I think one challenge with the building code right now is that there are a lot of good-intentioned things that are trying to be put into the building code, but every single one of them increases the price of a house.
Right now, we're saying we have this housing affordability crisis, but we also have a climate change crisis, so there's an accelerated push to get to net-zero really fast. That is good, except it's really expensive. We have our net-zero council, and we have the best leaders in the industry working on this solution all across the country.
Our point in all of this is that we really need innovation and we need to do it in such a way.... We need R and D. We can't regulate based on having to get to this point no matter what the cost, especially in new housing where we build 200,000 or ideally 400,000 houses a year, but there are 14 million existing housing units in Canada, many of which are very inefficient. They're very beautiful but very old.
We really need to focus on the existing housing stock and make sure that when we're doing something to the national building code, we do it in a step-fashion. If we say that we want to get to here, but it's going to be really expensive to get there for new homebuyers, let's figure out how we can do it. Put the money into R and D to find the solutions before we regulate something that's going to dramatically increase the cost of home ownership for people.
We're working very hard on that at the association. We're working with the Department of Natural Resources on innovation, but the regulatory marches on.
How do we avoid making home ownership even harder to attain? Let's make sure we don't do things in the code before their time.