I think there are a few different examples.
One that comes to mind is around safety, but it's actually doing safety properly. One of the most expensive things coming in the 2025 code is something called “lateral loads”. Lateral loads are about protecting against earthquakes, which is obviously hugely important, and against high winds. Of course, we're getting a lot of new high-wind events in this country, but we've actually had zero incidents of failure from high winds on existing housing, whether that's a hurricane hitting Atlantic Canada or a derecho blowing through Ontario and causing millions of dollars of damage in trees falling and that kind of thing. We don't need to build our houses completely differently and have all kinds of engineering requirements to do it.
It's too much under the current circumstances. It's probably too much, period. That's the kind of thing we need to revisit and ask what the smart thing is to do here. What's the right amount of dealing with lateral loads versus the excessive amounts? We're experiencing this in B.C. They've started with this ahead of the national building code and have engineering costs of $30,000 and more to do this kind of work on a house that didn't require any engineering before.
We have to get things like that correct.