Why Atlantic Canada Is Already Behind on Net Zero — and What BC Got Right | BuildGreen Atlantic Panel

0:00This episode is brought to you by our presenting sponsor Pizzant Building Products. Pizzant Building Products has been providing contractors and builders with the supplies necessary to complete their jobs since 1964. They have built a reputation of honest, helpful, and quality service, serving the HRM for the last 58 years. Now with seven locations in Nova Scotia and one in New Brunswick, our team at the Atlantic Construction Podcast is extremely excited to announce our new co-branded partner, Procore. Procore is the global leader in construction management software. We'll be conducting

0:29several podcast episodes with Procore users and construction companies across the country in 2023, among many other things. Stay tuned — we're excited. Okay, welcome back to the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Today we're excited to have a panel discussion on all things Net Zero, and we've got a lot of different perspectives in the room today. So I'll start by introducing: to my left, the far left, William Marshall with LMMW Group; we have Murray Tate with Tate Engineering and Airtight Spaces; to my right we have Keith Robertson, president

1:10at Solterre Design, and to the far right we have Lara Ryan. Lara Ryan Consulting and BuildGreen Atlantic. Thank you all so much for joining us today — excited to have a conversation on Net Zero. Thanks, Dan. Lara, maybe we can start with just a little bit of info on BuildGreen Atlantic, which is next Thursday, March 30th at the Nova Centre. I know you've been working really hard on that event; it sounds like there's been a lot of great response this year.

1:44Yeah, really excited about BuildGreen Atlantic. We've been away for three and a half years, so it's nice to come back. The event's sold out with 370 delegates, 49 trade show booths. It's a really good opportunity to bring the building industry together. And I think part of the reason there's so much enthusiasm is that the building industry is so varied — you know, it's from the design professionals to the tradespeople and everybody in between: building owners and policy makers. So it's going to be a great event. We did open up the

2:18trade show for a free trade show pass between two o'clock and four o'clock. So if you go to buildgreenatlantic.ca you can register for that trade show pass — so if you missed out on the full conference you can at least still come and visit the 49 booths. Yeah, that's great. No, it's exciting, and I know our team's excited to be there. And I'm sure these gentlemen will also be present. Absolutely — everybody who's anybody. There we go. So today, lots to discuss on the topic of Net

2:50Zero. Not an unfamiliar term, but maybe not so well defined. It's hard to know where to start. But Murray, maybe you could kick us off. I know we were talking before the episode — you know, it's kind of a simple process, but kind of full of blockages and so many layers, with five steps to Net Zero. Yeah, like technically, I think the people around this table understand that when I look at anything I try to boil it down to the simplest steps. And what I've

3:23been taught by the likes of Natalie Leonard and people that are pioneers in the industry is: super-insulate, right-size your windows and doors, quality windows and doors, right-size your mechanical equipment, and then that minimal offset with renewables. It was interesting — when Roxanne and I started our business, we were looking for an opportunity. And I went to a trade show in Toronto and these steps were in our mind, and we wanted to do something different, something for the future of our business and our legacy, I guess.

4:01And I came across AeroBarrier. The gentleman I met, Gord Cook, and his team — they brought HRVs to Canada. And he said, do you want to get involved in something new? And when he described the system where you pressurize a space, atomize a sealant, and the sealant automatically goes to the holes, I said, that's step two done. And we were taking a lot of courses with the Chamber of Commerce at the time, Roxanne and I, and they were encouraging us to invest, invest in the green economy.

4:37And so we did. We invested heavily, and here we are four years later, a pandemic in the middle of it — like, you know, it's not something anybody can control, but it's difficult to swallow that. Okay, now that we've invested in this testing gear, well, in this sealant equipment, and to make the industry better, to make buildings better, to make them healthier — now that we've done our investment, and you hear the government say, oh, we're going to Net Zero by this timeline, in this timeline.

5:12And to see in 2020 they take it off the table in the National Energy Code and the National Building Code — it's like, okay, on one hand the government's saying... but then on the other hand they're not, they're not creating the demand. And so we need the demand to drive the growth. So it's a little frustrating — actually, it can be quite a bit frustrating. And I think we'll get into that as we go. But so we're invested — Airtight Spaces — and I'm going to focus on that part of our business; it does other

5:43things, but that's where I'm going to focus. Try to focus anyway — see what happens today. Yeah. I mean, it's such a political issue, and there are so many other layers. And like you said, the government's not creating the demand while they have these incentives for more testing, and then there are waivers. I think it's almost similar with building code but no enforcement. Yeah. Any comments on that? Yeah, there are a couple of layers to that. I mean, there's always the political will

6:15component, right? You're going: what do we want, how do we get forward, we want to move these things? But then, you know, we're going to be cautious because we need to keep everyone on side and we need to keep the building officials up to speed. You know, we can't ask them to go enforce something that they haven't been trained on. So there's always — we'll say the train is: the head of the train's moving, but the midsection, the ass, is still sitting in the station, if that

6:36makes sense. Right. So I think when you look at those bits, Murray's perfectly in the middle of something where he said, I've invested my money, I'm going after a sector of this. And at the end of the day you're going, well, we're stepping back from where we're saying we're leveraging and we're going full in, and then we go, well, maybe let's just look at it again. And I think even something as simple as the actual definition of Net Zero is

7:00really that place to start. We're throwing these terms around, we're going, we're going Net Zero — can you say there are 14 different definitions? Yeah, so Keith and I did a presentation for Public Works, and that was their piece — they're going to educate us on what is Net Zero. And so Keith did some digging, and I think it was across North America — yeah, 14 definitions of Net Zero. And this is Net Zero Energy we're speaking of, right? So when you look at that, you know,

7:25there's no wonder that there's absolute confusion out there. And you have folks that are non-technical policy, and you have folks that are industry-related trying to keep people employed, and going, we don't want to flip into something that actually puts us out of work or makes it cost-prohibitive to build these buildings. But at the same time we need to make changes. So that idea of first getting on the same page of what is Net Zero, what is the definition, what's the target, and what are we trying

7:51to actually accomplish together — because like he says, there are a couple of slices to that cake, right? There are layers here that we have to do, and good design to the envelope is kind of that first step. It's the first step of a few steps. So for our listeners, maybe we can start before we get too deep into the different layers — a sufficient definition of Net Zero: as I understand it, Keith, you mentioned this to me — an energy-efficient

8:18building, on an annual basis, produces as much energy as it consumes. Can we start there? We could certainly start there, and that's a nice clean, understandable definition. So: first of all being energy efficient — as Murray says in the first two steps — and then getting that demand as low as possible, that's really the objective, and then using the remaining energy that you need, offsetting it ideally on site with renewables. So typically that's roof-mounted photovoltaics, or, you know, that kind of thing. So that's a nice clean definition.

8:48However, that's not a common understanding and it's not always achievable. So you take a building like downtown Halifax, or a 12-story apartment building — it's not going to have enough room for you to put enough renewables on it. So it has to be tweaked a little bit. But most of the simple definitions kind of follow that logic: an energy-efficient building that offsets its energy use on an annual basis with renewables. Yeah. And I think when we were talking earlier, the statement 'finance trumps everything' isn't just for

9:19private — like, this is something that you deal with publicly as well, in public tenders, and a lot of the same problems there. Even when the government has incentives, you're touching a bit of a sore point, because we all look at this and we look at our wallets — half our money goes to tax dollars. And if we can't get Public Works and different entities within the government to... you need to mix these bags of money of capital and operational and make decisions on total cost of building

9:49ownership. These are our tax dollars, every one of us. And so there's more money going into operation costs than there is into the building costs — a lot more. A lot more. Yet the decisions are made on balancing that capital budget. And we're seeing some really, some very real examples of that. So on one hand we're seeing movement from the government, with Bill 57 saying all new projects funded by the government need to be Net Zero or Net Zero ready and be climate resilient. When it comes back to

10:17this: what does that mean, what's the definition of it? 2050, right? Is that the... nobody that starts the planning process after 2022 — so that means buildings — we start planning now, okay — need to be Net Zero. Were you saying that it's kind of like an overage on the timeline, like there's going to be five or six years of lag? There's going to be certainly some lag, and how you define when the project starts the planning stage. But we're certainly now in that window.

10:44But we've seen this language coming into RFPs. An example would be a school that went up for an RFP for design services last year, or a couple of years ago, acknowledging Bill 57, saying the project is to be Net Zero or Net Zero ready and climate resilient — without defining that. We start into the design process and the project managers will go, well, actually we're not required to do that yet, and we do have this budget thing. So right. And it very precisely fits into

11:19what Murray describes: the province builds a school, the school board maintains and pays the operating cost. So the province has their budget — they're not really worried about what the school board pays for the operations of it. So we've got to get into this notion that we look at the life cycle cost of the building and plan appropriately from day one. And there's discrepancy there, and a gap between the provincial government, municipality, the school board — it's just not all on the same page as far as

11:49it's just the way it's always been. And you can talk to people in Public Works and go, yeah, I know it doesn't make sense. Yes, you're right. There's a lot — a lot of tradition involved in this. There's a lot of opportunity for leadership and sort of breaking away from this. But it's tough to be the first, whether it's the, you know... and it's not a problem unique to Nova Scotia, it's happening in other jurisdictions. That's the point. But we're kind of running out of time — like, somebody's got

12:16to show leadership and just blast through this stuff. And even to the point of the definition of Net Zero, I think it goes back even a little bit more than that, to some baseline sustainability understandings of why — where, why, you know, crazy people like us are pushing this stuff all the time and trying to make people change the way they do things, and a little bit of 'the sky is falling, hurry up, we've got to go.' Right, like — there's a bit of a sensitivity to that

12:46right too — is this really all necessary? And getting everybody on that same page from a climate and sustainability, from a global warming standpoint: it's like, yes, fossil fuels to renewable energy, that's right, kind of. And generically — well-known — clear the path for those leaders to really emerge and say, we're going to do it no matter what. Halifax is a good example with the climate plan, right? Like, they're getting a lot of pushback on the Halifax climate plan because it means that you

13:22have to raise people's taxes and nobody wants that. But how are you going to do this unless we find mechanisms to pay for it? And so being able to keep pushing that through is a challenging place for leaders to be sometimes. But we need more of them, and we need people to support that kind of leadership. And I think a better understanding of why, and creating that demand, is going to help some of the challenges that the industry faces, that the

13:56industry faces moving forward. And adopting the first, 'reduce' — they're counter-intuitive. That's what we find when we're having discussions with people: oh, we want to advance. Well, everything that we've learned from advancing... I'm middle age here, I guess — there's been more and more energy used. And if we want to keep advancing, people don't want to reduce. Why should I pay more tax, or why should I do this to reduce, have less? It's a good idea as long as it doesn't impact me. Yeah, yeah,

14:29don't ask me to reduce what I already have. I think the key — and a little bit of what Lara was saying — and then really where he started, with this idea of life cycle analysis. We are very blind to the fact — and I'll use Walmart — they say, well, I can go in and I take it off the shelf and I just assume it's there. I don't care how it got there, I don't care where the materials came from, and what factory

14:50they came from and then what truck they were on or what boat. Right, we take it, we go, that served my purpose, I'm done with it. Right. So I have total ignorance of upfront and total ignorance of once it's left my house, we'll say. And you know, you look at taxes as a way — people go, well, I don't want to pay taxes, and taxes are an easy thing to rail against, because nobody likes paying taxes, I get that. The reality is that it's really more about the

15:14total cost of ownership. It's like, what's the true cost of that item? So if you had to say, you know, when I bought that widget at Walmart, if I really knew it was 50 bucks and not $12.99, would I buy it in the first place? Right. It's that idea of going: some of these items we don't need — some of the demand is artificially created. It's a consumer-based, consumer-driven society. Right. So when you take that look with a building, and Murray nails it when you're going, you know, up

15:37front budget and operating — they're not different, they're the same thing. Right. And at the end of the day, when you put someone in a building and go, well, you've got — whether it be LEED Gold, a zero carbon, a Net Zero Energy — but they don't have enough money to pay the bills, regardless of what the budget was to build it, it's just kind of backwards and nonsensical. I don't see the media taking people to account on what the utility bills cost on an annual basis, but they certainly will take us to

16:02account when we need five million dollars more to finish the school. Right. And so it doesn't — it's not just limited to... we've talked about governments, provincial and municipal levels. We see it in other sectors as well. We've all seen the number of cranes building apartment buildings around Halifax. A developer doesn't really need to worry about the cost of energy because the tenants are going to pay that one way or another, whether it's included. So that gives them — to say — the opportunity to say, let's just do the

16:29absolute minimum here. And there are some issues in the code that we can probably get into that allow them to really minimize cost and do very little in terms of real energy reductions. When decisions are being made on projects, the question gets asked: who's paying the utility bills? Yeah. When you're behind closed doors and people are asking what decision you're making — sir, madam — well, who's paying the bill? And then the decision gets made. Yeah. And we can play devil's advocate in lots of different ways here with different

16:59priorities and different layers, as everything costs so much. Yeah, if you're not forced to pay for something, you're not going to pay for it — you're not going to do it. It's human nature. Yeah. That's understandable from their perspective in ways. Well, they can be made out to look like the bad guys, but they're not completely. At the end of the day, they need to provide housing — housing that's as affordable as they can make it. And the consumer bears responsibility. People ask us: who's your number one competitor? And I say, the granite

17:33countertop guy down the road. And they look at me kind of strange and I say, well, that's easy — because if there's an extra three to four thousand dollars to spend on a house, they're going to pick what they can feel and touch and understand, and what their friends come over and say, oh, that's a beautiful countertop. Nobody's getting down on their hands and knees and saying, wow, that's really draft-free around this sill. It's not happening. Right. So true. I mean, it's comical, but that's such a good analogy, because —

18:02again it's money up front, but, you know, long term — if we required some things like labeling. So if you think of what the EnerGuide label did to change the appliance industry, right? Like, you wouldn't go out and buy a fridge now that didn't have an EnerGuide label on it. And if we had a requirement that people label their homes — they needed a label on it before they were able to sell their home — you bet people would be fixing the drafts. And Ford puts a nice

18:31label on the car, yeah. And I only spend forty thousand dollars. Yeah. You know. But it's a good analogy, right? Because people invest a lot in their cars, and a lot in longevity, life cycle, and you stare at that list and you go: 10 miles to the gallon, or whatever the number is that you think is important, horsepower or whatever it is, right? Yeah, you look at it. But the transition to that label — that process of transitioning everybody — is big. Right? Because say we implement

19:00labeling — well, 10 years from now or 20 years from now it's just going to be a standard and everybody would do it. But to get to that point where you've got the consumer tipping point is quite big and kind of scary for people. Right, I don't want to be the house that has the crappy efficiency rating, you know? Like, I want to sell my house, I don't want to put any barriers up. So there's a lot of resistance to that kind

19:31of idea. But if we started requiring it on new construction and then started requiring it on the sale of houses, eventually the building stock would have these labels. And that would be something that could potentially — I think there's time to build that into the industry as well. We can give them a bit of warning; you don't have to do it tomorrow, right? But starting in 2024, or whatever — starting with single-family homes and then multi-unit. Right, start with an archetype or something like that.

19:59We can transition. Where does the resistance come from on labeling houses? Well, they're such a big investment — exactly — but they're also... that's not an easy fix necessarily. Right? If you need to take your house from a, you know, a terrible-performing home to something that's even in the middle — not even efficient, but even in the middle — you could be looking at tens of thousands of dollars to do that work to your house. And that's a barrier for people. Even though, I agree with you, it's

20:32a huge investment, and why wouldn't you want to do that, and why wouldn't you want to save on the operating — like, we all know the business case is there if you look at the total cost of ownership, or if you took a look at the life cycle assessment, it's there. But if you're asking somebody to put 20 or 30 or 40,000 out of pocket to retrofit their home so that the label is palatable to somebody who's buying it — that's a barrier. And especially if

21:00we've created a mechanism to say it's palatable or not. Right. So right now people buy those homes all the time — they don't know the energy efficiency of the homes, it's just not part of the conversation. But if we're making it part of the conversation then we're creating a bit of a challenge. Could that be a good segue into enforcement? Like, if you're going to label something, it has to be tested, it has to qualify. Right? Because a lot of times the issue — I think someone made the comment

21:26when we were discussing, leading up to our panel here, that code is beyond what buildings are actually achieving. So a lot of times when it comes to air tightness — like, what percentage of homes and commercial buildings are meeting the actual code for air tightness? The most interesting comment we get when we're doing our sales pitches: 'My building is tight enough.' And when I hear that, the resistance — I just come back and I say, 'What have you tested lately?' And when the silence hits, then the conversation gets

21:56really interesting. Because performance-based codes — you know, I think it was you the other day, Will — you talked about: would you just give us a target? Yeah, we're professionals, we'll tell you how we're going to get there. Right? Would you just give us a target, a performance target, and let the professionals do their job. I don't think the government can hire enough enforcement — it's not possible. They can't go out and put blower doors on every unit. They can't do all the modeling, the super-insulation, everything, you know.

22:27Visual inspection will only take you so far. Correct. And with the materials that are coming — and if we were to get this conversation into zero carbon, where that's a whole other discussion, that's a panel for another day — with materials and how they're manufactured and logistics and the ways to insulate and where's the dew point and the building science behind all this — yeah, houses and apartment buildings and complexes that we design and build, you're going to have to rely on your architects, your engineers. It's just more complicated.

23:03And I don't think we need to be blazing trails here. I think the City of Toronto is already saying, right, that you're going to have to start labeling houses in 2023, you're going to start meeting energy targets for apartment buildings and office buildings. And so I think there's a path forward that we can just say, this looks like a good idea, yeah, let's go there, let's start doing it. We have about 80 dealers in our network across North America and every year we go to a conference in

23:28Ohio. And every year the gentleman from Vancouver is doing best in the league. Yeah, you're talking about BC, because they have the step code. Yeah. And so tell us about the step code. So I don't know a lot about the step code, but generally speaking, every three to five years they ratchet down the air tightness, they up the insulation values in a Part 3 building, and they make it simple — they boil it down to: this year you have to get three air changes and go to R-24; in five years, just so you know,

23:58it's going to be R-30, R-50, and an air change of 1.5. I'm making up the numbers, but you get the idea. Yeah. In a Part 3 building they rely on the energy modelers and they say, you need to get to this — you're going to have to take over here, Will — but it's the energy demand. Yeah. So when you look at these things, this is where the idea of a benchmark makes a lot of sense. Right? You go, I'm giving a budget — just like I would give my kids

24:26a budget, right — or I'm a new student, I have a budget. So they go, here's how much energy you have per square metre, per square foot — work within the bucket. Right. So a Net Zero ready, in theory, is 100 kilowatt hours or less per square metre, depending on where you define it. I think ASHRAE goes even further, 68-ish. Can I get you to define 'Net Zero ready' just for our listeners? So is that — I know that's not an easy thing to do — but the intent is that you're ready to go back

24:51to Murray's first analogy: going, you know, we've got this pyramid, this cake, where we go waste out first, high efficiency next, and then end-of-pipe solution, which is your solar on the rooftop. 'Ready' means it's already intended to be efficient enough that you could put the panels on the roof, if that makes sense. So it's like, I've done everything well — I've done the air sealing, I've got my thermally broken envelope, I've got my outside continuous insulation, I've got good glazing, it's sealed, it's tested. And

25:18now I've put in a high-performance mechanical system. In theory I'm as low as I can go without, you know, pulling the trigger on the first panel, if that makes sense. And I see Keith is — I thought you might ask that question, actually. And I pulled out a couple. So Halifax has their definitions. And we'll go to Net Zero. Let's see: Net Zero. And this is in the administrative order from Halifax. It says Net Zero means that 100% of a

25:50building's energy need is generated on-site or off-site through a renewable. Not sure what the off-site part is — whether the owner needs to own something or buy credits or whatever — but that's what it is. I noticed they didn't say anything about energy efficiency in there; they just said offset your use. But Net Zero ready, from the same document: Net Zero ready means reducing the building's energy consumption by 50% compared to the 2017 National Energy Code and maximizing on-site renewable generation with the intention to purchase off-site renewables or carbon

26:21offsets as they become available. Another definition — I don't know if it's still in use or not. When, uh, natural... no, the Canadian Home Builders' Association had their NZE — Net-Zero Ready — program. And their definition, I think, was you had to be Net Zero ready, you had to reduce by 75% compared to the current standard and have enough roof area to offset the rest with photovoltaics, and have conduit or the infrastructure to be able to connect. So again, definitions are kind of everywhere. Yeah. Is there actually a shadow pilot for the

26:58Canadian Home Builders' Association Net Zero that they're running across the country? And part of the reason that Halifax isn't fully in is because Halifax is already running a retrofit pilot. And they had been sort of down the path. But they are collaborating with CHBA on the other pilots that are happening across the country. So we're just trying to figure this out, right? Like, everybody's trying to figure out what's the best pathway. And the good thing that I see is there's a lot of collaboration

27:28happening. Like, nobody's holding this conversation as secret sauce. Right? It's like, how do we do this? It's like you said — Toronto's already done it, BC's already done this — people are sharing solutions and sharing pathways. And there's going to be some regional disparity probably, but there doesn't have to be very much. Right? And I see a real spirit of collaboration amongst stakeholders in the space these days, because it's a huge problem. It's like, this is a really

28:01really big thing that we're trying to do — to get to Net Zero for new construction by 2030 and all buildings by 2050. Right? Like, that's a really, really big thing. So instead of everybody battling with each other over who gets the business, everybody's kind of... I kind of see it as everybody going, there's going to be lots of business — how are we going to get there? You know? And the ones that are a little further down the path, how did you get that far

28:31down the path? We need to figure out whether we take those steps that way or we take another step. Nobody's figured it out yet; nobody's at 2050 yet. But you know, capacity is a huge issue. Capacity is a huge issue. Numbers off the top of my head: I think the City of Edmonton has targets for their own buildings to be Net Zero by 2030. And somebody actually went through it and said, okay, in the next six years we have to do 500 buildings per year as Net Zero.

29:01And that's — how are we going to do that? Not the expertise, not the labour force. Is that all new builds, or can they be retrofitted? That's the retrofit, so they're going to retrofit their building stock. And that means they'd have to retrofit 500 buildings per year. Well, if you look at the Halifax plan for all buildings, it's 5,000 homes per year that need to go through retrofits. You know, so that's pretty significant. And to Murray's point about making the investment too — right now we've got a lot of

29:34companies that do insulation or that do heat pumps or that do windows, but there's not a lot of sort of one-stop shops for a homeowner who's going to do a deep energy retrofit. You know, to have one company come in — because they haven't seen the signals from the market that it's going to make sense for me to be a one-stop shop, and I'm going to buy this insulation company and I'm going to buy this window company and I'm going to be the company that can go

29:59in and do that. And we know in jurisdictions where they've had really successful pilots of retrofit programs that the market has responded, and the market has seen the opportunity and said, okay, we'll do all of these things. It's like you and your new company, right? We can do that, we can do that. Let's build what's needed. And it has — and we haven't really shown the market drivers here yet because the demand from the homeowners isn't there and we're also still relying on incentives. Lots of carrots, lots

30:31of carrots, lots of carrots. Right? To get people to do it. And a lot of people are going, yeah, where's my incentive? How much am I going to get if I go off oil? Like, people aren't saying how much am I going to save over the next 10 years if I go off oil — they're saying, how much of a rebate am I going to get if I go off oil and install a heat pump? Who's going to pay for that for me? Instead of looking at, you know, the next 10 years of savings on

30:54the oil. Yeah. Well, we went off on a bit of a tangent there. Did you want to keep going with the thread you were on? No, no, no — I think the capacity one is a good thread to kind of dial back in on, because again you look at these numbers and the retrofit capacity — and Murray was talking before the session, going, you know, it's hard enough to get people to bid on stuff, contractors and subs — and you're going, you know, when you look at that volume of work and

31:23again, let's ignore brand new — yeah — the volume of existing stock is massive. Right? So I'll use a good example: the feds put out the program for the green homes. They're going, okay, we're going to spend this money, we're going to go out, we have auditors trained, they're going to come in and do the home audits, they're going to actually do blower door testing, give you your recommendations — we've got some rebates, there's a $40,000 zero-interest grant you can access. It took a year and a half before they even

31:47— like, we think you can sign up for it now. But the reality is, if you look at the actual stock across Canada — and it was Shauna Henderson that kind of gave me the stats — there's about 780 certified residential auditors. So for them to actually go through the stock, just on the numbers alone: they're doing four to five audits a day. And that's not just show up at your house, take the measurements, do the blower door test — that's model them, finish them, put the reports out the door. It's impossible.

32:13Right. It's physically impossible. We don't have the users, let alone the end person to put it in play. And I think — and not to crap on the older generation sort of thing, Keith — but the reality is that you have the way of business: it's business as usual. Right? So we've had clients that are turned off. You know, we had a multi-unit residential client that was ready to go heat pump, and he said, 'I talked to my electrician. He said heat pumps don't save energy.'

32:39They might not save electricity, no. But they definitely save energy. Do you know what I mean? So same thing — we had our house retrofitted. And to give you an example: it's a two-and-a-half story, it's an old 1900s, and we put two inches of foam and we did the whole thing. And we're going to spend about $70,000. So that's a big investment on top of owning a house. But the reality is, you'll talk to a contractor and he goes, 'Oh, I

33:01wouldn't do that, it's a rule — we can't take the seams, it won't breathe.' And you go — so you're trying to make efficient moves and then you're getting what I would call business as usual, or the leftover notions of the way we've always done stuff, and it's not informed. Right. So for — I think Murray to come in — Murray knows that if he makes my house 0.6 air changes and I don't have mechanical ventilation, that is going to be a problem. Right? But it's not about

33:25saying, you know, maybe Lara doesn't know anything about that — she just goes, I just want my bill to go down, I want to feel more comfortable. And you get the one builder that showed up to give you a price and goes, 'Oh, I wouldn't do that.' Right. And so we're continually fighting this: re-educate, re-inform, retrain. And at the end of the day we still have this giant beast to kind of chew up piece by piece, and we're still talking about it. I feel like, you know,

33:52there is a level of — I think the right term would be ignorance from... I'll give context: say the four of you here are professionals in this space, and even then it can be hard to define things and understand what certain terms mean or give context to them. So I think the further away from having it in your micro environment every day, the more room there is for everything to just be misunderstood. And, like you're saying, a lot of contractors

34:24maybe just don't know — well, it's a risk. What do the terms mean? Yeah. Maybe it's not with any ill motive, just ignorance, or not knowing how to inform their clients as well. If their clients don't know, or they know a little bit about it — they've heard a little bit about it but they don't feel confident enough to inform their clients — and where do you go to find that? Like, that's... well, because then the problem needs to be

34:50solved even from the public sector with large projects. And, you know, professional corporate construction firms all the way down to, yeah, a builder building a home in Bedford or in Dartmouth or anywhere. And then, you know, for him there's the same amount of resistance: I don't want to change the way I do things, I'm not sure what this whole Net Zero thing is about. And until — I'm busy enough and I'm getting paid and I've got lots on my mind. And yeah,

35:22yep. I want to go back to the thread you were talking about on retrofits. In retrofits, it's generally known by the building science community that air tightness is the number one target — you take care of air tightness first, regardless of renewables or your mechanical system. Take care of air tightness first because it reduces the demand on everything else. So when we're dealing with professional owners like public housing, you know, the Nova Scotia government, we have to educate them and talk to them. Well, you could manually seal, and

35:56when they do that — we've seen them go in and caulk around the baseboard — they can get about 20 to 30% of the air leakage out. We did a project for Lindsay Construction and East Port Properties, and we took 90% of the leakage in with our system. But the one limitation to our system is we need to remove the contents from the space. You know, it would be one thing if there was nobody there, but the contents have to go. So that makes it unaffordable. So you have to plan it

36:26in such that — oh, when are you removing and changing the floors? What do you mean — what does energy efficiency have to do with floors? But when you're taking the floors, the furniture's already out. And so when you're doing flooring retrofits, do your windows, and then the casing and the baseboards are all off, then you seal it. So they have to make the connection: oh, when the floors come out, it's the right time to air-seal. And that's when you change your windows and do those things at the same time. So

36:55these are things we've learned over the past few years in retrofit cases. We have a lot of people who love the idea of the product, and then when it dawns on them that we want all the contents out — and I say, yeah, no thank you — I hear you, I understand that. So that's part of the education: to get the air sealing done the way we do it. Well, and I think the time to do retrofits is also when residential — we'll use that as an example —

37:24transitions. So somebody's selling and somebody's buying. You know, that — but in a perfect world, that doesn't happen all the time. But wouldn't that be great — we've identified all the things that need to happen to this house, it's empty, the bank's going to finance it because it makes a whole lot of sense, and they say, you can add $40,000 to your mortgage, no problem, because you're going to save all of this energy cost — you can just apply that to the loan. And we

37:49often thought we should be giving lunch and learns to the Realtor Association. You should, actually. Yeah, absolutely you should. And it's the same issue with — you know, what I was talking about earlier with the labeling — all of that needs to happen on those transitions. Well, you reach the building asset owners through BOMA and those kinds of things as well, for education. In the past two years we haven't been able to reach anybody, thanks for having

38:15us here, because — yeah. That was why we're here, though. That's one of the frustrating parts: we invested, oh, a year ahead of COVID, and then it was like, shut the doors. And we've had a lot of great people with purchase orders ready to go, and then the price of plywood went like this — four times. Yeah. And those same folks will call us and say, 'Murray, understand why we have to pull your PO — it's not a gold requirement.' Yes, I understand. And you walk away — what

38:44can you say to them? They can't afford to put the building up because they budgeted the year before. And that's a known thing to us. You mentioned about carrots on incentives. Right. I wonder if the biggest carrot would be: I could make an extra $30,000 because my label scores higher than the next. Yeah, sure. Yeah, it's definitely an incentive. Nobody knows about it. Nobody's using it. Hasn't there been some cases locally here? I don't know if we can name the developer, the project — maybe we can, maybe it's okay.

39:15Well, I know you mentioned one where the building was built — we had a developer involved locally in the city who was kind of a front-runner and a leader as far as Net Zero, going above and beyond, 75% more efficient. But then the incentive issue was — he built too well. Almost. Yeah, I'm pretty sure he'd be more than happy to have us name him. His name's Peter Polley, Polycorp. And, you know, they're not the biggest builder, but his model is: I'm going to keep these buildings for the

39:42long haul. Comfort's important. Being able to stabilize the rent — knowing that the rent also includes operating costs — makes a lot of sense. Yeah. He's gone out and done stuff that's well, well beyond code. And then he gets to the point where he's going, I've got some stuff that's older but when it was built was 75% better than code. This is Woodman's Grove in Wolfville. And he went to get refinanced through all this new funding that's available. And they go, okay, you need to be 25% better than your existing

40:10operating bill. So you'll secure — they obviously are very low — because guess what, I already did the work upfront: I got rid of the waste, I downsized my mechanicals. And now we're having this debate going, well, it's not really saving you — you're putting solar on — and you're going, well, I can't buy anything more efficient than the geothermal that's running or the air-to-water heat pump. And so you've got these leaders out there that are kind of blazing away, willing to show folks how it's done, working inside a

40:40regular construction budget — maybe he takes a little bit longer, he does a bit more shopping, you know what I mean — but then there's a guy there that's getting disincentivized because now he can't get access to funds that the folks who are coming in under that program and building just over code are getting access to. You might have more to say, Murray. Well, no, he's talking about leaders. And I can't help but think about incentives. No, I was thinking about a post I saw on LinkedIn this winter. And

41:07I think it was East Port Properties — they did a test on their building. Because we haven't talked about resiliency yet; we've been talking about energy efficiency. Yeah. And so they took a warehouse of theirs in Burnside — I understand, during that really cold snap this winter — and Judy Wall turned off all of her systems. And it went down to eight degrees during that three-day minus-30 snap. It didn't come up — eight degrees was as low as it got. It held the heat. It held the heat! This is a warehouse with overhead

41:38doors. Like, how many square feet? I have no idea — they're over 150,000. Yeah, 150,000 square foot warehouse. Well, they built it — they've built the warehouses to zero-carbon standard. So that's, you know, it's great that they did that testing too, to prove that. But they had lots of challenges too — they had challenges to get into that pilot when it was first announced a few years ago, because the warehouse wasn't an archetype that they were looking for in the pilot. So Judy and her team really

42:07had to fight to say, we want to — we want to see if we can do this: a zero-carbon warehouse. And they did it. And then the other disincentive that you see sometimes: you've built a great building, it's more valuable than other warehouses as an asset, but then it gets taxed higher because it's a more valuable asset. So we've got these disincentives there. So we need to find the carrots and find the levers that are going to

42:39support the leaders. And if the leaders do a little better from it than some of the laggards, let them — let them do a little better financially from it, you know, let them benefit from it so that others can learn from their example. And then it's safe to say, like, code... it's not working so well, and incentive is maybe a better answer. So they go hand in hand — I think you need to celebrate and incentivize the leaders. But we also just need better

43:16codes, faster. You know, we need to accelerate the adoption of the codes. So the provinces adopt the code after the federal code comes out. And we're — how far are we now, Keith, from the 2020 code? Well, it's 2023, but it's supposed to be 18 months, right? And we're past that. We're past that. So we know that the Net Zero Energy code is 2030. Nova Scotia said we'll adopt it by 2032. But, you know, are we

43:46going to be able to meet those kinds of targets? And some provinces haven't adopted the federal code at all, you know — they just operate. And let's acknowledge that a code is the minimum legal requirement to build to. So when you said energy code, this is the least you can possibly do. So we should be building above code constantly. And going back to one of your comments about recognizing the leaders — like one of Peter's buildings, Q Lofts — speaking to one of the condo owners

44:14there, he loves it. He said his condo fees are rock-bottom compared to any other condos around. But if you're just looking at the pick-and-price, you're probably going to pay more for Peter's condo than the one that's down the street. But you've got to go that level deeper. And I'm going to be one that's looking at labels and asking for energy bills. But not everybody is. Right. You hit a sore spot talking about codes and timelines on getting to 2030. When the 2020 code went out for

44:41public consultation, it had mandatory blower door testing in it. And then it gets pushed back — it gets pushed back because we don't want to do that. And so then the provinces and the territories push back on the feds, and they pull that requirement out. So Engineers Canada — there's an article that I have here — they state: we've already missed 2030. Yeah, because of that change. Yeah. If it's number two on the list of five steps to Net Zero and you've taken the requirement out —

45:14well, which do you want? Do you want us to get to Net Zero, or do you want to satisfy a buoyant economy? Well, that's where you get this challenge between that leadership and — like, who's going to lead? And I do stakeholder engagement for a living, so not to crap on stakeholder engagement, but it's a requirement of all of this policy development: stakeholder engagement, you have to listen to what people are saying, you have to take their views into account. And it goes back to

45:44not everybody being on the same page, not everybody understanding what Net Zero means, not everybody having that baseline sustainability or commitment to the climate challenge. You know, you're going to have stakeholders — lots of them — who just say, 'You're all the sky's-falling tree huggers.' Yeah. And even in the best path, I mean, it's a clunky system to try to navigate through. For us to say, let's start changing this — we're talking about years in the process. An example would be: I'm aware of some, let's say,

46:22lacking requirements in the 2017 energy code that have allowed some inefficient buildings to be built. Those same requirements are built into the 2020 code which we don't even adopt yet. That means we're not going to get beyond this until at best our next energy code, which is in 2025, which we'll adopt in 2027. So we're already four years behind. Yeah. Some known issues. And those buildings are going to be around for 75 years and they're going to need a total retrofit in 30 years. Yes. You

46:52mentioned life cycle earlier. For the government, for public tenders — a school, let's say — what's considered the life cycle, how many years? When we're talking about planning and the operating costs that are much higher than the building costs, they're going to call it 25 years, but really it's 75 — or what's the number? So most of the — I think if you look at the zero-carbon standard, I believe it's a 60-year horizon that's used. That's kind of the agreed-upon — we're going to look at it from A to Z, you know,

47:18cradle to gate, cradle to grave. Yeah, it's 60 years. I know when you're looking at assessing the materials that go into it, you're looking at a 60-year replacement, refurbishment, whatever. So that's one of them. Keith and I are working on some long-term care facilities now, and when we talk on those they value the life cycle as 25 years because that's the length of the mortgage. And we're doing our utmost best to convince them that it's 60 years, or 100 years — some of these nursing homes

47:46we're replacing are 100 years old. Yeah, so it stands to reason that it's 60. Right. So just another layer that's not defined. Yeah. And what we bake in now — to use Will's term, right, you say that all the time — we're baking in the inefficiency, and it's going to be there for a really, really long time. Halifax and Moncton are the fastest growing cities in Canada. I was about to say it — they educated me because I was surprised. Right, the fastest two cities. Yes. So I think the leadership has to say,

48:20if we're the fastest growing and this is our stock for the future, we can't pass up on this opportunity — we're missing it now. Keith, I want to ask you about — so I think we've talked about a lot of different things: code, enforcement, incentives, public-private finance, groups, subcontractors, kind of where everybody fits in. But another layer would be the consultants. To understand that — to make this massive shift, this transition over time — one of the big deals for major

48:53architecture firms, I think — correct me if I'm wrong — but also for mechanical engineering firms, is changing the standard library of details. Like, you know, you've been using these tried-and-true, proven details and assemblies for however many years, and that's a big deal for large firms. Can you speak to that a little bit? Sure. And I think it's safe to say that we're still on a learning curve about how building envelopes actually perform. We talk about an R-23

49:22wall, and we can say that we do this and this and this. Or we're failing to take into account some of the thermal bridges at the floor connections, wall connections, the foundations, structural stuff that pokes through it, the things around the windows, the windows themselves. So when we think it's an R-23 wall, it actually might be an R-12 wall. So there's a — I think — a growing understanding of that. And there's some really good information. So the BC Hydro thermal bridging guide is a great

49:50resource. And that actually kind of proves that out — that, you know, you can start with a wall that's R-23, but by the time you poke all these things through it, it is much less than that. So codes kind of need to account for all of that. And the design industry needs to acknowledge that. But there's some really straightforward stuff too that I think is partly the case — we've just got a stock of details we put on. Yeah, we're putting on a continuous, whatever, mineral fibre insulation, but we're

50:17putting on these continuous horizontal or vertical girts, not knowing that when we do that it reduces that insulation value by 50%. Right. But if we do this instead, we only reduce it by 10%. So there's a lot of learning still that can go on in the design professions on how building envelopes actually perform. I was just thinking to myself: once you update the details, then the next step is to get the trades to go, 'We don't need that.' Exactly. We don't need that. That's so true.

50:55'I can save you 50 bucks by doing this.' Yeah, exactly. Not to put anybody down — that's the tradition. It's the tradition of: I haven't seen that before, that must be extra, it must be for another job. Yeah. It's hard to break tradition. And that's really — maybe one of the underlying currents and problems with this whole solution — isn't it? Because it's a major shift from tradition. So we're trying to invest in that capacity

51:24building, right, and training and retraining and micro-credentialing, so that people are learning this stuff and they're getting some sort of badge or passport — something that they've gone through some training. Like a green seal, potentially. You know, instead of a red seal. So we understand this kind of stuff. So there is some investment in that part of the capacity-building piece of how do we train people. And Will and I are working on a project on this. And it's

51:53complex, because it's not like: build a course and put it in NSCC and we're done. Right. It's like, how do you integrate it into what NSCC is doing, how do you integrate it into what Dal's doing with the design professionals, how do you get Bob with his hammer to care about it, let alone get online and do an online course from Pugwash? You know? Like, that's — it's when you're talking about everybody being on the same page, the complexity of

52:24creating the training, creating the modes of delivery of that training, and reaching everybody — is huge. You've covered kind of the last half of the design and construction part of it. But the first half is really important too. And we're still stuck in a mode of — right — as an architect, my contract says 10% of my fee goes to schematic design and 15% goes to design development. Well, no — if I want to design this properly, I want to hire Will during schematic design to do this and this and

52:58this iteration. So my schematic design fee should probably be 20%, not 10%. So we've kind of got this built-in structure that's been in place forever that we need to think about how to redo. Right. To build in that — and that's just in the architects' world. The engineers probably have something similar. Every silo in this ecosystem has a way that they do things that needs to change somehow, needs to adapt. And so that's why it's just so big — it's so

53:32— is 'green seal' a conceptual thing in your mind or is it a real discussion? Well, it's a real discussion but it's kind of conceptual. Very interesting. Nobody's officially doing it yet. And there's a lot of ownership around red seal, yes, obviously. Right, so we can't just go in with our good ideas and say, you ought to be doing this. But there is conversation about it. Yeah. We've touched on air tightness quite a bit, and building, some renewables. Will, can you speak to

54:04a little bit about mechanical systems and how that part plays such a big role in this as well? Right, definitely. I mean — let's just beat the heck out of the business-as-usual case. Right. Client engages architect, architect hands you the box and goes, fit it up, make it hot, make it cold, here's your budget, and here's your 10-by-10 mechanical room. So when you

54:32look at the component of that, we're really talking about the second layer. Right? We've gotten the waste out — if the architect's done a good job, looked at orientation, we've broken the envelope, we're airtight — and now we're saying, okay, how do we condition the space? And so you have a couple of plays there. Engineers are no different than architects — they've got a library. Boilers are easy. You know, the doubling of the size of a boiler isn't typically double the cost. The doubling of the size

54:56of an air-to-water heat pump or a VRV air-to-air heat pump definitely is doubling the cost, if not tripling the cost. Right. So that idea of the first layer being so critical in driving down what my mechanical system actually has to do is pretty key. You know, in terms of the strategy from the mechanical side, it's really been about: we electrify and decarbonize, right? That's the magic, left and right — the Mr. Miyagi training, if you will. But the reality is

55:25that's totally dependent on where you are regionally in the country. Right. So to electrify in Nova Scotia — no problem, we can do it. Heat pumps are going to save you some energy, some operating costs. But then you're going, well, what's my grid intensity? Right. So we talk about Net Zero, we talk about energy, we talk about all these things — and at the end of the day, they're all carbon. Right, we're all really talking about carbon. What's my budget? What's my balance? So if we move all this stuff

55:50and we go high performance — we've got a good envelope — that's great. And we let Nova Scotia Power continue to kind of clean the grid. As you say: if I took that same building and dropped it in, say, Quebec — guess what? Their emission factor per kilowatt hour generated is almost zero because it's hydro. Right. So when we look at how do we make the biggest bang for buck on carbon reduction — the play is: electrify, clean the grid. And then we don't need as many solar panels in

56:17theory. Right. But when you say electrify everything — guess what we're dealing with? The electrical infrastructure hasn't been upgraded in a long time — distribution, transmission equipment. So now we're adding loads to the electrical grid. And now Murray's got an electric car, an electric truck. And so we're doubling down on this. And we're going, okay, the electrical grid is just like a pipe system — it can only move so much water, or electrons, through it. So if everybody tomorrow turned off the fossil fuel

56:48tap and came on electrically, we'd probably be sitting in a brownout for a while. Right. So it's that idea of going: we need capacity, we need to be able to start... and again, this is where the layers get more complex, because now we need interconnection of provinces, we need energy corridors where we can say, okay, I can wheel 10 more megawatts or gigawatts from Quebec in, or I have a bunch of excess on my solar farm or my wind farm and I need to be

57:13able to shift it somewhere else. Right. Otherwise, what are we doing? Well, we'll buy batteries. Guess what — if I can't spend extra money on insulation, I'm probably not going to have a building-sized battery in my budget. Right. So it gets complicated quickly. It's easy to say, it's hard to do. Best practice currently — and what we've kind of pushed and promoted — is to go look at distribution. So even if today your budget doesn't allow VRV or geothermal or an air-to-water, make sure

57:40the distribution is low-temp. Right. So now I can take it off that boiler — I can put in a technology that doesn't need to be operating at 180 degrees Fahrenheit. Right. It's that idea of going: if you look at all these old buildings, the challenge is I can't take some of these low-temp systems into those buildings because the baseboards want high-temp — they're sized to receive flow at this rate and at this temperature. And if you're giving me half the temperature, guess what, there's not enough heat. Right.

58:08So now you're going, do I strip out all the baseboards and put in new distribution? Through it, now it can work. So again, it's got a couple of layers. But engineers are just as guilty as architects in the sense of: we rely heavily on what we have in the bucket and what's in the folders to go — I make money because I'm using something I already know. Right. And that's a challenge. You can talk about fees, you can talk about this and

58:35that, but at the end of the day, to do some stuff that's innovative, you need: one, a client who's interested and who's not looking for perfect, because you know in some of those cases there's no such thing as perfect. And you need to have someone who's willing to go, we know there's going to be extra effort. You know, for me to pull out a set of plans that have a boiler with some baseboard rads and a central air-source ventilation

58:57system or makeup air unit — pretty straightforward. But if I have to go through and figure out all this and work around fire protection and work around bulkheads, etc. — you also need a client that's willing to take the risk. Yeah, convince the client, and also willing to let their team members fail. Like, we're going to try this, don't worry about it, we're going to try it. But it's a big asset to have to take that risk for. Right. I mean, you've had clients who say, yeah yeah, we want to do

59:21it, we want to do it, and then — oh, well, there are a lot of them left there. Right. Yeah, you know, let's take this out, let's take that out. You know, I would say — if you look at who's in the mainstream, I'll use multi-unit as a sector — Dexel does it well. Dexel's got a bit of interconnection: they understand, they do some of that architect-inside work, so they're building with the intent of: I'm designing to make my build easier. Right. And they go through system iterations

59:46like, okay, we've tuned that enough, we lock that in, and what's next. Right. So it's that idea of: we can't do it all at once, so how do we do it incrementally? So little things like — I would say Keith's part is more important. You know, my system can go into any building if Keith has designed it to be low thermal need and he's got low-temp. After that, we can retrofit all day. But if I have to take Keith's building and say, well, let's take all this cladding off,

60:12we're going to throw it in the garbage, we're going to put on the insulation — guess what, I hate using two-inch nails. I just, you know, I'm never going to wrap my head around it from a fastener perspective. Or I don't know what that detail is, so I'm going to skip the isolator on the girts. You know, we're just blowing other people's money in the future, if that makes sense. By the way, we've done a few projects with Will, and most of our projects are kind of double the energy

60:32performance — double the thermal values of the walls. We're going for air tightness, educating contractors on what it means to be airtight, and showing them where the air barrier is and to leave that alone. And I don't think we've got a client yet that said, 'Damn, I wish I didn't put so much insulation in.' And I think maybe that's a good point. And we talk about this idea of education — and again, not to blur the message, but when you think about something like the zero-carbon standard,

60:58which is the CAGBC's self-made standard for Canada — they brought in a new metric which is called TEDI: Thermal Energy Demand Intensity, or Index. Right, TEDI, TEDI. Right. And TEDI is really about going: you know, based on all my losses, all my passive gains, and then what comes in and out of my ventilation — that's a thermal number that I can target. And if I can drive that number down, that's a measure of how resilient this thing is going to be. And there's that word again,

61:26right. Yeah, we're throwing it in there. But to go to Murray's point — they did a test in Toronto using low-TEDI buildings and they went a little further. They ran that test for up to two weeks and they go, okay, what happens when I do a code building? After an hour, here's the temperature drop — two and a half, three degrees. After a day, here's the temperature drop. After a week, guess what: we're below freezing. They did the same with a low-TEDI building and guess what — at the end of

61:52two weeks they were still in t-shirt and shorts weather. Right. So that idea of — you know, Texas has a freak snowstorm and everything freezes again. Total cost of ownership: somebody paid billions of dollars in insurance money to repair all those buildings, when we should have been thinking about, yeah, maybe it's not going to happen today, or why wouldn't we put the money into it up front? Because at some point it's just going to be someone else's dollar. That's one notion of what resilient means: what do we do

62:19in a catastrophe? And there is a term called passive survivability, coined by Alex Wilson in the States. It was after Hurricane Katrina — he kind of toured the area while there were still power outages. And he noticed that all the old houses still had people living in them because they were designed to not require air conditioning: they had high ceilings, they had ceiling fans, they had big verandas. So people were still able to live in them without power for weeks. So we've kind of built that into the notion of

62:49design: what happens to this building if I don't have utilities for a certain period of time? It makes me think of other drivers, you know — like the insurance industry as a driver for change, or the financial sector as a driver for change. So, you know, we know that ESG is getting some traction. Environmental, social, and governance goals — it's a risk mitigation tool from a financial standpoint, from an insurance standpoint. And so you've got all of these sort of auxiliary players

63:23around the building sector that are driving some of this change. So if you're a building owner and you have investors, they're going to want to know what your ESG plan is for your portfolio. And so if you're having to state it and report to it, you better be doing it. Right? So that's driving some of the environmental considerations that we're seeing in the building sector. And same thing — if your insurers are asking

63:53what your risk mitigation is in your portfolio, as an owner you've got to be doing some of this stuff — whether it's retrofitting or building more resilient buildings from the get-go. So it's good to see that kind of stuff. And then you get all the noise that's saying, we're not going to pay attention to ESG anymore, and it's not going to be something that we're allowed to talk about in Florida, or you know — well, there's all that kind of pushback that happens when

64:23when there are tools to drive us forward, there's always going to be the drag: no, we don't want to do that, no no no, we don't want to change how we do things, and it's going to cost me money and it's going to challenge my business — you know, those bad things instead of the good things that come out of those drivers. And I think often — and you know, this makes me emotional sometimes — but all of the good work

64:54that happens, all of the really good, smart people that are working in this space and trying to make a difference, and trying to lead us and to drive us and to incentivize us — that's just tremendous to me, you know, that that kind of stuff happens. So anyway, that's my little... I've got a couple of thoughts, and one's going to change the conversation a little — it's on the same topic, but with respect to resilience. I'm not going to complain

65:24about Nova Scotia Power — the men and women that climb those poles and get the power back on for us. There's going to be power outages. What I'm going to complain about, though, is my neighbours starting their generators — they're breaking the peace and the silence that I've been enjoying. Right. But in these resilient buildings — I remember the first passive house I was taken into, it was minus 25. The owners were in Florida, they had their heating system shut off, and that house was set to turn on at seven degrees. It never turned on. Now,

65:54you're talking about buildings and how you design as a mechanical engineer — you're talking about Part 3 commercial buildings, apartment buildings. What happens to the homeowner where you're not involved? You're not involved. There's no architect, there's a designer maybe — maybe there's a designer. A designer might be a catalog, it might be something they've seen on the internet and they printed off. And then there's somebody trying to pull that off too. But then there's a plumber, an electrician, and the ventilation guy, and somebody sizes the heating system,

66:33and somebody guesses the size of the heating system. Well, they don't guess — I don't think. They make sure it's plenty big. Plenty big. Yeah, that's fair enough. They oversize consistently. Yep. Because what's the last call they want? Yeah, 'I'm uncomfortable, you failed.' Yeah, they don't want that call. And so I don't know how wasteful that is — I think it's highly wasteful. And I think it also brings up — maybe you didn't mean to go in this direction, but — how

67:02is it possible that a Part 9 and a Part 3 building are drastically different beasts, but I can get a permit for a Part 9 building with a set of elevations and a floor plan? But I mean, mechanical — I need electrical, I need plumbing, I need all these other pieces from a Part 3 before I'll even issue a permit. You know what I mean? So this idea — and I think it circles back around to education — is we really need to support these folks by

67:29going, here's the free tool, here's the detail that we created and we actually tested on site — and guess what, feel free to use it. Right. It's — tall walls are a good example: they're not difficult. And if you stay between X and Y, and the window will be not bigger than Z, this would be a typical framing for a tall wall. Right. We should be doing the same thing with assemblies — putting those out there, making them

67:53available and going, look, at least if you're going to be a poor designer, at least go to the library, you know what I mean, and borrow the book and go — add these three sheets to every drawing, here are the good designs. Yeah. That's it. Right, draw from this shelf, not that shelf. And then in that next layer, you have to go and train those folks how to do that. Right. So if you have a contractor who goes, I just don't get

68:16how to use two-and-a-half-inch — you know, like, what part are we missing here? Where's the gap in that knowledge? Where's the resistance coming from? Or is it that you just don't know how to price it? Right. Because that's the other thing: we run businesses to make money, and there's nothing wrong with making money or having a company, employing people. But if

68:39I'm going to bid on something that I don't totally understand, I'm going to de-risk myself. Right. I'm going to go, 'I wouldn't do that,' and I'm going to do my very best to convince you otherwise, because I know I make money selling them a peanut-butter sandwich. Right. Coming back to Murray's point — I think our tradition of oversizing stuff isn't limited to people taking a guess on a non-professionally-designed home. I've seen examples in the commercial industry where an engineer needs to size a domestic hot-water tank for a

69:08multi-unit building. They go through the calculations — the calculations say it should be 800 litres — but ASHRAE says you should upsize that by 30%, which they round up to 1,500 litres. So we've almost doubled this thing just because of some perceived risk: 'I don't want to be the one that gets called when somebody's shower is lukewarm.' So there's some of this caution that goes on. You talk about political will and aligning with it. I was thinking about that over the past few weeks, and yeah,

69:40past week I guess since we've talked. And I think — you imagine, you've seen that — being a doctor: part of that, Dr. Strang, he made a really good... he made the Atlantic bubble. And it was the Atlantic bubble that drew people to moving here, and people wanting to immigrate here. What is going to make people continue to want to come to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and Atlantic Canada? Is it better buildings? Is it, you know, leaders that say you're going to be more comfortable? What is the role

70:13of government? Is it to protect — I think it is. I think it's their role to protect the consumer. And not from the developer — like, don't get us wrong, we're not being hard on developers; they have a business to operate, they have to make money. But maybe protect the consumer from themselves. Because, like I said, I'm not down there feeling the draft, I'm not looking at your mechanical system — it's not something I show my friends. Yeah, right. If it's the targets that government is setting for us to make as a

70:47whole, as a group, as a society — well, they have to put the rules in place so that we do actually change. Will it make for a better place to live? Why were people investing and going to BC for the past number of years? BC was probably the fastest-growing — I don't know — but it was growing very quickly before. Is it a sustainable approach to living? Is that what people actually want? I think there's a real movement towards it — I think there's a really big movement

71:21because, well, there's enough incentive for developers, right there. My own kids — they're in elementary and middle school; actually, one of them's in high school now, the forgotten one. Yeah. And they come home saying things like, 'I don't think I'm going to have children.' And you get a little disappointed maybe at first, but you go, well, why? 'Well, we have too many people on the planet.' And that's your reason for not having children? Okay, that's interesting. So they're being taught at a younger and younger age that there's a crisis.

71:56And so they're our future — we have to start changing. And so it's going to come, these ideas that you're talking about. I found that amazing, talking about a green seal or that idea, that notion — I really like that. But our kids are going to force it on us if we don't do it right. And I think that's — you know, a lot of the work that I do is bringing people together so we can talk about these kinds of things and we can come up with these ideas. And

72:23finding ways to convene and learn from each other. Would you say you're in a lot of conversations that a lot of other people wouldn't be? I guess so. And you know, that's just my silo, I suppose. But what I try to do — and BuildGreen Atlantic is a good example — is to say, okay, whose story needs to be told here? What do we need to learn about? What do we need

72:49to know — who do we need to profile? And what best practices can we share, and who do we put up in front of folks? You know, so that's kind of part of curating that day of information for people. And I think it's going to be total information overload, because you try and cram it in, but there's lots of good stuff happening. Like, we put out a call for presentations — we had over 35 submissions for 15 presentation spots. And they were great — like, they were really great, you know,

73:19good things that are happening. People say, hey, I want — like, from, I don't know, some crazy boiler or something, you know, that I don't know anything about. But I can go, who cares about boilers? And then you put it in front of the committee and they're like, 'Oh, I care about boilers! I want to know about boilers.' You know. So I don't know — anyway, it's just going to be information overload. But we need to find more opportunities for those kinds of things to happen and to bring

73:45everybody together. Because the architects talk to each other, the engineers talk to each other, the plumbers talk to each other, the building owners talk to each other, you know. And we have these silos and these organizations that represent those groups. And we need more integration between the groups more often. Yeah. We haven't touched a whole lot so far on the manufacturing side and building materials. Speaking with someone the other day — this new campus, there's a new product

74:21being used on the south wall of the Loyola building — solar cladding. Yeah. Heard a lot of new kind of retail agent reps here, repping renewable products — whether it's EV chargers or renewable showers, or the water being recycled. Can we talk a little bit about that side — building materials and what you see kind of happening there? Not just renewables — I mean all kinds of products. And we've mentioned insulation already, but cladding, new... I would say let's let Keith take a run

74:58at that. Yeah.

75:04I think what it speaks to — I should have been looking at him — I think what it speaks to is that there are business opportunities. People see business opportunities. Right. So whether every solution is the right one... well, they've got to be following that shift as well, right? Your product reps — so that's the shift: following the shift and saying, I see a business opportunity here. I mean, Murray did it himself, right? I see a business opportunity here for this product. And finding ways to

75:33be part of the solution. And whenever — so even I'm sending stuff out to speakers for the conference saying, 'This is not a sales pitch.' Right. You have to frame it as a solution: how is this going to solve your problem, how is this product going to help solve that particular problem? If you want it to go to the junk mail — yeah, exactly. I didn't mean to jump in there on it. But in talking about materials, there are a couple of aspects to that. And

76:03one is: in the industry we're starting to get used to talking about energy numbers. And one of them is the EUI — Energy Use Intensity — of so many kilowatt hours per square metre per year. And when Will was talking about targets, that's the kind of thing we're talking about: how do we get this energy use down to a certain number of kilowatt hours per year? 100 is a pretty good number, 60 is a better number. But 200, 400 — a lot of

76:27buildings are being built with 400 kilowatt hours per square metre per year. So now that we're starting to bring that language in, there's another part that is starting to come into the discussion — and that's the embodied energy, or the embodied emissions associated with the building. And you can talk about it in a similar kind of way, only we talk about it in kilograms of CO2 per square metre per year. That's language that people are now starting to be aware of. And the difference is

77:00— we talk about the embodied energy, which happens right up until the building is opened, and then there's the operational energy that starts. So we've got this huge impact that happens before we even have the first energy bill. The energy bill happens gradually over the next 50 years. And when we've got Net Zero buildings, the energy use is going to be hopefully zero. So in that case, the entire impact is on what we call embodied carbon — the embodied impact of materials. So there's research happening now on how we model that.

77:31We're starting to get into that now. And it turns out that the embodied impact of materials is, even at current normal energy consumption, worth several years of the equivalent in energy. So that's the kind of thing that we should start entering into the discussion. And there are a lot of things that go into that — concrete is noted as a significant one, steel is a significant one. Insulation — there's a wide variety in the impact of different types of insulation. So that should be part of the lingo that we're

78:02talking about. So that's one part — it's just awareness of what this impact is. And then the other part is technology. So there are things like photovoltaic cladding, fantastic: it's doing two things — it's keeping the water off and it's producing electricity at the same time. Or windows that produce electricity. Or new materials that sequester carbon right in them — so we can get greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, put them in the material, and it's locked in forever. So that's also

78:29on the fringe of where we're starting to go. Trying to get new products, new processes in place that minimize this growing awareness of the embodied impact. Well, we have about five or ten minutes before we need to wrap things up here. I'm sure we could go on for hours. But maybe we'll give everyone a chance to touch on anything we didn't talk about yet that you want to bring to the forefront. Or maybe we can

78:56start with you. Well, sure. I mean, I think it's pretty simple — like, we talk about it and we see what's going to fall out of the tea leaves, or what's going to follow the cards. And the reality is we always need to be educating, we always need to be doing a continual improvement process. Right. So we know there's going to be call it an A, B, and C builder. We don't need to worry about trying to move the C's to the A's — we need to go, how do we

79:21leverage the A's, learn the lessons, and then share the lessons. Right. So I think at the root of it there are two pieces for me that seem to be really lacking. Education is one of them. It's this overarching vernacular — it's this idea of saying we're all talking, and when I say this you understand what I mean. It's not, you know, we're just being plain language — do you know what I mean? I think architects, engineers, technical professionals live in the acronyms world and it doesn't always

79:47trickle down to the homeowner. To use the classic example: I just want my house to be comfortable, and when my friends come over I want them to be impressed. Right. That has nothing to do with what's going on inside. So I think there needs to be a massive push on educating. And when we look at that specifically in and around the trades — we don't necessarily have to create all these new trade designations. We need to incrementally train the existing tradespeople we have. And when

80:11you take those tradespeople and go, I'm going to add skills to your belt — whether it's a black belt, whether it's like your Nova Scotia Construction Safety Passport, right, how you physically get your WHMIS, you physically get your fall arrest — so you know, teaching a cladding gentleman or a woman how to properly detail a corner or a window: that makes a lot of sense. I think, on the political wheel and regulations: government has to honestly step up and go, we've said we've

80:39committed to these things. Bill 57 — it's not going to be super popular with some groups, but we're going to adopt the codes. Get out of the way, you know what I mean? Like, adopt it, put it in play, you've done your piece. We're not asking the government to solve how we get there, but this waffling doesn't make anybody happy — it's that pause in the train, you know what I mean? And now we have to get the train back up to momentum. So I think: straight education,

81:03living within the policy, and letting the experts share the lessons — we're going to go faster. You know, green seal is a good example: it would be lovely to have. It's probably 12 years out, you know, by the time the national talks to the provincial into this. So we have to go beside that and go, here are 10 ways for Murray to upskill today that don't require him to leave a job and go take another two-year degree. You know what I mean? So I think education and then just the political

81:30will to actually enact the policies and regulations we've already got in place — and then get out of the way. I think that's where we're going to win. Right. Right. We've covered a lot of ground, and I don't have a lot to say. I just have one final thought: if we're trying to align the government's will to the broad consumer base — well, housing is going to get more expensive. That's a reality, be it single family, be it... you can slow it down, it can slow down, but

82:01it's still continually going to go up. If I have some way to show that my house is worth more, it's more comfortable — through a labeling program — you're going to attract people to your region. Full stop. Because my investment is going up, it's going to cost me more to get in, mortgages are going to be... it's just what it is. So, yeah, we have to have a way for people to say, yep, I can recover this and I can recover it easier. The IPCC just came out with a new report

82:39that's been several years in the making, and it sounds like it's pretty alarming. I haven't looked at it yet. I appreciated that when they were presenting it, there was a little nod to the current movie of the year, because they said, what do we need to do? And the answer was: we need to do everything everywhere all at once. So there — I think we need to acknowledge there is urgency. And even how we frame that and talk about that in our language — we used to talk about global warming and people going, 'Oh,

83:05that's great, yeah, a little warmer climate would be nice.' Now we're talking about climate change. We're going to change that — talk about climate catastrophe, climate emergency, because that's what we're seeing in the news almost every night. Climate change is causing these catastrophes all around the world. Or even simple things like natural gas — it's methane. So let's actually acknowledge within our terminology what we're doing, what our impact is. And start doing it now. Lara? Yeah, I think we need to keep talking and keep learning from each other and keep

83:39finding ways to do this kind of thing, so we're getting the word out. You know, we all live in this space, but homeowners all live in their homes and we all work in buildings. Like, the impact of buildings on our lives is so huge — and we don't really think about that. We don't think about it in relation to this climate catastrophe, and we don't think about the elements of the spaces that we're in that have an impact on that

84:12climate catastrophe. So let's keep — I like those words — let's keep trying to get people to pay some attention to it. Yeah, absolutely. Will, Murray, Keith, Lara, thank you for joining us today. Great discussion on a very important topic. Hopefully we've shed some light — it's a lot of ground to cover, it's hard to squeeze into an hour-and-a-half segment, but I think maybe we did okay. Can I do one more? Absolutely, of course! So even though the conference is sold out, there still

84:43are some pre-conference workshops on March 29th. So if you want to learn about passive house, there's an Introduction to Passive House. If you want to learn about the CaGBC zero-carbon standard, Will is teaching that course on Wednesday morning. In the afternoon there's an ASHRAE workshop, and there's also a Green Building Initiative workshop — they run Green Globes, which is a rating system, so they're talking about Green Globes and workshops. Yeah, some really good workshops, really affordable. Come and dive in for three hours on these topics. We're excited to

85:19have a booth. We're excited to have Keith — Keith is on the panel for the lunchtime keynote, or after the lunchtime keynote. So the lunchtime keynote is 'The Two Trillion Dollar Opportunity,' so for the business people there — good enough to have the same discussion but in about 10 minutes. Yeah, pretty much. And Keith brings sort of the local perspective. And Will will be there — Will's teaching on Wednesday as I said, and then Will will be in the audience on Thursday, networking and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, awesome. And you

85:49guys will be there. Absolutely, shooting and talking. Excellent. And hopefully some of our listeners who maybe weren't aware of it — I'm sure most people are, but if it's the first time they're hearing about it, hopefully they'll come out and check it out too. Yeah, that'd be great. It's the 30th, next Thursday. BuildGreen Atlantic. Thanks again, folks — this was great, really appreciate it. Very enjoyable. Thank you, thank you. Quick shout out to the newest sponsor of the show: The Stone Depot. The

86:15Stone Depot is located in the Bayers Lake area of Halifax and serves all of the east coast. The showroom is over 8,000 square feet, perfect for masonry contractors, landscaping contractors, builders, developers. Regardless, The Stone Depot is a great option for you — whether you're doing fire pits, patio stones, kitchen and interior stones. So if you're looking for a great stone supplier, visit The Stone Depot. This episode is also brought to you by Cook Insurance, your trusted insurance broker in Atlantic Canada for 50 years. Insurance is complex and the Cook team focuses on delivering comprehensive

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