In the summer of 2021, Charles McCormick of Soprema and Kyle Kennedy of IRC Building Sciences sat down with the Atlantic Construction Podcast to explain what happens when roofing material simply disappears — and why the right answer, more often than you'd think, is not to replace the roof at all.
By August 2021, a commercial roofing contractor in Atlantic Canada trying to source ISO insulation was looking at 12-week-plus lead times — and that was the optimistic number. The polyisocyanurate shortage had two causes that compounded each other badly. COVID-19 manufacturing shutdowns had already chewed into North American production capacity. Then, in February 2021, Winter Storm Uri tore through Texas and physically destroyed equipment at insulation plants, cutting off the MDI chemical supply that polyiso depends on. Industry figures placed actual lead times at 31 weeks or more in some markets by mid-summer. The 12-week figure cited on air was, by that point, the floor.
Halifax was in the middle of a multi-unit residential boom. The work was there. The roofing contractors were showing up — New Brunswick firms were crossing provincial lines to help with the load. Kennedy described it directly: “we're seeing a lot of branches that were just in new brunswick kind of coming into nova scotia to help with the workload because it's needed”. The insulation was not.
Charles McCormick had spent more than a decade at Soprema and 25 years in the industry overall. Kyle Kennedy had come out of Flynn Canada, where he watched the company grow from around 20 branches to more than 32, before moving to consulting at IRC Building Sciences Group. The two of them had developed a working relationship that turned out to be well-suited to exactly this kind of market dislocation. This is what they told the show.
Spec for what's actually available, not what you'd prefer
The conventional workflow on a commercial roofing job is for the building scientist or consultant to write the spec, go to tender, and let the contractor source the materials. That sequence breaks down when lead times run longer than a construction window. Kennedy's answer was to invert it: call the manufacturer before the spec is written.
His framing was direct: “what's the lead time what are we looking at and then we'll adjust from there”. If a particular ISO product is unavailable for three months, you design around something that is available. That is not a compromise — it is the correct professional response to a constrained market. Specifying an unavailable product and then discovering the problem at tender adds weeks and erodes client trust.
McCormick had been pushing the same message from the manufacturer's side. When architects specified Soprema products and the lead time was prohibitive, he would proactively offer equivalent substitutions with supporting technical data. Most architects responded constructively. He described one exception: “i've had one job where the architect just said no i want this and we ended up accommodating but it wasn't easy”. One rigid refusal out of many is manageable. Blanket inflexibility in a supply-constrained summer is not.
Scan the roof before you spec anything
The deeper argument in the episode, and the one with the longest shelf life beyond the 2021 crunch, is about the thermal-scan-first workflow. The instinct when a roof is failing is to replace it. That instinct is often wrong — or at minimum, premature.
Kennedy's team at IRC takes a specific sequence seriously: “we're on that project site before we even think about specking it out we're doing core tests we're doing dimensions”. Those cores tell you what's actually wet and what isn't. The thermal (infrared) scan, done after hours when the roof has been absorbing solar heat all day, maps where moisture has infiltrated the assembly. The result is often that the problem is localized — a section of wet insulation, a failed flashing detail — while 80 or 90 percent of the existing membrane is in serviceable condition.
In a market short on ISO insulation and fasteners, that matters enormously. “if you're proactive enough it might just be 5 10 to a building owner if you can leave 90 of your roof up there”, McCormick said. A thermal-scan-led recap — removing and replacing only the damaged sections, recapping over the sound membrane — gets the building watertight with a fraction of the material demand of a full tear-off and replacement.
Soprema had been building the case for recapping on sustainability grounds for years before the supply crisis made it financially obvious. “the company for a long time has been talking about sustainability and design not replacing things that don't need to be replaced”, McCormick said. A roof membrane that is structurally sound and not saturated is worth keeping. Sending it to landfill because it is easier to quote a full replacement is neither good practice nor, in 2021, a realistic option. Soprema had formalized this with a warranted recap program — a 100-year roof built by recapping in layers over time rather than cycling through full replacements.
Sell on labor saved, not just product cost
One of McCormick's persistent challenges was getting building owners and contractors to accept that a more expensive membrane can be the cheaper choice overall. The sticker price comparison always looks bad for the premium product. The total-installed-cost comparison often does not.
Soprema's response to the labor shortage in Atlantic Canada was to develop laminated Smart Board panels — a single product combining multiple layers that would otherwise require separate installation steps. The labor savings are real and quantifiable: “if you can justify that price point and make them understand that the labor costs a lot more than material”, the math changes. “there's a real shortage of labor out there and with that shortage of labor sometimes comes from quality control issues on jobs” — and quality control failures on a commercial roof are expensive to fix after the fact.
The same discipline applies to product specification generally. When the consultant and the manufacturer's rep are aligned before the spec goes out — checking lead times, confirming what's available, designing around real constraints — everyone's cost of rework goes down.
What IRC's technology suite actually does
Kennedy walked through IRC's full capability set, which had expanded well beyond its roots as an industrial roofing consultancy since the firm's founding in 1992. The four practice areas — roofing, building envelope, parking and paving, structural — are backed by a technology suite that includes thermal/IR scanning, pull tests, and two tools worth knowing about.
The Matterport 3D capture system gives IRC the ability to build a permanent, measurable as-built record of a building at any point in its life. The most practical application in new construction is straightforward: “we can come in do that scan for them when all the conduit all the plumbing all the wiring that you're gonna bury is exposed we'll do that port you have that forever now”. When a commissioning fault shows up three years after occupancy and the contractor needs to know where that pipe runs, the answer is in the model rather than in drywall tearout.
The drone program is more specialized. IRC employs a licensed commercial pilot who runs envelope inspections of high-rise buildings using properly equipped and certified aircraft. The point Kennedy made was specific: “you can't just hire drillable off the street that body is a the proper licensing the parish the safety parachutes all these things”. Drone inspection replaces swing-stage scaffolding for close visual access to high-rise cladding and envelope details, but only when the operator meets the regulatory and safety requirements.
IRC's November 2020 acquisition by Rimkus Consulting Group extended the firm's specialist network across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. — adding access to a global pool of forensic engineers for clients whose projects cross borders or involve complex technical disputes.
The supply chain as a design input
McCormick closed with a point about how Soprema thinks about supply-chain risk at the corporate level. The company's strategy is deliberate vertical integration of essential components: “if it's an essential component in our systems if possible we try to acquire the company so that we have control over that vertical integration”. The 2021 shortage made visible what was always true: a manufacturer's ability to deliver depends on the security of its upstream supply.
For anyone specifying or sourcing commercial roofing in Atlantic Canada, the 2021 crisis made three habits permanently worth having. Check lead times before you write the spec. Scan the roof before you commit to a full replacement. And when you're pricing a premium product, do the labor math before you price it out.
Featured on this episode
SOPREMA Canada Inc. manufactures waterproofing membranes, thermal and acoustic insulation, vegetated roof systems, and air/vapour barrier products for the roofing and building-envelope sectors, with R&D and production facilities across Canada.
IRC Building Sciences Group, A Rimkus Company is a Canadian engineering and building-sciences consulting firm with more than 35 years of experience, specialising in the assessment, design, remediation, and quality observation of roofing, building envelope, structural, and pavement systems.
Guests: Charles McCormick, Senior Sales/Business Development, SOPREMA Canada Inc., and Kyle Kennedy, Project Manager, IRC Building Sciences Group, A Rimkus Company. Episode 17 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast, published August 31, 2021. Watch the full episode. Supply-chain receipts: Duro-Last on the state of polyiso, August 2021; Rimkus acquisition of IRC, November 2020.