Mass Timber Construction: Cut Building Times by 20%

At Surrey Memorial Hospital in British Columbia, a critical care tower rises in warm, exposed timber and glass — glulam beams fanning out over the entrance like a canopy, cross-laminated panels forming the structure above. It is the kind of building that, a decade ago, few engineers would have proposed for a hospital. Today it stands as one of many signals that mass timber has moved from architectural novelty to structural mainstream.

Across Canada, that shift is accelerating fast. Progressive building code changes, a maturing prefabrication industry, and mounting pressure to decarbonize construction have combined to push mass timber into a genuine growth sector — one expanding by more than 15 percent annually across North America. For an industry facing a housing shortage on one side and a climate mandate on the other, wood is emerging as an answer to both problems at once.

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For years, the biggest obstacle facing mass timber wasn't engineering — it was regulation. National and provincial building codes long treated wood as simply "combustible," a blanket classification that capped most timber structures at six storeys regardless of how the material actually performed in fire and seismic testing.

That began to change with the 2020 update to the National Building Code of Canada, which introduced encapsulated mass timber construction as its own recognized category, separate from the old combustible-versus-noncombustible divide. It allowed timber buildings up to 12 storeys for the first time. Provinces have since pushed further, with Ontario and others now permitting encapsulated mass timber construction up to 18 storeys.

The precedent for that ceiling already exists. Brock Commons Tallwood House at the University of British Columbia, an 18-storey hybrid mass timber tower completed in 2017, was treated at the time as a demonstration project — a one-off feat requiring special approvals. What was once exceptional is quickly becoming a permitted, repeatable typology.

Taller buildings are only part of the story. The more transformative shift is happening in how mass timber buildings actually get made — increasingly, in a factory rather than on a muddy job site.

Glulam beams and CLT panels are now CNC-cut to millimetre tolerances in climate-controlled shops, with window and door openings pre-cut and connection points checked before anything leaves the yard. Each piece is labelled not just with a part number but also with a placement instruction, arriving on site in the exact sequence it needs to go up. That precision removes much of the guesswork and delay that traditionally plagues construction.

The results are measurable. Mass timber projects can shorten construction schedules by up to 20 percent, and factory-built approaches more broadly have been shown to cut total project timelines by as much as half while reducing costs by 20 percent or more. Quebec City's Origine tower, at 13 storeys, went up in just four months. Fewer trades on site also means less noise, less debris, and less disruption for surrounding neighbourhoods — a meaningful advantage for infill housing in dense urban cores.

Canada's manufacturing base is scaling to meet the moment, with more than 20 specialized facilities across the country now producing CLT and glulam, clustered into emerging regional hubs from coastal British Columbia to southern Ontario and Quebec. Even so, much of the CLT used in Canadian buildings is still imported from Europe — a gap the domestic industry is racing to close.

Mass timber's environmental case rests on a distinction that's easy to overlook: embodied carbon versus operational carbon. Operational carbon comes from running a building — heating, cooling, lighting. Embodied carbon comes from making it: manufacturing, transporting, and installing every material inside it.

In cities with relatively clean electricity grids, such as Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, embodied carbon is projected to account for the vast majority of a new building's lifecycle emissions by mid-century. That's where wood has an outsized advantage. Unlike concrete and steel, which release significant emissions during production, timber stores the carbon a tree absorbed while it was growing, locking it away for the life of the building. Combined with smart material substitution elsewhere in a project, building with wood can cut embodied carbon by as much as 40 percent.

That advantage is only as credible as the forestry behind it, and Canada has a strong hand to play: it holds more third-party certified, sustainably managed forest than any other country in the world. Efforts are now underway to build traceability into the supply chain, so developers can verify and market exactly where their timber came from.

Mass timber made its early reputation on showpiece towers and one-off cultural buildings. Its bigger opportunity now lies somewhere less glamorous: the 4-to-6 and 7-to-12 storey residential buildings that make up the "missing middle" that Canadian cities desperately need. Standardized panel sizes and repeatable building archetypes could let mass timber become a default choice for multi-family housing rather than a bespoke exception.

That shift matters for labour, too. Construction faces a persistent shortage of skilled trades, and mass timber buildings generally require smaller on-site crews than concrete or steel equivalents. It matters regionally as well: unlike a typical concrete pour, mass timber's value chain runs through forests, sawmills, and manufacturing plants, work that is inherently distributed into rural and Indigenous communities rather than concentrated in a handful of urban job sites. Cultural buildings like the Squamish Lil'wat Cultural Centre and the Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute point toward a growing model of Indigenous-led participation across forestry, licensing, and manufacturing.

There's a competitive dimension too. Despite its wood resources, Canada currently sources a significant share of its CLT from European manufacturers rather than domestic ones, leaving considerable manufacturing value on the table. Industry targets call for growing the domestic mass timber sector to $1.2 billion in annual revenue by 2030, doubling that again by 2035, and positioning Canadian firms to capture roughly a quarter of the global market rather than simply importing it.

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The debate over whether hundreds of completed buildings have effectively settled mass timber works, an updated code system, and a supply chain that's finally catching up to demand. What remains is the harder, more interesting work: standardizing components, scaling domestic manufacturing, and training a workforce fluent in a building system that behaves as much like advanced manufacturing as it does traditional construction.

As one newsletter tracking the sector's rise put it, not long ago the conversation was dominated by reasons mass timber "wasn't right for housing, small projects, healthcare, labs" and beyond. Today, the more useful question the industry is asking is simpler: how do we make this happen? Across forests, factories, and job sites from coast to coast, Canada is increasingly answering with wood.