Changing the code is a laborious process involving a lot of committees and a lot of professionals. It doesn't really rest on government. It rests on the whole industry, and that's the way it should be. It should be a cautious process to develop it. It's about life safety, and that's important.
On the other hand, it has become acceptable that every code takes five years to develop. That's what has created the slow transition. Nobody had ever imagined buildings 30 storeys tall made of wood, truthfully, until we started talking about it 10 to 12 years ago. In fairness, if you haven't imagined it, you don't write the code for it, but steel and concrete have no height limits attached to them.
It's not that we should see an entire world covered in very tall wood buildings. It's not that I believe that's the future, but I believe we should see a lot more large buildings in wood. Introducing these artificial and arbitrary height limits somehow says to the public that wood buildings aren't as good as steel and concrete.
That impression is part of the shift we that we need to change. I often say the hardest part of my job is shifting the public's perception of what is possible. It's not the engineering; that's easy. That shift of public possibility, I think, is a great opportunity for our government to say that we have a history going back to the first nations people of building in wood and that we are as good as anybody on earth at doing this, and so let's champion this as part of our national identity.
Even at a very primitive level, every two years at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Canada somehow has been embarrassed to demonstrate our leadership in wood because I think there's a sense that we might be looking back at our past rather than recognizing part of our future. Instead we show concrete and steel buildings instead of wood buildings. I think that shift in public perception comes from some investment in.... In the same way that we talk about the national parks in public media and on television ads, we should be talking about Canadian wood products in that same forum.
In Australia that's what they've done. They had a public campaign around recycling tin cans. After that was finished, they moved into encouraging people to build in wood. They had public celebrities across Australia speaking about building in wood. This is from a country that has very little forest. They chose to invest that way, and it made a huge difference. People identified that recycling tin cans makes sense and obviously building in wood makes sense, and the consumer side of the industry started to adopt it.
You introduced the question around code. I think the broader question that we have to address is how the code impacts the perception of what's possible.