April, Collingwood’s chief building official Tammy Hogg told council there would be challenges ahead with changes to the Ontario Building Code coming down the pipe. The challenge at that time was the new code had not yet been provided to municipalities to give them time to prepare.
Since then, the code has been made public but the implementation date of Jan. 1, 2025 has remained unchanged.
As part of her presentation in April, Hogg talked about Ontario’s plans that include a three-month transition period from the old to the new code, which has not had a complete overhaul since 2012. The province will no longer have its own building code, and will instead adopt most of the 2020 National Building Code of Canada with Ontario amendments.
She said that there were an estimated 2,400 changes coming under the new code.
“The challenge to building officials and the construction and design industries will be the lack of materials available to prepare,” Hogg said in April.
One concern at that time from Hogg and shared by Collingwood council was that there are no green design guidelines laid out under the national code.
In Collingwood in 2023, the town’s building department did 4,896 inspections, issued 506 building permits and 143 other permits. Those building permits account for $335 million in construction value, which is more than double previous years, mainly due to the issuance of the permit for the town’s water treatment plant expansion.
Hogg said occupancy was approved for 293 apartment units in 2023, and the town is on track to eclipse that number in 2024.
Hamlin said that at the end of her presentation, she requested that if changes to the code weren’t possible at this time, that the province at least establish voluntary green standards.
“That way, if builders wanted to do it, they would know what would work and what wouldn’t,” she said.
While ministers and the province won’t commit in the moment of delegations at AMO, Hamlin said she left the meeting feeling positive.
“I had a good feeling,” she said.
Later in the day on Aug. 19 during a session on changes coming to the Ontario Building Code, Mansoor Mahmood, director of the building and development branch of the MMAH, said he had heard multiple delegations at the conference on the topic of adding green development standards to the code.
“For this code, we have not made many changes on the energy-efficiency side,” Mahmood told attendees. “There is already a robust energy performance requirement in the building code.”
He said with there being 2,600 changes already made in the 2024 code, adding green development standards would have easily “doubled” the number of changes.
He reminded attendees that the 2024 version of the code is not the final copy.
“We will be reviewing further changes in the future,” he said. “Changes aren’t off the table, but in this point in time because of the housing crisis... we just wanted to ensure that where we didn’t need to make a change, we wouldn’t.”
As part of his presentation, Mahmood also outlined some of the changes coming under the new code, which includes updating building requirements for secondary suites, farm buildings, septic systems and accessibility standards. Carbon monoxide detection requirements will be expanded in some residential and commercial occupancies, as well as radon detection. Fire safety rules will be harmonized with the National code.
For more information on the 2024 Ontario Building Code, click here.
