As Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government plans billions in financing for builders of prefabricated homes, one expert says it’s a “significant amount of money” and “a very healthy kick-start” for the industry.
The federal government’s Build Canada Homes (BCH) plan promises, among other things, more than $25 billion in financing to “innovative prefabricated home builders in Canada,” according to the Liberals’ website.
Ramping up prefabrication could result in cheaper, faster and better-quality homes, said Tony Yang, professor of structural and earthquake engineering at University of British Columbia.
“We are building too slowly right now,” he said. “We are lacking skilled workers on site.”
The goal of prefab is to shift manufacturing from construction sites, which he called relatively inefficient, onto production lines that operate more quickly through repetition.
“This is how cars are being made, this is how airplanes are being made, and housing will be no different," he said.
A production-line approach to housing could also improve quality control and enable more automation, said Yang.
Investment into prefabrication has the added benefit of creating jobs throughout the province, said the director of a B.C. non-profit dedicated to expanding the industry.
“When we grow the industry, we’re growing factories and jobs all across the province, not just in the Lower Mainland, not just in cities,” said Paul Binotto, director of Modular BC.
Binotto talked up prefab’s abilities to boost supply, support the B.C. economy, serve Indigenous communities and minimize disruptions to neighbourhoods, cities and infrastructure.
“We have plants across the province that are running at 30-per-cent capacity. We need to get them to 100-per-cent, create more jobs and get more houses out there,” he said.
Binotto specifically cited provincial multiplex legislation as an important milestone. Bill 44 “is a huge, huge benefit and foundation for us,” he said.
“I think that model is going to lend itself to be probably one of the biggest assets that we have in the province, because it’s going to open up standardization across the province.”
At the federal level, UBC’s Yang said he believes the BCH program’s goal is not to solve the housing crisis, but to help stakeholders overcome initial hurdles and catalyze commercial investment.
“In order to build a house, I need to have all the supply chains to do it. I need the electrical, mechanical, plumbing to all work together to get it built,” he said.
“We haven’t had that supply chain established yet, but part of the initiative by the Carney government is actually using some government support to actually build up and initiate the supply chain. Once it’s been established, then the momentum will continue.”
The UBC researcher said Canada already has an existing prefab industry, which has thus far served mainly remote communities on a smaller scale. Because construction crews are sparse, homes are manufactured off-site and shipped to those areas.
He said the big gap in Canada is prefabricated highrise technology.
Yang said permitting authorities should consider introducing rules requiring buildings to have certain amounts of prefabricated components, such as kitchens, baths and balconies. This could hasten adoption in Canada, he said.
“Then you can accelerate the scale-up because you’re doing the same thing over and over. The quality will be better [and] the cost per product will be cheaper,” he said.
