Support forestry with an affordable home strategy

Here’s why:

Developing a national homebuilding strategy, building on the existing Canada’s Housing Plan, will require federal, provincial and municipal governments to coordinate with forestry and housing stakeholders, and will connect Canada’s forests with the housing crisis.

We grow it here. Let’s process it and build here, too.

Canada can transform current trade headwinds into an opportunity by scaling up the production of innovative wood products and working to sustain a thriving domestic homebuilding market. It’s time to reduce our historic dependence on exporting commodities and focus on what will become the next phase of Canada’s forestry industry.

Canada already excels at manufacturing engineered wood products, mass timber and prefabricated building systems but it could do so much more. To craft a strong, Made-in-Canada homebuilding strategy, Canada must be ready to overhaul its building and permitting approach, better recognize the value of wood product utilization and deploy an ambitious and patient investment strategy. 

Such a strategy opens durable employment pathways badly needed in a sector that has seen thousands of job losses over the past decades. These high value-added products also make the most of a fibre supply which faces significant challenges, and they are a low-emission building option key to enabling long-term carbon sequestering. Most important, they help Canada build houses at a crucial time.

Canada’s Housing Plan identifies three goals, the first of which is ‘Building More Homes.’ As the Plan says, “We need to build more homes, faster. From concept to construction, we need to increase the pace of homebuilding to get Canadians into homes that meet their needs at prices they can afford.”

Within that goal, the Plan prioritizes “Changing the Way Industry Builds Homes,” including:

• Implementing an industrial strategy for homebuilding
• Introducing a Standardized Housing Design Catalogue
• Scaling up new tech to build new homes
• Investing in new approaches to homebuilding
• Providing low-cost loans to prefabricated housing projects
• Simplifying the way that Canada builds homes

Ongoing trade disputes with the U.S. over lumber and wood products  has underlined the need to transform Canada’s forestry industry, including adding value, and growing good jobs, by investing in processing and R&D to develop new wood products.

This proposal will not have to be built from scratch. British Columbia already has a modular housing initiative, called Modular BC. A number of companies have already moved into the modular housing field, involving ‘made in Canada’ engineered wood products.

The proposal will require government investment, support, and coordination, but the result will connect Canadian loggers, mill workers, engineered wood product manufacturers, transport and logistics workers, designers, homebuilders, and finally, residents.