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The Hammer is your deep dive into the issues and information that drive Canada’s renovation and custom homebuilding contractors. Join Canadian Contractor editor Patrick Flannery as he talks to top experts from inside and outside the industry to generate new insights and ideas for your business. Find new and past episodes online at canadiancontractor.ca or subscribe through your favourite podcasting service.
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Skylights are a feature that transform an interior space when done right and risk a lifetime of headaches when done wrong. Modern designs have come a long way from the old plexiglass domes and now offer great energy efficiency, smart home options and the ability to improve the environment throughout a home. Mark Taylor, national Canadian sales manager for Velux and 27-year veteran of the business, joins The Hammer to share tips on how to do skylights right and really boost the impact of your renovations and custom builds.
Amanda Spann is the author of I Have an App Idea - The Essential Guide to Building an App Without Tech Skills and she has good news for all of us. You don't need to spend in the five figures or burn hundreds of hours of staff time to develop an app any more, thanks to new AI-powered tools and reasonably priced professional services. The even better news is, as experts in touch with the needs of their businesses, building trades professionals are in a position to make more useful and targeted apps than anything coming out of Silicone Valley. Whether developing something to help your team internally or making a product you hope to post on the App Store, there's an opportunity here to help your efficiency and potentially add a revenue stream to your business.
Embodied carbon and an increased focus on building resiliency are coming soon to a building code near you. When they do, we're going to need a lot of information about the amount of greenhouse gasses embodied in our building products and how to build structures that will last longer in the extreme weather events happening in the regions where we build. Kelly Doran and his team at Half Climate Design have stepped up with two new documents that are included in the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation's Housing Catalogue: the Materials Guide and the Climate Resilience Guide. Doran joins The Hammer to walk us through the new documents and explain how they will help as we make the adjustment to thinking about things we never had to before.Materials GuideClimate Resilience GuideHalf Climate Design
Building resiliency is the hot focus for sustainable building regulators developing the next wave of codes and standards we will all have to follow. Resiliency impacts our designs two ways: making buildings last longer with less maintenance, and making them resist extreme weather and natural disasters better. Both are related to climate change in that buildings that last longer prevent new carbon emissions from having to repair or replace them, and climate change is already leading to weather changes that our present designs are not ready for. Duncan Rowe, a principal with RJC Engineers, deals with these issues daily both as a building engineer and in his role sitting on various code committees. He joins The Hammer to discuss resiliency and how it might impact our designs and practices going forward.
Bryan Reid, president of Kindred Construction and Kindred Custom Homes, joins The Hammer to discuss B.C.’s latest attempts to make it easier to build homes. He covers the recent prompt payment legislation and a large attempt to streamline B.C.’s approval processes with 187 amendments to legislation. He also offers his perspective on whether these moves will make life easier for B.C. contractors and the sources of the housing crisis in general. Reid has a law degree and knows his stuff, so enjoy this informative conversation.
Growing concern over building emissions and occupant health has led experts to re-evaluate how we insulate and protect our homes. Spray foam insulation, once valued mainly for its high R-value, is now at the center of discussions about sustainability, environmental impact, and indoor air quality. How does spray foam contribute to lower carbon footprints? What innovations are shaping the next generation of energy-efficient and healthy homes? And how can builders balance performance, cost, and environmental responsibility? Mickel Maalouf, Building Science Expert at Huntsman Building Solutions, joins The Hammer to unpack the science and future of spray foam in sustainable construction.
In an business where trust is perhaps our most valuable commodity, the ongoing presence of dishonest contractors and outright fraudsters hurts us all. Alex Kimmich left the tools to do something about it, establishing the BetterBid online service that connects homeowners to a vetted list of reputable local contractors. He joins The Hammer to discuss the scale of the scamming problem in Canada today and go over some of the creative new methods these criminals are employing.
Toronto construction software developer CMiC has commissioned a study examining uptake in Enterprise Resource Planning software in the American construction industry and come away with many insights relevant to our market, too. Weiss has been working with contractors to provide digital solutions since the early ‘90s and has lots to say about how the tools and interfaces have changed between then and now and why smaller contractors should be taking another look at how things like AI can help them. Plus some hard truths about why our industry has been slower to adopt the productivity-enhancing technologies that have boosted other sectors.Read the full study here
As new custom homebuilders working in the Toronto area, Joshua and his partner, Alvaro, were getting more and calls to build outbuildings on existing residential yards, home additions to add space for family and rentals, and fully separated basement living space – so-called Alternative Dwelling Units. The work has proven to be lucrative and relatively uncomplicated, with municipalities speeding up approvals even over Josh’s five years in business, so the partners have decided to make it a focus of their business. Josh joined The Hammer to talk about his journey to his point and share some tips and observations on the emerging ADU trend.
As executive director of Career Colleges of Ontario, Kate Bartz wants us to know that career colleges play a vital role in providing the skilled workforce of the future and will be an important part of the province’s mighty effort to build hundreds of thousands of homes in the years ahead. She spoke to Pat Flannery about what career colleges have to offer and how she hopes to partner with the province and our sector going forward.
Achieving good indoor air quality for our clients is something we probably need to think about more than they do. A homeowner may not give the topic a second thought…until their throat starts scratching and their nose starts itching from a poorly designed HVAC system. Mohamed Fouda sits on ASHRAE committees writing indoor air quality standards and joins The Hammer to advise us on how to protect homeowners’ health and happiness even as building envelopes get tighter.For more information, contact Mohamed at Mohamed.fouda@wolseleyinc.ca.
Silica is one of the most common hazards at construction sites. Workers exposed to airborne respirable silica are at an increased risk of developing lung diseases like silicosis, lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Meghan Friesen, Occupational Hygienist with the Ontario Health Clinics for Ontario Workers, discusses the hazards and health effects of silica, exposures in the construction industry, and the free online Silica Control Tool.
High-profile wildfires doing substantial property damage to urban areas in B.C. and Alberta have spurred NRCan to look at creating Canadian building standards for wildfire resistance. The consultation process has just begun, but it seems likely that some day soon we may see new codes requiring resistant windows, doors and other components in wildfire-prone areas. What might these rules look like? How do we determine if a product is sufficiently resistant to external fires? And what is the science behind making frames and glass that resists fire and prevents heat transfer to the home interior? Robin Urquhart has worked on rebuilding communities destroyed by wildfires and joins The Hammer to share his deep knowledge of this topic.
The difficulty, expense and delay in getting projects approved has been identified as one of the big reasons Ontario is nowhere near its homebuilding goals and not likely to be any time soon. Enter Arash Shahi and his non-profit One Ontario initiative to offer a database of municipal zoning bylaws and regulations that shows where building can happen and whether your project qualifies. One Ontario has the data and the software tools – what it needs now is provincial backing to legitimize regional planning authorities using it. Shahi explains what One Ontario is, what information it can provide and how it could be part of the path forward to getting this province out of its homebuilding logjam.
Gil Yaron of Light House is spearheading the launch of the Building Materials Exchange on Vancouver Island and Lower Mainland, B.C., with plans to expand. It’s a website where members can post excess materials from inventory or jobsites and offer them for sale or free to whomever wants them. The important wrinkle is the business-to-business nature of the site, allowing contractors to deal with other contractors and not so much the general public. There are the obvious environmental benefits of reducing waste, but avoiding charges at the landfill and being able to find free or inexpensive materials is a pretty attractive business proposition, too.
Canada, and especially Ontario, faces a housing crisis in which we are building less than half the new homes each year we are expected to need. But even so, housing starts dropped in Ontario in 2024. Radical action is clearly needed, and RESCON CEO Richard Lyall has some ideas. He joins The Hammer for some tough talk about the need for big cuts to development fees and taxes; new investment in infrastructure; harmonization of codes and standards; slashing of red tape in approvals process; the need to fight U.S. tariffs and more.
Jared Kress of Metropolitan Floors and Chris Maskell of the National Floor Covering Association of Canada join The Hammer to set us straight on the impact insulation class (IIC) for flooring. This is the number that tells us how much a flooring product prevents sound transmission to the space below from footsteps. Some condo boards and architects are specifying crazy numbers for these ratings, but what you get in a lab is often not what you get in the field. Kress and Maskell take us through how the rating is calculated, what impacts the actual performance in your project and what you need to tell clients who think your floor can be made absolutely silent.
Steve Johnston of Omnigence, a private equity firm investing in the construction sector, has a stark warning. He sees a real risk of long-term stagflation (inflation coupled with low productivity and high unemployment) in our present conditions and government policies. His white paper lays out the broad details, but he joins The Hammer to talk about the specific effects in Canada’s homebuilding sector and what will be needed to avoid them.
Movember is back with an added focus. The popular fundraising drive for men’s health has added support for mental health to its efforts along with prostate and testicular cancer. Mitch Hermansen joined Annex Business Media publisher/editor, Patrick Flannery, to talk about why these issues are important and what we in the construction community can do to help the guys who work for us.When you’re done, check out Movember’s hilarious video Shit Mos Save Lives!
We had a great conversation with Damon Gray, owner of B.C.’s NZ Builders, about their innovative insulated concrete panels and some of the great things they can achieve with them. NZ is making high-performance homes, even Passive House homes, on Vancouver Island out of concrete and finding the material generates a more comfortable and healthy environment for their customers.
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