One hundred per cent. I'll be blunt here. I think the national building code process got hijacked. They started to pursue a whole bunch of things, such as some of these net-zero targets that weren't really understood based on building science—or so-called building science; I don't know what to call it sometimes—that weren't subject to cost-benefit analysis.
I, for one, was in favour of the harmonization of building codes across Canada, but because of that, we went to the Ontario government and said that, nationally, they were just jacking up the cost so much that people couldn't afford it. There was no sense of priority.
There's some great research that's being done connecting social housing, well-being and so on and so forth. What is the priority here? Is housing the number one priority or not? Is it some kind of esoteric, ill-defined effort by a national code, or is it a municipality declaring a climate change emergency and then introducing their own standards for things? That's being tamped down now in Ontario. We have to be really careful with that.
We have to set our priorities, though. Is it more important to have some pure version of net zero, or is it more important to house a family in a decent, modern home that's built according to our current very good standards? You're not going to save the climate on your own. What's more important here?
When you look at the consequences of inadequate housing, people have to go somewhere, so they go into substandard occupancies that are inefficient and unhealthy. Kids don't learn well. People get sick more, and that puts a burden on the health care system. That's all measured, but it's not taken into consideration on these things.
I'm in favour of harmonization, ultimately, but I don't like what has happened at the federal level.