In the past two decades, Canada has taken significant strides forward in creating greener, more sustainable buildings. Notable recent examples range from Manulife’s carbon-neutral 980 Howe St. office tower in Vancouver to EllisDon’s award-winning green retrofit of Toronto’s iconic Massey Hall.
Energy-efficiency requirements are already tightening up, from changes in the national building codes to the establishment of provincial and municipal standards, such as the BC Energy Step Code and the Toronto Green Standard. Both Vancouver and Toronto have set net-zero greenhouse gas emissions targets for all new buildings by 2030, while Montreal’s must be net zero by 2025.
There is also a move to more sustainable materials, such as mass timber, which both sequesters carbon – keeping it out of the atmosphere – and uses less energy to manufacture than concrete and steel. The trend is already unfolding on Toronto’s waterfront, with the mass-timber construction of George Brown College’s Limberlost Place and the T3 Bayside office-and-retail development.
In place of fossil fuels, he expects alternative systems such as air-source heat pumps will become ubiquitous. Other options are advanced technologies such as variable refrigerant flow , which, while costly, are much more energy efficient. “There’s no reason we can’t borrow from their example,” Ms. Willson says. “It’s clearly working there.”