Harmonizing building code rules into a single standard that applies province wide does make construction easier. If you want to build a building in north Toronto and you want to build a different building across the street in Vaughan, or across the street in Richmond Hill, you suddenly have three different sets of giant building codes that you have to make sure you follow. Want to put light fixtures on the outside of your building? If they shine upwards at all, you can install them in Toronto and Richmond Hill, but absolutely do not think about doing that across the street in Vaughan, you’ll fail your inspection and cost days work and potentially delay opening if that rule isn’t caught during design. It’s easy to handwave away and say deal with it, but these things to add a lot of cost and complication to projects and the end result of that is people wasting time and resources. Multiply that by a full province worth of people and you end up with economic inefficiency that is felt as things being more expensive and slower than you’d think they would be.

A similar measure is likely to happen with the Ontario Building Code, at the federal level. When Carney talks about harmonizing inter-provincial trade barriers, one of those thing is harmonizing codes and standards so that companies can freely move and operate wherever is needed without lots of retraining, which would likely aim to harmonize the Ontario Building Code and Canada Building Code more than they already are.

Unfortunately, the way Ford is doing it, is just cutting off all modifications that have been made to the OBC, rather than picking and choosing the most sensible modifications that municipalities have enacted. Toronto’s green roof laws should apply province wide, as should Vaughan’s night sky protection laws, but instead we get nothing.

That being said, if Carney harmonizes the building codes at the federal level, he has the opportunity to strong arm in more stringent environmental considerations into every building code. And if Carney doesn’t harmonize building codes, a future left wing Premier will hopefully use that legislation to enact green building standards province wide.