Montreal’s SOFIAC to expand decarbonization retrofit business with capital raise - The Globe and Mail

Canada has two urgent housing jobs: build more affordable homes and preserve existing ones. Yet, we often assume they must be addressed separately when there is an opportunity for us to tackle them together. The Government of Canada has already sought to address the need for greater scale in new housing quickly through the establishment of Build Canada Homes (BCH), which recently became a Crown corporation. Its mandate is to build affordable housing and leverage the market to catalyze the adoption of Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) by increasing the use of factory-built and prefabricated construction. As BCH is still in its early stages, there is an opportunity to explicitly include whole-building retrofits in its mandate. New construction and retrofits are not identical, but they rely on many of the same foundations such as off-site manufacturing, skilled workers, early coordination and a steady pipeline of projects. Bringing them together could support both the construction of new affordable homes and preservation of existing ones.