I can at least speak from my experience in British Columbia. The Wood First Act in British Columbia is fairly strongly worded around requiring the use of wood and developing the wood culture.
I don't know that I have a lot to offer you in wordsmithing. I think there are a lot more experienced people in developing legislation than I am, and whether it's “requiring” or “encouraging” or “providing preference for” or “an initial consideration of”, I think I'll leave to others. However I do think it's important in whatever this bill moves forward to still have some strongly worded direction. In my experience in British Columbia, there were a number of unintended impediments that we identified after the Wood First Act was put into place I can give you an example.
Without some strong pressure and some clear direction to government ministries and public works, these may or may not all be addressed. For example, in British Columbia when we looked at schools.... I showed you an example of a school. The Ministry of Education started to look at what building products were being used in B.C. schools. They found there was a lot of concrete and brick and steel and such, so they started to ask the question, why aren't we seeing more wood buildings?
Building codes allow for the vast majority of school types, and the size and shape and what have you, but it wasn't happening. It wasn't until the ministry was forced to go back and really start to peel it back that they identified their costing models and the project planning systems that they had with the individual school districts were all developed and based on building a concrete school.
When those school districts went through the process and provided all the required information back to the Ministry of Education, of course, more often than not they fell back to the concrete buildings, which was how the system had all been designed and set up. It wasn't until they started to change that and opened it up to be far more product-agnostic , and to look at wood to see where wood was being unnecessarily excluded from the process, that it changed.
Now we're starting to see a far better balance. Not every school in British Columbia is 100% built with wood, but there are more that are being built with wood, and those unintended impediments that existed in the system are being dealt with.