Building Regulations for Market Access: Enabling construction companies to grow

The Canadian building construction market is worth $130 billion and is expected to grow, yet builders are faced with increasing construction costs and shrinking profits. They are turning to manufacturers to provide innovative and cost-effective products with demonstrated performance, and to provincial and territorial governments to provide consistent and simple-to-implement regulations across the country.

In response to these industry needs, NRC launched a new initiative—Building Regulations for Market Access—with two focus research areas:

• Performance-based Technical Solutions will provide industry clients with evaluations, designs and technical guides to lower cost, risk and time to commercialize products and systems, and demonstrate their compliance to code requirements.
• Research-based Building Code Development will validate performance levels and assessment methods, and develop and deploy improved national model building codes.

By bringing together national services such as the Canadian Construction Materials Centre CCMC and the Canadian Codes CentreCCC with technical expertise and world-class testing facilities, this NRC initiative will help industry resolve market barriers to increase the sales of innovative products, reduce the regulatory cost of market entry, as well as increase access to broader markets. We will continue to support provinces and territories by ensuring consistent and innovative code requirements and evaluations are available across Canada.