July 16, 2024 – OTTAWA, ON – The Canadian Home Builders’ Association (CHBA) has launched a new project to help prepare the industry for future building codes. The project, ‘Enabling Tiered Codes – Implementation and Market Preparedness,’ is funded by Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) under the Codes Acceleration Fund (CAF), which is part of the federal government’s Green Buildings Strategy to accelerate innovation in making Canada’s buildings more affordable, efficient, comfortable, and resilient. 

The objective of the project is to support efforts to help enable the residential construction industry to effectively adopt forthcoming high-performance building codes, including the highest feasible energy performance tiers of the national model energy codes or other high-performance building codes, such as net-zero emissions codes, by building industry capacity. The project will also inform the building code process, as it looks at buildability, costs and other hurdles that need to be overcome for successful implementation. 

Industry capacity will be built through the project by educating the industry on the coming changes to the national building codes, incenting more builders, renovators, and energy advisors to complete existing net zero training, and developing new training courses. CHBA is also expanding its successful Net Zero Home Labelling Program, which helps builders and renovators to achieve Net Zero energy targets voluntarily, by providing builders and energy advisors with more starting points to guide their project to Net Zero Ready, using builder option packages to make the process more straightforward. An expert Emissions & Resilience Working Group has been established to inform the development of both operational and embodied carbon emissions programming, as well as resilience best practices to protect homes against extreme weather events due to climate change. 

“CHBA members have taken a leading role with the voluntary adoption of the CHBA Net Zero Home Labelling program, with nearly 2000 homes labelled to date. However, there is a lot of work to be done to prepare the industry so that they have the knowledge and skills to implement the many changes coming quickly to building codes, and we also need to provide solid and informed feedback back into the code development system. This is why projects like this are so important,” says CHBA CEO Kevin Lee. “We are excited to be able to continue to advance our industry through delivering CHBA’s existing Net Zero training courses at scale as well as developing a new NBC 9.36 training course. The insights into emissions and resilience options will benefit builders who are leading the industry in those areas, and will also inform future codes, all of which in turn will benefit Canadians.” 

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About the Canadian Home Builders’ Association
The Canadian Home Builders’ Association (CHBA) is the voice of the residential construction industry in Canada, representing some 8,500 member firms across the country. Our membership spans new home builders, renovators, developers, trade contractors, building material manufacturers and suppliers, lenders, and other professionals in the housing sector. 

MEDIA INQUIRIES
Journalists who would like more information are encouraged to submit their request by email to media@chba.ca.