Equity Up North

Momentum on building performance standards (BPS) extends beyond the United States. Canadian jurisdictions are making movements on performance policies as well. Benchmarking & Reporting and BPS (or BEPS) policies have been passed at both the city and province level (see our map for details). For example, Toronto, Ontario is the latest city to move toward adopting a BPS bylaw. The introduction is expected to happen in 2027 but stakeholders have already been sharing ideas, feedback, and vision for the bylaw.

The project

IMT worked with a diverse group of Canadian partners interested in BPS and committed to equity. For over a year our organizations completed research and local engagement to learn about community priorities, national examples, and best practices. This came together in our latest release – a toolkit for local governments in both Canada and the U.S. to use in creating Equity-Embedded Building Performance Standards.

We and our partners believe that climate action is necessary and urgent, and must equitably improve building energy and performance. This means improvements should 1) enhance health and stability as well as reduce carbon emissions; 2) underserved communities should be centered in policy design and implementation; and 3) unintended consequences should be addressed and remediated upfront.

Check out the resource

Recommendations and tools

Our key recommendations included:

Make policy community-driven through meaningful engagement with impacted groups, early and often and with as much sharing of decision-making power as possible
Protect renters and low to moderate income tenants, both within the BPS and through accompanying policies and programs
Design for flexibility, to support affordable housing and others that may have compliance constraints
Build an ecosystem of support, through connecting with existing programs
Intentionally consider non-energy benefits, in particular health, when designing and evaluating the policy

The toolkit highlights tools that governments can implement or partner with to support equitable implementation, including:

The end of the report (pages 18-20) contains links to all the research completed leading up to this toolkit, including tenant survey responses, memos for city government, policy briefs, landscape surveys, and best practice reports. While this work was prompted by Toronto’s BPS design process, the themes also apply to governments across Canada and the US.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the Toronto Atmospheric Fund for funding and supporting this work, to Efficiency Canada for leading us, and to all the other partners we worked with and learned from: