Canada’s building codes are a mess, and the climate era’s coming

CLIP You’re listening to a frequency podcast, network production in association with City News.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings After a massive earthquake in Turkey, the devastation and loss of life was severe, more even than was expected. A month later, the country is still digging out, hunting for remains. Trying to figure out why this was so tragic. The earthquake itself obviously was unavoidable, but in the aftermath as officials, reporters, and experts searched for answers, the most critical one became very easy to see.

CLIP That’s right. It’s very disappointing. Really what we are seeing here is of course, a, you know, old building stock that hasn’t performed, uh, uh, as desired, but also even the new builds actually, uh, have, uh, gone through severe, uh, pancaking style damage. So clearly, there, there has been a big failure to comply with the code.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Until a disaster strikes, building codes are boring unless they’re your job, but they’re there for a reason, and if they’re not followed, a small disaster can become a big one. In Turkey, cost cutting and corruption are cited as the culprits behind insufficient cooperation with the codes. That would’ve helped keep some buildings upright. Here in Canada, we may not have the same level of cost cutting and corruption when it comes to building codes, but what we do have is confusion. As we enter the climate era, more and more of this country is going to be susceptible to extremes. Fire, floods, heat, all of that and the way we prepare ourselves to survive what’s coming is with better, stronger, safer buildings in order to know how to make those buildings better, stronger, and safer. We need to update our building codes. Which ones? Well, here’s where the confusion comes in right now. There is a national building code, which is a set of guidelines to be followed by provincial regulations on buildings and construction standards. And then depending on the size of the building and where it’s located, the codes, a contractor uses to say, reinforce your foundation or waterproof your basement, may or may not. Up to your local municipal government. You see it’s confusing. So how does all this work together or more accurately right now? Not, and just how much trouble could we be in in the coming decades if we don’t figure this out quickly? I am Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is the big story. Katherine Blaze Baum is a member of the Globe and Mails Investigative Team. She, along with her colleague, Tuan Ha, dug into the convoluted world of building codes in Canada. Hi, Catherine.

Katherine Blaze Baum Hi.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings I’m glad that we’re talking about this today because I feel like this is something everybody, owns, rents, lives in a home in Canada, probably needs to get ahead of it.

Katherine Blaze Baum Certainly, uh, seems that way to me.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Our lives are touched by standards and codes pretty much in every facet. Uh, and so building codes seemed like an obvious place to sort of look to for, you know, some insights into just how vulnerable we are.

Katherine Blaze Baum Yes.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings And one of your reports, well a couple of them begin, you know, with some human faces on this, but one of them begins with a pretty extreme example. Can you just quickly walk us through what happened, uh, to a woman named Natalie Harris in Barry Ontario?

Katherine Blaze Baum Sure. So Natalie Harris, she was at the time a Barry City counselor, and this was sort of the afternoon of July 2021. So not last summer, but the summer before. And she was, you know, out and about. She was planning on picking up some groceries, decided to instead first drop by her ex-husband’s house to see the teenage son that they co-parent and to check on the family dogs. And she’s very grateful that she did because what happened next was harrowing.And she’s unclear on what would’ve happened to her son had she decided to go grocery shopping first.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Hmm.

Katherine Blaze Baum So basically soon after she arrived, her ex-husband, John called, um, and he was at a nearby Costco and he saw like a wind gust, just picked up a garbage can and hurl it into a car and it smashed the windshield. And this guy is a paramedic and so he’s obviously thinking about safety. He calls the house and he tells his son, take the dogs and get to the basement. He knows that there’s a tornado, or at least a very bad wind event coming. Their son had been upstairs in the bedroom and that was a part of the house that saw extensive damage. So if his mom hadn’t come by, Dad hadn’t phoned. It’s entirely possible that could have been a much more tragic story for the Harris family. So they go to the basement, Harris and her son, and the house just starts shaking and just listening to her tell me the story was terrifying. Just keeps seeing dust falling. They can just tell that the structure above them is being ripped apart. They couldn’t hear each other screaming. They see each other’s like faces and the sun like grabs his mom’s cheeks and is trying to get her attention and then all of a sudden they, you know, the house just goes quiet and she goes upstairs and, you know, everything’s gone still. And basically the, she looks up and there’s the sky where the roof used to be, and there’s just rain pouring down on her. There’s like furniture everywhere. Insulation everywhere. There’s a doormat that wasn’t hers that somehow ended up in their hallway. She goes out the door, there’s cars overturned. Her vehicle is, you know, way down the street. And so everyone starts checking on their neighbours. And thankfully no one died. But it was a, a very dramatic and destructive tornado.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Why was it so damaging and destructive? And I guess, you know, this is Barry, Ontario. Like, is that common for that area? What’s different about this one?

Katherine Blaze Baum So Barry has been hit by tornadoes before this one kind of stood out in more kind of contemporary times, because the wind speeds were up to 210 kilometers per hour, which is rated what’s called EF2 on this particular scale. And so a lot of the tornadoes that come through. Might be EF1s. So basically the tornado just brought so much more wind load and, and what are called uplift forces than the building code requires that homes in the area be built to withstand.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings This brings us to the building codes, but maybe for the big picture, just sort of before we get into that, we’ve covered extreme weather and its impact on Canadian communities a lot on this. But perhaps not so much the sort of overall physical and monetary cost of it. Have we been able to quantify that in any way as kind of part of the reporting around this, like the increased risk of financial damage?

Katherine Blaze Baum Yeah, and I, I think that’s a good question and one that’s being brought up more and more, it kind of at the outset of the conversation around climate change a lot. Emphasis was on mitigation and kind of energy efficiency in reducing greenhouse gases and carbon footprints. And now we’re talking a lot more about adaptation and resilience, right? sAnd so there are some, you know, companies that are tracking this. So one figure that we cited in the story is from Catastrophe Indices and Quantification Inc. It’s a consultancy that, uh, analyzes data from meteorological and human made disaster, and this group found that insured damage from severe weather events in Canada went from an average of 400 million per year in the early two thousands to an average of roughly 2 billion in recent years.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Wow. So that’s five times what It was just decades ago.

Katherine Blaze Baum And it’s, you know, the stakes are getting higher and it’s only going to get, worse. There’s also been some work done to understand how, you know, an inexpensive climate resilient solution. You know, they might cost a little bit upfront, but then save a lot in the event of a natural disaster. So there’s been some work on sort of quantifying that as well.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings And when you mentioned, you know, just again to use, uh, Natalie Harris and, and the Barry Tornado as an example, you know, when you mentioned that this kind of weather was just more than what the building codes had, had ever predicted is maybe the wrong word, but were set up for, and you dug into the building codes in places like this, what were you trying to figure out? Like, what was the big question?

Katherine Blaze Baum The big question was basically, you know, to what extent do our building codes stand up to climate? How vulnerable are we and in what ways are we most vulnerable? I realized that the matter of codes doesn’t sound, you know, particularly sexy, but I, I used to be the Globe’s environment reporter, and in that role it was something that kind of came up kind of tangential to some conversations that I was having, and then I thought to myself, that’s actually, it’s a really interesting question, you know, to what extent.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Do our building codes are, are they sufficient in light of this kind of new world that we’re living in?

Katherine Blaze Baum And so the project which we called code Minimum basically set out to analyze the current codes and standards across a number of key areas to determine where they’re poised to fail us in the not so distant future.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings What do those codes look like?

Katherine Blaze Baum And we don’t have to get to a granular level right this second, but, but what does that process look like in Canada? Like who starts setting the code? You know, I’ve been down the road a lot on this show trying to determine, uh, responsibility between federal and provincial and municipal governments. But like, you know, who owns this? So, when Haun and I started this, examination of the building code system, we, we knew it was gonna be bureaucratic and clunky, but we were both just kind of kept looking at each other with our head spinning half the time. I mean, it’s a very fragmented and largely opaque system and no, not in Canada, never. And it’s one of those things where we do interviews and we’d keep hearing from people. It’s basically like a black. Which we thought, you know, great as we set out on our reporting. And so basically just breaking it down, the federal government is responsible for research related to building codes and it produces a national model building code every five years or so. And then under a new governance structure, which took force kind of mid our reporting, Ottawa will also have a say in what exactly the code. But it’s very important to note that in Canada, that national model building code is just that. It’s a model. It’s not binding. That’s because the matter of building regulations falls outside of federal jurisdiction, and so the provinces and territories actually have to adopt. The national model code, either in part or in full. So they kind of use it as a template. So the national model code matters a lot because the provinces and territories do, in large part, kind of defer to that as their rubric. There are some provinces that make changes, but for the most part, it’s. It’s largely based on the national model code, but then there are exceptions. Like in Quebec, the residential building code only applies to buildings greater than a certain size, and so, you know, there are municipalities in Quebec that, that don’t have a building code at all. Then there’s First Nations communities. These are communities that are under federal jurisdiction. So you’d think, okay, well then the National model code would apply. Well, no, because it’s a model code. So then the First Nations have to go through this kind of rigmarole to absorb their kind of power over building codes and choose. To adopt in part, in full, whatever the province is put forward. So it’s, it’s just a, a messy patchwork of regulations. And there is a push, I should say, to harmonize building codes across the country. And that’s in large part driven by the provinces and territories, but also builders because they wanna be able to work across the country without having to adjust to different codes. It will make things quicker and more affordable.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings So what does that actually look like? on the ground in towns and cities across the country. Is there any uniformity? Do uh, contractors and and other people understand how to work within these?

Katherine Blaze Baum I mean, it, it looks like confusion, you know, in some cases, for sure. And Haun did some excellent work on going through the code change request. These are proposals that are put forward by interested parties to, you know, a province or a territory or the federal government. Uh, a great example that he found was the use of backwater valves. So maybe I’ll use that as a way to sort of illustrate. The confusion that can come from this. So a backwater valve, it’s effectively like a flap that blocks water from flowing up a drain into the home. Its installation is not universally mandated because of ambiguous language in both the Ontario code and the National Code. So in Ontario’s code, the province requires that homes with drains must be fit with backwater valves if they quote unquote. Be subject to backflow.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings They must, if they may.

Katherine Blaze Baum Exactly.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings An editor would have a field day with that statement.

Katherine Blaze Baum Exactly. It’s like, okay, so what does that mean? And it turns out it’s not clear. So the Ontario Auditor General found that the wording left the Ontario Code open to, you know, very diverging local interpretation. So her office surveyed 52 municipalities and found that only 14 required backwater valves in new homes with basements, and then hot dug deeper on this, and he found that in Windsor, all new homes have to have the device. In Toronto, the city only requires the valve in areas that quote have been identified as locations. Subject to backflow. Yeah. Yeah. Which, Is again, ambiguous. So I thought that was just a really telling, telling example of the confusion that can kind of come into play and, and the ways in which homeowners can become kind of vulnerable across kind of things that they didn’t even know that they were. Like, you know, you don’t know what you don’t know.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings So given that situation, I’m really not trying to, to lead you to a conclusion here, but, you know, one of the things I wanted to ask about is, how adaptable and, uh, fluid are these regulations when it comes to taking into account, uh, the new reality of climate change?

Katherine Blaze Baum You know, and again, I’m using Ontario as an example. We’re gonna talk about Quebec in a minute. This won’t be totally Ontario centric, but yeah, in Ontario, like I’m just, just anecdotally, like the province is making a huge deal right now about how many new homes they’re planning to build to accommodate all the immigration they’re seeking, which is good.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Do we even know if these homes will be built to withstand the stuff that happens in places like Barry?

Katherine Blaze Baum I mean, the short answer to that is not soon or not soon enough in the minds of a lot of people. So, so far the code system hasn’t really taken climate change into account very much at all. So I will give credit where credit is due. Some climate data that underlies certain building requirements has been updated at sort of the national level, and the provinces and territories do look to that data, but even those updated figures are still several years old and they do not take into account the projected warming that Canada is facing under various climate change scenarios, and that data is really important, it dictates design parameters. And so while the feds have done some of this work to develop forward-looking data, those figures are only going to be submitted for consideration in the 2025 edition of the code, which likely won’t be released until 2026 or 2027 and wouldn’t be adopted by the provinces and territories until about 18 months later.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Okay?

Katherine Blaze Baum So it could have been, you know, the end of the decade before climate. And sort of the new climate reality that we’re living in is really taken into consideration when setting code requirements. We are moving with our typical alacrity on this kind of thing. What’s crazy is actually, you know, Canada is doing better than other places in in the US. I was stunned to find out that there is no code model or otherwise at the, uh, sort of national level in the US. Some states have codes, many don’t, and then this leaves you with like just counties that have no code at all. So I, I found it kind of astounding.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Okay. Well maybe I’m being too harsh then. At least something is happening.

Katherine Blaze Baum Exactly. At least something is happening. Let’s talk about what this actually means, and you mentioned bc, which you can talk about in a minute, but maybe do first, uh, tell me about the flooding in 2019 and Sam Quebec. I guess this surprised a number of people who already believed that they’d done all the right things. I, I think that’s right. I think the, the example of the same Marie flooding in 2019 really illustrates that you can be really well intentioned and still have it backfire, which I know is disconcerting and feels kind of disempowering to people. Um, so again, this was some reporting that Haun did, him being the much better French speaker than I. So St. Marie, it’s been flooded kind of each spring. That’s nothing new. Area, kind of south of Quebec city. But in April of 2019, the damage was just unprecedented. There were hundreds of homes, I think close to a thousand homes, had to be evacuated, including some that had been waterproofed. And it should be noted that St. Marie doesn’t actually have construction bylaws and it leaves it to builders to follow the provincial code. So you’re used to sort of seeing. Your typical sites after flooding, right? Like just lots of water cars submerged. This had some interesting imagery. There were some buildings that like slumped backwards or slipped sideways from their foundation. The floors became slanted, joists were cracked, and so these were houses that Haun found had been waterproofed. With the installation of impermeable barriers around the foundation.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings So like you kind of said in the question that ended up backfiring costing people hundreds of thousands of dollars in kind of repairs. And why was that?

Katherine Blaze Baum Because the, because the floods were just so much more extreme. Basically the way it was kind of described to ha and, and in turn in the piece to readers was the houses kind of ended. Filling with water, and they became more like boats, like they started to float away. So one thing that an engineer said should have been done and should be done in the future is you actually at some point should allow some amount of water into the home to keep it in place, which I thought was. Super counterintuitive, but apparently that’s the move.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings And what about in bc?

Katherine Blaze Baum You mentioned there’s some heat proofing that is or isn’t, I guess, going on there. Yeah, so in BC as environment reporter, I covered the, the heat dome that happened there. So the heat dome that happened in 2021, it is linked to hundreds of deaths and the overwhelming majority of those deaths occurred indoors. And so there’s been a lot of work. Done on trying to understand kind of how hot is too hot when it comes to heat inside. And this happened in a place with relatively low air conditioning rates. And so, you know, I spoke with the daughter of a woman who died in her condo with fans worrying in the background with no air conditioning. Her death was among those that has been linked to the heat dome and there was a a BC coroner’s report and there. Like lots of recommendations in the coroner’s report that we’ve heard before in the wake of heat waves. But this particular report actually mentioned building codes, and that was something that Haun and I found intriguing. It recommended that the 2024 edition of the BC building code require new homes to have features that lessen the impact of extreme heat. And it said that this could be accomplished either through passive cooling, which is, you know, using, for example, sun reflective material. Or active cooling systems like air conditioners. So, you know, neighborhoods look pretty much exactly the same after a heat wave. That’s not true of a tornado or a flood, but this is how people die by climate change. You know, it is the silent killer in climate change is arsenal, so we gotta figure it out.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings So to go back to the big picture for a moment, you know, right now at this stage is usually when I ask like, so what’s being done? And we’ve kind of gone through that and things are moving even if they will take significant time. When you talk to people who, who get into the weeds of like what the regulations actually end up being, how different will building a home in Canada in 20 28, 20 29 be from what’s happening right now in our cities?

Katherine Blaze Baum I mean, I think the hope among experts and you know, people who submit code change requests is that proposals. Kind of build our resilience and help buildings withstand climate change will be increasingly, uh, absorbed into the code and that. You know, climate change adaptation right now is viewed as what’s called a policy priority at the national code level and not a technical priority. So they’re basically talking about how to incorporate climate change into the code as opposed to just incorporating climate change into the code. So I think the hope is just that there are some simple measures that end up in the code that are, you know, relatively inexpensive, but that can save, a lot of money in terms of insured damages. You know, examples are the hurricane straps, the backwater valve, you know, maybe backup power for a sump pump. Just kind of like the low hanging fruit is what people want the different levels of government to go after.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Last question then. If somebody right now is, planning their dream home, or is buying a home right now that you know, to your point earlier, they may not know what they don’t know, like what kind of advice would you give them after doing this investigation? What should they try to get a handle on?

Katherine Blaze Baum I think there are things that we can do that would better protect us against, you know, headache of damages and you know, just losing money to having to fix things. And I think it’s worth just kind of looking at some of what a lot of builders call the low hanging fruit and talking to builders about things that can be done. There are some builders that are kind of more open-minded and kind of forward looking when it comes to climate stuff. So you can find a builder that kind of fits that, one of the builders that we quote in the story is Doug Terry of Doug Terry Holmes. He’s in Ontario. And um, you know, he’s somebody who is super knowledgeable on things like how. Solar heat gain, you know, you get via this window versus that window. So it’s like windows. It’s thinking about flood prevention. So like this backup power for a sump pump, having a sump pump functioning, um, you know, air conditioning. It’s controversial because it adds. Emissions, but you know, it can save lives and so, you know, gotta gotta weigh the way, the cost benefit on that one.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Catherine, thank you so much for this. Um, it’s really dense stuff, but it’s so important.

Katherine Blaze Baum Thanks for having me and bearing with me. It is dense as you say, but it’s important.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings It’s getting more and more important. Katherine Blaze Baum reporting with the Globe and Mail. That was the big story. For more head to the big story podcast.ca, you can always talk to us on Twitter at the big story, fp n or email us hello at the big story podcast.ca. This podcast is available in all your podcast players. This is my frequent reminder to toss us a rating and a review if yours let you do it. It’s one thing that keeps our podcast in front of new people. Who might have never heard of us, and we like new people here at the Big story. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.