Cutting the Permitting Backlog in Canadian Housing Construction

Licensing and permitting are an integral part of housing development in countries around the world, touching every stage from application to occupancy. Yet many governments still rely on decades-old systems that can’t keep up with the speed and complexity of today’s housing demands.

In the latest available World Bank analysis, Canada is ranked second-slowest in the OECD for obtaining construction permitting approvals. These bottlenecks significantly delay construction and increase costs, further contributing to nationwide housing challenges. The headaches include, for example, fragmented systems for planning, licensing and building inspections – which often don’t communicate with each other; manual processes such as entering data and tracking approvals through paper documents; and rigid systems that cannot easily translate code and policy changes into technical updates. All these factors and more create backlogs and increase costs.

Learning Objectives:

• Outline all the processes and systems being used in your agency’s permitting process to identify where bottlenecks occur
• Delineate the requirements – e.g., creating information flow between applications and inspection milestones – for a single platform that can host and share all applications and their status
• Define metrics to measure changes in time to completion, where the greatest gains are made, and what further improvements can be made