Issue 40 November 2019

News and Events

Second Annual Legislation Day

CHBA BC held its second annual Legislation Day in Victoria this week! We had 32 CHBA BC members and staff from all eight local associations participate.

On Sunday, Nov. 24, we held a training day to learn more about the legislature and CHBA BC’s policy work. On Monday, our members held 21 different meetings with Cabinet Ministers and MLAs, meeting with almost 75% of the provincial legislature – to achieve affordable, available and professionally built homes. The evening reception on Monday evening was packed with MLAs and staff. The evening featured speeches by Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Selina Robinson, and Liberal Opposition Leader Andrew Wilkinson.

CHBA BC CEO Neil Moody, CHBA BC President Brian Charlton and Government Relations Committee Chair Matt McCurrach had the honour of meeting with Premier Horgan and Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Selina Robinson to discuss collaborative efforts to achieve greater housing affordability and see to more homes being built across the province.

Thank you to all members that took the time to participate in this successful second Legislation Day. An additional thank you to the CHBA BC government relations committee and chair Matt McCurrach for their hard work that helped to make this event a big success!

Building Code Update

“New updates to the B.C. Building and Plumbing Code (B.C. Building Code) support innovative construction methods to help build more affordable homes faster, while enhancing building standards for energy efficiency and safety for British Columbians.

One of the changes to the building code enables local governments to allow 12-storey tall wood buildings, up from the previous limit of six storeys. Thirteen communities have signed on to be early adopters of tall wood buildings using mass timber technology.

Another change will help increase the supply of homes people need by allowing secondary suites in multi-family buildings, like thousands of duplexes and townhouses around the province. The regulations also remove maximum size restrictions in the building code.”

You can read the full release here. 

Water Act Update

The Minister of Forests, Lands, Natural Resources Operations and Rural Development, the ministry in charge of approving Section 11 approvals under the Water Sustainability Act, have notified us that they had increases to staffing capacity approved and, coupled with new guidelines to support the completion of high quality, complete applications, expect that the approval backlog will be substantially reduced or eliminated within a year.

Here is the website with the updated guidelines.

Consultations

Accessibility Legislation Submission

CHBA BC provided a submission on the British Columbia Framework for Accessibility Legislation to the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction in late November 2019.

The purpose of this Framework for Accessibility Legislation is to begin a conversation about accessibility legislation for B.C.

Within the submission, we provided recommendations for the built environment, voluntary opportunities where CHBA members are already leading the way, and suggestions to improve coordination between ministries on this important topic. 

The full submission can be read here.

TEDI Win

The BC Energy Step Code is performance-based code, where compliance is based on a set of technical metrics that builders must follow for each project.

Following the release of the first Energy Step Code metrics update, effective Dec. 10, 2018, CHBA BC received member feedback that some projects that previously met Step Code levels were no longer able to comply with the same step under the revised metrics.

To address member concerns, CHBA BC established a Step Code Task Group to work with the Building and Safety Standards Branch to develop solutions for the Step Code metrics, based on actual homes being built and designed. This extra step, led by CHBA BC, was essential to provide real-world validation of solutions under development.

After engaging in months of consultation and CHBA BC conducting its own third-party validation, Revision 2 of the BC Building Code 2018 has been approved and takes effect December 12, 2019.

Revision 2 included changes to the Energy Step Code metrics for TEDI (Thermal Energy Demand Intensity) for Part 9 Residential Buildings:

There will be two (BC Energy Step Code) options to address building envelope performance requirements: revised TEDI metrics or a percent-better approach. TEDI targets will remain the same, however Revision 2 will allow builders in colder parts of a climate zone to adjust their TEDI based on the Heating Degree Days (HDD) of their project location, rather than use a single value for the entire climate zone.

Alternately, builders using the EnerGuide approach will have the option of demonstrating a percentage improvement of the annual space heating requirement over the reference building. This is based on a similar approach being considered for the model National Building Code.

If you’d like to learn more about the BC Energy Step Code Part 9 changes, please view this link.

Thank you to our members who have dedicated their time and efforts to getting this amendment approved! The existing task group will continue to address any further issues or challenges as they arise.