Article: For Self-Sufficiency and Sustainability, We Need More Renovation and Restoration

By Lloyd Alder

I apologize to non-Canadian readers, but we are all a bit preoccupied these days.

The President of the USA has given Canada and Mexico a month’s reprieve after threatening to impose a 25% tariff on Canadian goods, but everyone in Canada is still flipped out, recognizing that existing treaties have been ripped up and our relationship has changed. The country has also changed, and many governments and individuals are rejecting American products. As Heather Mallick writes in The Star, It’s wartime. Do without. Shop locally. It’s not just me. And it’s not just food; we also have to think about buildings.

Fifteen ago, when I was President of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario, I fought heritage preservation battles with the support of the late Paul Oberman, founder of Woodcliffe and one of the best developers of heritage projects this country has seen. He told me often that his new construction projects might have 50% of the money go to labour and 50% to materials, many of which were imported, whereas a restoration might be as high as 80% labour, and most of the materials were local. His pitch was that restoration and renovation kept money and jobs in Canada.

This was before upfront or embodied carbon was on the radar, before we thought about the emissions from replacing existing buildings. Yet we regularly knock down perfectly good apartment buildings to build new ones twice the size instead of fixing what we have. To do so, we import tonnes of material- 30% of building materials used in Canada are imported from the USA, usually high-value stuff- in 2021, the US sold us US$2.61 billion worth of HVAC equipment, almost all of which went into new buildings.

In 2023, Canada imported 1,121,640 bricks from the USA, whereas Daniel Arellano of Arcana Materials can sell you rescued and restored bricks that are “approximately 79 times less than the production carbon footprint of new heritage-match bricks.” American bricks have been cheaper than new Canadian ones because of lower energy costs for firing the bricks; Daniel’s don’t need any firing.

Canadians have invented machines that can clean old mortar from 2 to 8 bricks a minute, making it cost-effective to reuse bricks.

I suggested that Meredith Moore of Ouroboros Deconstruction should look at what Miller Hull and Lord Aeck Sargent did at the Kendeda building for Georgia Tech in Atlanta; they designed a gorgeous ceiling where new lumber was alternated with recycled lumber to make Nail-Laminated Timber (NLT). It makes our new wood go farther and makes good use of the old wood.

It was all nailed together by people from Georgia Works, a non-profit that trains and employs economically disadvantaged Atlanta residents. There are likely going to be a lot more economically disadvantaged Canadians after the tariffs kick in.

Surprisingly, Canada imports a lot of lumber from the USA, mainly hardwoods and engineered wood products. When I was at the Interior Design Show a few weeks ago, I was surprised to find that the Québecois designer and manufacturer of this furniture got his hardwoods from the USA; suitable local wood was unavailable.

Meanwhile, out west on Haida Gwaii, beautiful FSC-certified logs are being shipped to Japan because there is insufficient demand in Canada. Clearly, we have to make better use of the resources we have instead of shipping out raw logs.

We certainly have the design talent needed to restore, repair and even add on to existing buildings, as ERA demonstrated recently in Toronto, fixing up my mistakes from when I renovated this building in the eighties.

What we don’t have are the trades. I sit on the National Trust for Canada’s Roundtable on Heritage Education, where at every meeting, we learn of another school that is dropping its heritage training programmes. They just haven’t been priorities for governments who like to build shiny new things. In the light of current circumstances, that might have to change.

For years, I have been preaching to anyone who would listen that preservation is climate action, that “We are no longer just trying to save the past; we’re trying to save the future.” Now, we are also trying to save the country. Some ideas:

• Ban Demolition. Renovating and restoring what we have requires much less importing of materials and equipment. Toronto should immediately ban the demolition of perfectly good apartment buildings; we have lots of room to build housing if we fix the zoning.
• Invest in our heritage trades. There is going to be significant unemployment, and preservation can put a lot of people to work.
• Use less American stuff. Canada imports American steel ($9.45 billion worth) and drywall ($65 million worth) because we don’t make enough of it to meet domestic demand. Renovation and restoration means we will need less of it.
• Use more Canadian Stuff. Add lightweight aufstockung or optoppen to the top of our existing buildings using Canadian timber.
• Electrify and heatpumpify. Many eastern Canadian provinces get their natural gas from the Marcellus Shale fields in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Heat pumps make it possible to renovate our existing buildings and go carbon (and American gas) free.
• Cancel the Therme spa on Toronto’s waterfront. It’s all American steel and glass and concrete, and its pro forma relies on American tourists who may not arrive.
• Fix what we’ve got. Repair, restore, renovate, rebuild, and recycle first.

Many American readers think I am overreacting. One says, “It’s all about the illegal immigrants and drugs.”-it’s not; now he is complaining about banks. Another asks, “Have none of you ever done business with a New Yorker? how could you all be so damned gullible?” Perhaps we are all overreacting. However, I tend to agree with the Globe and Mail’s Tony Keller, who wrote under the headline, “For Canada, Donald Trump is the end of the world as we know it.”

Don’t get too comfortable. This is a one-month reprieve. It’s not the end of trade threats. It could be just the beginning. Mr. Trump has been clear that, as far as he’s concerned, no deal is ever settled, and agreements exist to be ripped up whenever it suits him. The trade war could restart in a few weeks. Or not. It all depends on Mr. Trump’s whims and needs.

Things have fundamentally changed, and we in Canada have to adapt and prepare. Changes to what and how we build should be high on the list.