There was a time when every young Canadian was sold the dream of home ownership. It was what your parents encouraged you to aspire to, along with a good job and a family of your own. However, with the cost of a house in Canada continuing to outpace salaries as each generation comes of age, from Gen X to Millennials to Gen Z, that dream has fizzled out just a little more.
It’s no secret we’re in the midst of a housing crisis here in Canada—95 percent of Canadians agree according to a December 2024 Ipsos poll—but even more depressing is the fact that, of those Canadians who currently do not own a home, 72 percent have given up on ever owning one. It isn’t just that we lack the supply, either. Low productivity in the construction sector, supply chain disruptions that drive up costs for building essentials, and the ongoing affordability crisis are contributing to a serious problem with no solution in sight.
Underpinning all of this is the fact that we need to boost our housing supply in a way that doesn’t drive up carbon emissions. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, building construction and operations made up approximately 37 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2022, which was an all-time high for the industry.
As municipal, provincial, and federal governments attempt to come up with solutions while foisting blame on each other, the answer may be staring us in the face: converting our most prolific renewable resource into a more sustainable form of housing with mass timber.
Photo: Bright Photography, courtesy naturallywood.com
Changing how we value lumber
First, it’s important to understand the difference between commodity lumber and mass timber. Most wood used to build furniture or house frames falls into the former category, which contributed more than $33 billion to Canada’s economy in 2022. Mass timber, on the other hand, is a wood product created by reducing the moisture content in smaller pieces, mechanically grading each of them, and gluing or laminating them together to create an extremely strong building material.
“A wood-frame house is a completely different structural performing system than mass timber,” explains Patrick Crabbe, director of mass timber with Bird Construction. “These products are direct substitutes for, or can be used in conjunction with, steel and concrete in building construction.”
A TD report from September 2024 notes that although Canadian productivity hasn’t bounced back the way it has in many countries since the pandemic, construction is nearing its lowest point in thirty years. Construction is slow, but again, the answer is in front of us: mass timber offers quicker construction timelines that can result in overall project cost reduction.
“Mass timber is a pre-fabricated, modular solution,” says Crabbe. “A lot of the work is done in a highly automated factory, and when it does show up on site, the time to build these buildings is reduced substantially. The tradespeople working on that site can work quicker and then move on to the next project, so you’re erecting buildings in a matter of days instead of months.”
Sustainable and economical
What’s more, tall wood buildings require less energy to heat and cool long term because wood is a natural insulator. It can also reduce the construction industry’s carbon footprint by up to 45 percent. The idea that Canada could increase residential construction while reducing carbon emissions, all in an economically viable way, is exactly why Bentley Allan, a transition pathway principal at The Transition Accelerator, is such a big supporter of mass timber. The Transition Accelerator is a Canadian organization focused on ensuring the country’s economy can prosper in a net-zero future.
“We’re missing out on a whole chunk of the value chain in forestry,” he explains. “And it’s actually very difficult to change the way that our forestry economic model works in order to accommodate something like mass timber, because it’s a wholesale change.”
Allan says the Canadian forestry sector is almost too successful for its own good due to how efficient lumber companies are at harvesting trees and shipping the raw lumber out. We’re doing the basic work so quickly that no company has upgraded the quality of our end product so we can get more money from a resource that’s vital to solving many of our current woes. He likens the practice to a Canadian company mining copper ore, shipping it off in raw form to another country where it’s made into batteries, which Canada then buys back at a higher price.
“With mass timber, you can generate so much more value from one piece of wood, as opposed to turning it into a commodity and shipping it across the border,” adds Crabbe. “It can incentivize landowners to manage their material to grow a higher-quality product and get paid a much higher value for it, so it can change the whole value stream. What I like to say is that we move away from the volume model to the value model.”
Beautiful buildings that serve a purpose
When you see a stunning wood building like The Wave in Singapore, it’s easy to assume mass timber is more suited to expensive, architecturally unique buildings and doesn’t fit the low costs and basic materials we need to fill the housing gap. But Allan and other Canadian thought leaders envision it as a way to transform a resource we already have into something far more usable, sustainable, and ultimately, more economical.
Investing in Affordability
Organizations like Rooted: Community Development Partners are putting their money where their mouth is to prove mass timber’s feasibility in solving Canada’s housing crisis. The Nova Scotia based non-profit is building a high-efficiency, eighteen-unit, multi-residential property in Dartmouth suburb Cole Harbour, which is set to open in late 2025. Rooted will rent half of those units—which include one-, two-, and three-bedroom options—to eligible families at 60 percent below market value.
The type of mass timber used in the building’s flooring system, known as cross-laminated timber, makes for a shallower depth than standard materials, explains Crabbe. “This can translate into a reduction in building height and building envelope costs, making the project more affordable overall.”
Photo Courtesy of Rooted: Community Development Partners.
Opening Image: RAEF Architectural Photographer, courtesy naturallywood.com
So what’s missing? What’s holding Canadian mass timber innovators back? The ability to scale. We simply don’t have enough manufacturing facilities with the capacity to meet a domestic surge in mass timber demand. The facilities required to produce these products are much different than the average sawmill, with advanced machines and different employee skill sets—all of which need to be funded. And while some money is starting to flow as companies recognize the opportunities that exist, it’s not yet enough to bring hundreds of thousands of new residential buildings into being.
“Mass timber made its name on these extraordinarily nice, bespoke pieces,” says Allan. “But we’re not going to scale mass timber that way. We’ll do it by making mid-rise buildings that are six storeys; that fill the missing middle in Ottawa, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Vancouver; and make housing affordable for Canadians. This has to be a made-in-Canada plan for a made-in-Canada industry.”
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