Four green-building practitioners — Lara Ryan, Murray Tate, Keith Robertson, and William Marshall — recorded this 87-minute BuildGreen Atlantic 2023 panel as a pre-conference diagnosis. Their verdict: the region has the technology. What it doesn't have is aligned incentives, a big enough retrofit workforce, or a government willing to enforce the codes it already agreed to.
Murray Tate invested in an air-sealing company built around AeroBarrier technology. Then he watched mandatory blower-door testing get quietly removed from the 2020 National Energy Code under industry lobbying. Engineers Canada looked at that rollback and declared 2030 net-zero targets already missed. For anyone trying to build a green-building business in Atlantic Canada, that sequence says everything about the structural problem: the direction is announced, practitioners commit capital, and then the requirement disappears.
The BuildGreen Atlantic 2023 panel that Lara Ryan organized — 370 delegates, sold out, first event in three and a half years — spent 87 minutes pulling apart exactly how that happens and what it would take to stop it. The four panellists are all in the trade: Ryan runs Lara Ryan Design and organized the conference; Tate runs Tate Engineering and the Airtight Spaces air-sealing operation in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick; Keith Robertson is principal at Solterre Design, Halifax's longest-running high-performance architecture and LEED consulting firm; William Marshall runs LMMW Group, which does energy modelling, deep retrofits, and building-operator training across the region. This is not a think-tank panel. These are people pricing the work.
Fourteen definitions and the split-budget trap
Keith Robertson opened the technical diagnosis with a number that stops the conversation: across North America there are fourteen competing definitions of net-zero energy. Before a procurement can even start, everyone in the room is working from a different scorecard.
Under that definitional chaos sits a structural problem that is easier to name and harder to fix. When a province builds a school and a school board pays the utility bills, the builder has a rational incentive to cut insulation and pocket the capital savings. The operating cost lands on someone else's budget. As Robertson put it, the core requirement is to mix these bags of money — capital and operational — and make decisions on total cost of building ownership. That almost never happens in public procurement.
The same logic runs through private development. When tenant-paid utilities are the norm, developers have no financial reason to build above code. The split-incentive problem isn't a moral failure; it's math. The panel agreed it takes either mandatory energy labelling at point-of-sale or structural reform to close the gap.
BC got it right with a ratchet
The most replicable model the panel cited is BC's step code — a pre-announced ratchet of air-tightness and insulation targets on a multi-year schedule, heading toward net-zero-ready construction by 2032. The mechanism is simple: every three to five years they ratchet down the air tightness, they up the insulation values, and they make it simple. Industry gets enough notice to retool. Nobody faces a cliff edge.
Atlantic Canada has no equivalent. Nova Scotia's adoption of the 2020 national code was already overdue at the time of recording, and the panel noted that some loopholes carried forward from the 2017 code were being written into the update rather than closed. Robertson's read on codes was blunt: a code is the minimum legal requirement to build to, and the industry should be building above it constantly. The problem isn't that codes are aspirational — it's that governments commit to timelines and then don't hold them.
The retrofit math doesn't close
The new-construction conversation is the easy half. The existing housing stock is where the real climate exposure sits, and the panel laid out a capacity gap that isn't close to being filled.
At the time of recording, Canada had roughly 780 certified residential energy auditors nationally. Halifax's own climate plan called for 5,000 home retrofits per year. Those two numbers don't resolve. No amount of incentive spending closes a gap that large without a trained workforce to do the work.
Murray Tate's air-sealing business ran into a different version of the same problem. AeroBarrier — the automated aerosol sealing technology Airtight Spaces deploys — requires an empty building. In practice, that means retrofitting usually waits for a vacancy or a gut renovation, and most owners never reach that trigger. His proposed fix was to bundle retrofit interventions with lifecycle events that already empty a space: when you're doing flooring retrofits, do your windows, and then — with the casing and the baseboards all off — you seal it. The logic is sound. Waiting for a voluntary trigger that never comes is not a retrofit strategy.
The federal green-homes incentive programs were discussed, but the panel's assessment was that carrots alone hadn't moved the market. The biggest behaviour-change lever available, by the panel's consensus, is mandatory energy labelling at point-of-sale: if we had a requirement that people label their homes before they were able to sell, people would be fixing the drafts. An EnerGuide label at the listing stage makes the hidden visible and lets buyers price the operating cost into the offer.
When doing it right gets you penalised
The clearest local proof that net-zero-ready buildings are financeable within normal budgets is developer Peter Polley's work in Halifax — Q Lofts (72 suites, LEED Platinum, ICF construction, triple-glazed windows) and the Woodman's Grove Residences in the Wolfville area. Polley built above code within normal budgets.
The cruel twist the panel described is that his buildings are now too efficient for green-finance programs: he can't get access to funds because he can't demonstrate the 25 percent improvement that programs require. The developers building just over minimum code can access that financing. The early mover can't. That is a policy design failure, and it actively discourages the practitioners most likely to push performance.
On the commercial side, East Port Properties' Burnside warehouse was the other local proof-of-concept. During a -30°C cold snap, the building held an interior temperature of 8°C with all active systems off. That's the resilience argument for high-performance envelopes stated in a single real-world data point — what happens to this building if the utilities are down for a period of time.
The wall you think you have isn't the wall you built
The panel's most practically useful exchange for anyone in the trades was on thermal bridging. A nominally R23 wall can perform as R12 once thermal bridges at floor connections, wall connections, window frames, and structural penetrations are properly accounted for. Engineers and architects routinely underestimate this — we think it's an R23 wall, it actually might be an R12 wall.
The reason it persists isn't ignorance. It's fee margins. Design professionals default to familiar detail libraries because using something already known is how they protect margins. Changing to a high-performance assembly requires a client willing to fund the extra iteration time. That client exists — but procurement processes rarely create the conditions for it.
On mechanical systems, William Marshall's framework was to separate the two decisions: electrify now (in Nova Scotia, electrification saves operating cost even against the current coal-heavy grid), and design for low-temperature heat distribution so a higher-performing upgrade can slot in later without tearing out baseboards. Make sure the distribution is low temp — so you can take it off a boiler and put in a technology that doesn't need to operate at 180 Fahrenheit. It's a sequencing argument: the building you design today should be ready for the mechanical upgrade the grid will make possible in ten years.
The businesses doing this work
Airtight Spaces is the authorized AeroBarrier dealer and automated air-sealing contractor for Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, operating as a division of Tate Engineering. Air-sealing is the highest-ROI first step in any retrofit — air tightness is the number one target because it reduces the demand on everything else downstream: mechanicals, insulation, renewables.
Solterre Design is Halifax's longest-running high-performance architecture and green-building consulting firm — LEED and Passive House work across residential, commercial, institutional, and healthcare projects throughout Atlantic Canada, led by Keith Robertson (Nova Scotia's first LEED AP) and architect Jennifer Corson.
LMMW Group does the full energy services stack for building owners — energy modelling and audits, deep retrofits, solar PV, ongoing facility management, and workforce training — operating under the L360 (facility services) and E360 Institute (training) brands out of Dartmouth.
East Port Properties is the Dartmouth-based commercial developer whose Wilkinson Avenue warehouse complex demonstrated that zero-carbon industrial buildings are not theoretical. The Burnside cold-snap story is their proof point — a building that holds temperature when the grid doesn't.
What actually moves the industry
ESG disclosure requirements and insurers asking about portfolio climate risk came up late in the panel as unexpectedly effective drivers — if you're a building owner with investors, they're going to want to know what your ESG plan is for your portfolio. The panel's read was that these obligations are becoming more effective than voluntary incentive programs for institutional owners because they're not optional.
For the trades, the panel's closing argument on workforce was direct: we don't necessarily have to create all these new trade designations — we need to incrementally train the existing trades folks we have. Adding high-performance envelope details to the knowledge base of existing red-seal holders is faster than building new credential streams from scratch.
The panel ended where it started: the codes exist. The technology works. The region has developers willing to prove it. What's missing is government choosing to enforce what it already committed to — and stop handing rollbacks to the lobby groups that lobbied the blower-door test out of the code in the first place.
Guests: Lara Ryan (Lara Ryan Design / BuildGreen Atlantic), Murray Tate (Airtight Spaces / Tate Engineering), Keith Robertson (Solterre Design), William Marshall (LMMW Group). Episode 46 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast, recorded as a pre-conference panel for BuildGreen Atlantic 2023. Watch the full episode. Also featured: East Port Properties. BC Energy Step Code background: BC government and Wikipedia.