Brief highlights concerns about building code and approvals process

By Dave Henderson

Sept. 14, 2026

The comment period on the open-ended public consultation for the Ontario Building Code wrapped up in August, with many stakeholders and code users providing input.

RESCON, with the valuable input from members and their designers, put forward a submission that highlighted industry concerns about the code, but more importantly about the building approvals process.

In our submission, we discussed the following key concerns:

Harmonization with the National Building Code

While many people point to the benefits of having one common building code across Canada, our experience and observations suggest that this goal is likely unrealistic for a variety of reasons.

Canada is a vast country with many climatic, geographical, geological and societal differences. Trying to consolidate and distill all of these differences into one uniform regulatory document has resulted in something that is overly complicated, clumsy and fails to address housing affordability right across the country. Rather than becoming a document that unifies building requirements for all Canadians, it has become something of an albatross that doesn’t really do anything well.

Ontario has a housing affordability and supply crisis. Our building regulatory system needs to be nimble and respond to geographic, climatic and social policies unique to Ontario if we hope to resolve our housing challenges. Harmonization of the Ontario and National Building Codes puts tremendous faith in one process and assumes that the one over-arching development process got it right.

The release of the 2025 National Building Code (NBC) is more than enough evidence that this assumption is anything but correct. Ontario and the other provinces and territories should always look to the NBC as a model and harmonize where harmonization makes sense, but to blindly adopt everything from the national process without thorough examination of what makes sense provincially is silly. The Ontario, and by extension the NBC development process, needs better justification and cost/benefit policy guardrails.

The RESCON submission outlines 10 policy principles that we believe should be foundational to all code change proposals before they move on to serious consideration for future adoption into regulation.

Approvals process

Many members and code users who shared their concerns with us indicated few problems with the actual technical code document. Most reported difficulties with the process leading up to the receipt of the physical building permit itself. Challenges identified focus on variation across all municipalities from what constitutes a complete application, to individual municipal stipulations that go beyond standard building code requirements, to what can only be described as “stonewalling” by municipal staff to avoid meeting provincially mandated service timelines.

One of the solutions proposed years ago to speeding up the approvals process was digital submissions. Sadly, this has not been the panacea everyone hoped for. If anything, it has slowed down the submissions process by requiring overly complicated and cumbersome, not to mention non-uniform data-entry provisions from one municipality to the next.

This might be solvable but would require one over-arching body to take control of the process right across all 444 municipalities, and that may simply be a step too far for the comfort level of various municipal authorities.

Interpretation and consistency

While the RESCON submission covers many issues and provides recommendations for each, it is worth mentioning that one of the biggest challenges code users and administrators face equally is uniformity of interpretation. With a document as technically complicated as the Ontario Building Code, there will always be various thoughts on how to interpret a provision.

The Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing (MMAH) used to provide interpretation services. The ministry hasn’t offered official interpretations for code users in years. This needs to change. As the authors of the code, the MMAH staff are the definitive source and keepers of knowledge when it comes to how or why an article was crafted the way it was.

The RESCON submission is available to read here. We would like to thank all members and design professionals who took the time to respond to the consultation, provide their valuable experience and insight into their daily challenges, and most importantly share their comments with us. The MMAH special stakeholder advisory group will be reviewing all comments received through the consultation and provide recommendations to government in their final report expected this fall.