BSAO News
BSAO submission to the Province's Building Code consultation (ERO 026-0744)
Dear members,
On August 14, BSAO filed a submission with the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing in response to ERO 026-0744, Reducing Regulatory Burden in Ontario's Building Code.
The consultation is run by the Building Code Short-Term Advisory Body, established in June, which is conducting a section-by-section review of the Building Code and reports to the Minister — an interim report this September and a final report in March 2027. Comments filed now feed that interim report.
The consultation is deregulatory in intent, so we framed our submission as burden reduction through performance rather than as a request for new requirements. Its central argument comes straight from your daily work: the most avoidable burden in the current system is not the number of requirements, it is uncertainty about how a requirement will be interpreted. That uncertainty drives over-documentation, defensive detailing and repeat plan-review cycles without producing safer or more durable buildings.
The submission recommends:
- Consolidating the envelope requirements now scattered across five separate sources — the environmental separation provisions, the housing provisions, the fire provisions, the energy Supplementary Standards, and the standards each of them references. Shorter, not weaker.
- Greater use of qualified professional review, where documented responsibility for an outcome justifies requiring less prescriptive demonstration in advance.
- Fixing the air barrier inspection, which is called as a single notice stage even though the system is concealed progressively by trade — so what actually gets inspected is only what remains visible. Fire separations already receive progressive inspection for the same reason.
- An optional provincial library of deemed-to-comply envelope details for the recurring conditions where disputes concentrate, using the existing supplementary-standard mechanism.
- Alignment with the National Construction Codes where divergence buys nothing, while keeping the variations justified by Ontario's climate and durability conditions.
- An anonymized, searchable provincial repository of municipal alternative-solution acceptances, so the same solution is not argued from first principles in every municipality.
- Support for the tiered energy framework of the 2025 National Building Code, with harmonized metrics, modelling requirements and documentation across provincial, municipal and incentive programs.
It closes by offering BSAO's Codes and Standards Committee to the Advisory Body as a technical resource on building envelope, moisture management, durability and energy performance, at no cost.
The submission was prepared by our Codes and Standards Committee and is signed by me as President and by Brandon Gemme, P.Eng., BSS, CPHD, Chair of the Codes and Standards Committee. You can read it in full here.
This is exactly the kind of file BSAO exists for, and our submissions are stronger the more members are behind them. If you would like to contribute to future Code submissions, the Codes and Standards Committee welcomes new members — write to info@bsao.ca.
Best regards,
Negar Pakzadian, BEng., MArch., MBSc., BSS, CPHD
President
