During the week of May 9th, myself and MCAS President Ken Swann will be joining our MCA Canada colleagues from across the county for our annual mid year meetings and lobby day in Ottawa.
Your MCA Canada Board of Directors, MCA Provincial Managers and representatives from CIPH will meet with Liberal, NDP and Conservative Members of Parliament from across the country. The theme for our lobby day will be “The Business of Net-Zero Buildings.”
MCA Canada Chief Executive Officer Tania Johnston provided the following outline of the three recommendations that we will be focusing on:
- Updating Canada’s Building Code
- Coordination and collaboration to ensure timely adoption by provinces, territories and municipalities, and clear, manageable timelines for industry transition
- Regulatory frameworks that balance costs and measurable benefits using validated data to support initiatives
- Buildings to be considered as a connected system in construction; and
- Effective approaches for new construction and retrofits informed by an understanding of the full supply and value chains.
- Skilled Trades and Market Transformation
- Net-zero buildings will not be achieved on the government’s timelines without major new investments in training, incentives, and promotion; MCAC and CIPH call on the government to invest $1.25 billion in workforce development for energy efficiency and climate resiliency, with specific emphasis on the mechanical trades for access to training programs and developing new approaches.
- New Retrofit Investments
- Recommend the federal government invest $20 billion over five years for ICI construction retrofits as part of the National Net-Zero Emissions Building Strategy.
It will be interesting to gauge the response that we receive during these meetings, and I will provide an update to our membership. There is an opportunity for the mechanical trades to be on the front line of net-zero building and to tackle this proactively rather than reactively.