On March 30, 2023, host Daniel Arsenault set up a booth at the Halifax Convention Centre and recorded all day. Eleven guests. One emerging picture: Atlantic Canada's construction industry is mid-shift toward high-performance building, and the people doing the work are ahead of the policy frameworks written to support them.
BuildGreen Atlantic's 2023 edition drew roughly twice the attendance of its 2019 predecessor. You can read that as pent-up post-COVID enthusiasm, or you can read it as something more durable: contractors, engineers, product reps, and government staffers all recognizing that the energy code is changing, the funding is real, and the clients are starting to ask questions they didn't ask five years ago. The eleven conversations recorded that day covered building-envelope commissioning, passive house standards, mass timber, VRF HVAC, LED retrofits, flat-roof R-value testing, and EV infrastructure. Taken together, they sketch the same underlying argument from eleven different angles.
The envelope comes first — and it needs a third set of eyes
Charlene Cormier, Sustainability Manager at EastPoint Engineering in Halifax, has thirty years of building-science experience behind her when she talks about third-party envelope commissioning. The pitch is simple: the building envelope — the skin that separates conditioned from unconditioned air — is the most expensive thing to fix after the fact. EastPoint's commissioning work, which runs on LEED and healthcare projects, positions a specialist alongside the design team early, before a spec decision becomes a poured foundation or a curtain wall that leaks.
Cormier puts the logic plainly: "you want to catch this in design if you're catching this during construction it's going to cost you more." That's not a philosophical preference — it's a cost curve. A design-phase correction is a redline on a drawing. A construction-phase correction is labour, materials, and schedule.
Contractors sometimes assume a third-party commissioner is there to find fault. Cormier's experience runs the other direction. "the contractor doesn't want to come back because there's a leak — it's not beneficial to anybody." Tradespeople who take pride in their work benefit from independent validation as much as the owner does. And the business case sharpens further with the new energy code: "building owners are going to have to do envelope testing to see what is their envelope air leakage." That requirement creates a market. Subcontractors who already know how to price for this work will be ahead when it becomes the norm.
Envelope first, then renewables — and know the difference
Chris Petit, Manager of Technical Services at Passive House Canada, drew a distinction that kept surfacing throughout the day. Passive house is a performance standard, not a certification badge: R40 to R50 walls, airtight construction, heat-recovery ventilation. Net-zero is a different target — and the two are often confused.
The discipline matters because of asset lifespans. "renewable energy is expensive — it's way cheaper to do the Energy Efficiency first." A well-insulated, airtight envelope lasts fifty to a hundred years. Mechanical systems last ten to twenty. Spending money on a solar array before tightening the envelope is putting new equipment on a leaky building. The right order is: reduce demand, right-size mechanicals, then add renewables.
Roxanne Tate, founder and President of Tate Engineering in Halifax, ran the same logic from a different angle. She built her firm from a home office, driven by a conviction about environmental sustainability, into an energy-audit and engineering practice. Her framework hasn't shifted: "the very first step is to reduce demand first and foremost — get that building envelope insulated to the optimal level." Only then do you right-size the HVAC. Building owners who skip that step spend years paying for the gap.
Selling high-performance products into a tradition-heavy market
David Squires, Technical Sales Rep for Italian manufacturer Rothoblaas, covers high-performance membranes and mass-timber fasteners across Atlantic Canada. Rothoblaas operates in seventy-two countries; Atlantic Canada has its own character. Squires frames the challenge directly: "what we're accustomed to here is well my father built it that way yes and his father built it that way." The product demonstration is the easy part. The harder work is the mindset shift that has to come before it.
Mass timber is where he sees that shift happening fastest. The conversations in 2023 had no precedent a few years earlier: "conversations we're having now we never had five years ago — everybody wants to talk about it." Budget overruns — not disinterest — are the primary bottleneck. And mass timber's cost position has changed: pandemic-era lumber price spikes have subsided, while steel and concrete continue to face their own supply-chain inflations.
Vinicius Correa, Technical Advisor for Atlantic WoodWorks (a regional non-profit initiative of the Maritime Lumber Bureau), made the logistics case concrete. Mass timber panels arrive on site numbered and sequenced, crane-ready. "it comes to sight ready to install — it's almost like it's kitted, it comes in a kit, it's like Lego." Faster erection, quieter site, lower crane time — the productivity argument stacks alongside the carbon one. At the time of recording, the Cunard Street five-storey mixed-use mass-timber project — designed by FBM Architects as their own development — was under construction in Halifax. The building completed in February 2024 and stands as the region's clearest case study for the structural system.
The ROI is already there — someone just needs to audit the building
Cameron Benedict, a sales executive with Energy Network Services (ENS), described a model that removes the typical barrier to energy upgrades: free audits. ENS offers no-cost lighting surveys, then designs and delivers the retrofit. A real example from an indoor tennis facility in Fredericton illustrates the math: 57% energy reduction and $18,000 in annual savings, combining reduced energy bills and lower maintenance costs. "they're saving money on energy bills and also lighting maintenance costs — they're very happy"
The same visit is increasingly the entry point for EV-charging infrastructure conversations. On a new construction project, running conduit and wire for chargers costs relatively little. After the fact, it's a different story: "it's always much more efficient — it's harder to dig into existing concrete for sure." Wiring for EV capacity during the build is the kind of decision that costs almost nothing now and a great deal later if skipped. Owners planning mixed-use or commercial properties in 2023 and beyond are the ones who need to hear it before ground breaks.
When the roof doesn't leak, no one asks what it's worth
Dale Hume, President of Frederiction-based Thermtest (a National Research Council-licensed instrument manufacturer), described a knowledge gap so common it passes as normal: building owners routinely don't know the actual thermal performance of their existing flat roof. Insulation degrades over time. Moisture infiltration accelerates that degradation. But as long as the roof doesn't let water through, it rarely gets scrutinized. "if the roof doesn't leak water it's fine — that's the Milestone part of the building." Energy cost bleeds away slowly and invisibly.
Thermtest developed a non-destructive instrument that measures actual in-situ R-value on low-slope roofs without core sampling. For a building owner facing a repair-or-replace decision, that's the difference between guessing and knowing. For an energy auditor or envelope consultant, it's a tool that makes the audit defensible. About 97% of Thermtest's revenue is exported — the instrument has a global market precisely because the problem is universal.
The businesses doing this work
Three of the day's guests represent firms worth knowing for anyone commissioning or auditing buildings in Atlantic Canada.
EastPoint Engineering is an employee-owned, multi-discipline architecture and engineering consultancy based in Halifax, offering integrated services across architecture, civil, structural, mechanical, electrical, building envelope commissioning, and sustainability. It's the firm to call when a project needs LEED facilitation, envelope commissioning, or energy auditing under one roof.
Tate Engineering focuses on energy management, energy audits, energy modelling, and facility optimization for Atlantic Canadian building owners and operators. Roxanne Tate founded it in 2012; the practice is built around the reduce-first philosophy she articulated on the podcast.
Thermtest designs and manufactures instruments for measuring thermal conductivity and related thermophysical properties, including the portable in-situ flat-roof instrument described above. The firm also runs a contract testing laboratory. For owners, engineers, and auditors who need defensible R-value data on existing assemblies, this is the company that built the tool.
What the full day added up to
Eleven guests across two hours don't arrive at a consensus by design. But by the end of the recordings, a consistent argument had assembled itself: the Atlantic Canadian construction sector knows where it needs to go, and many of the people doing the day-to-day work are already there. The envelope first. Performance over prescription. Test what you think you know. Price for the new requirements before they're mandatory. Commission the skin of the building the way you'd commission the mechanical system.
Doubled event attendance from 2019 to 2023 isn't a single data point — it's a direction of travel.
Recorded at BuildGreen Atlantic 2023, Halifax Convention Centre, March 30, 2023. Episode 49 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Guests: Janet Tobin (EfficiencyOne), Madison Schimpf (DNR&R), Charlene Cormier (EastPoint Engineering), Willem Paynter (EMCO Applied), David Squires (Rothoblaas), Chris Petit (Passive House Canada), Tim Duguay (Rework Business Solutions), Cameron Benedict (Energy Network Services), Dale Hume (Thermtest), Roxanne Tate (Tate Engineering), Vinicius Correa (Atlantic WoodWorks). Cunard Street project details: FBM Architects. Passive House standard reference: Passive House Canada.