Welcome to the
Summer Ontario FOCUS By the time you have this Ontario FOCUS issue of Sustainable Architecture & Building Magazine, we will have wrapped up the Canada Green Building Council’s annual conference – Building Lasting Change. Held this year in Montréal, QC, our conference is a great opportunity to reconnect with peers from across the country, delve into the issues facing our sector, and be inspired by our collective successes. The Focus publications are like that as well, showcasing regional leadership in green and sustainable building. In this issue, you’ll read about the new Kitchener Library branch building targeting zero carbon, a multigenerational rammed earth home with high energy savings, and an abandoned two-storey residential building converted to modern housing, alongside updates from the CAGBC. We have been very busy over the first and section quarter, from our advocacy efforts – including CAGBC’s perspective on Ontario’s proposed Bill 98, new LEED v5 alternative compliance paths for Canada, and our focus on retrofits. We’ve also published or partnered on research that will help Canada’s green building sector meet the challenges and opportunities in front of them. First, we published the Accelerating Deep Retrofits: A Year of Insights on Progress and Barriers report, which captures findings from the inaugural year of the Purpose Retrofit Accelerator. Led by Purpose Building, funded by Natural Resources Canada, and supported by CAGBC, the report draws on real-world projects to assess market readiness for deep carbon retrofits. Notably, it establishes an initial cost benchmark intended to spark informed dialogue across Canada’s building sector at a time when owners and investors are navigating rising transition and physical risks, alongside broader economic and geopolitical uncertainty.
We also worked with REALPAC to publish Valuing the Future, a roadmap that looks at how Canada’s appraisal community could integrate climate-related risk factors into real estate valuations. The report will help building owners, appraisers, investors, and industry stakeholders better understand how physical and transition risks may affect asset value, and influence cash flow durability, capital expenditures, leasing risk, operating costs, insurance, liquidity, and long-term asset competitiveness. You can find the report at www.realpac.ca. As Canada’s building sector works to understand the impact of climate-driven physical and transition risk, CAGBC will focus on the pragmatic solutions that will help owners and developers unlock the value of green building and further Canada’s and Ontario’s economic competitiveness. I hope you will join us in this endeavour, as we focus on the cost-effective deployment of solutions that accelerate innovation, decarbonization, and resilience across the building sector.
Sincerely, Thomas Mueller President & CEO, Canada Green Building Council
SUMMER 2026 Ontario FOCUS
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