John Mava was minding his own business, looking for work, when a construction project sprouted behind his house like a Canadian maple. Curious, he wandered over and discovered that in Canada, houses are built with timber instead of bricks, and people actually care about the environment. "I said it would be great for me to have knowledge about this," he recalled, and so began his journey into the wild world of home retrofitting.
Mava applied to the YMCA's Power of Trades programme and became one of the first hires at Build, a new social enterprise launched in September by the Ottawa non-profit EnviroCentre. Build aims to tackle two pressing issues: the urgent need to retrofit Canadian homes to fight the climate crisis, and the shortage of skilled workers willing to stuff insulation into attics. Buildings are among the top-five greenhouse gas emitters in Canada, according to the federal government, which prompted the Canadian Climate Institute to note that "Canada's climate progress has been modest and is at risk of going in the wrong direction" - a polite way of saying we're fumbling the ball.
Melanie Johnston, a director at EnviroCentre, explained that "we are seeing drastic reductions in GHG emissions by providing building envelope upgrades." Build's goal is to train people who normally face barriers entering the industry - including women, Indigenous people, and newcomers like Mava - in insulation installation, air sealing, and other retrofitting skills. Retrofitting, for the uninitiated, means upgrading a building to improve its energy performance, ranging from caulking windows to overhauling heating systems. It also comes with non-environmental perks like household cost savings and better indoor air quality, which Johnston says can lead to "less visits to emergency rooms for asthma attacks or lost days at school or work."
The Pembina Institute calculated that Canada needs to retrofit about 600,000 homes each year to hit net zero emissions by 2050. Since 80% of the buildings that will exist in 2050 are already standing, we can't just bulldoze everything and start over - though that would be easier. Build has been training its first two mentees, Mava and Allan Kanobana, who moved to Canada from Rwanda in 2024 in search of better education for his kids. They've been learning health and safety, PPE use, and practical skills like insulation and drywall installation at a warehouse, while also working with groups like Toronto's Building Up to share resources.
"When you look at the building science and the building codes and how building is practised here, it's very different from where I come from," said Kanobana. Johnston noted that Build recruits newcomers through the YMCA and the Ottawa Community Immigrant Services Organization, helping bridge the gap caused by the classic "lack of Canadian work experience" catch-22. Katie Sexton, a YMCA vice-president overseeing Power of Trades, reported an 84% employment rate after completion - not bad for a program that also teaches you not to nail your thumb to a wall.
The skilled trades shortage is real: vacancies in residential construction have increased by an average of 11% annually since 2017, exacerbated by Covid-19, bias against blue-collar work, and Canada's ageing population. Statistics Canada projects more than 245,100 construction workers will retire by 2032, leaving a shortage of over 61,400 workers. The federal government says immigration is part of the solution, but immigrants face barriers beyond training - like the fact that "the construction industry is historically mostly male, white people," as Johnston put it. Build aims to create a welcoming space and roll out a tool kit for employers to "remove some of the older toxic behaviours that you might see in the construction environment."
Build plans to take on two more mentees by year's end and retrofit hundreds of Ottawa-area homes, mostly through EnviroCentre's affordable housing connections. Mava, inspired by a trip to Huntsville, Ontario, where a homeowner said he was retrofitting for his grandchildren, sees the work as his legacy. "He doesn't want a situation where his kids will ask him: 'What did you do about it?'" Mava said. "I don't want my kids to ask me: 'John, what did you do about this?' With this, we'll be able to reduce the emissions and then the kids will be happy in the future. I'll be able to say: 'Yes, this is my own contribution to it.'"