The Ontario government has released a plan to increase the manufacturing and use of made-in-Ontario wood building products in an effort to build more homes faster and create a more resilient forestry sector.

The plan promotes the use of prefabricated and modular wood-based building materials, known as advanced wood construction.

Mass timber and wood construction can be used to build modular and prefabricated buildings, including mid-rise and tall multi-family homes and a wide variety of commercial and industrial buildings.

The government says advanced wood construction can complete projects up to 50 percent faster and cut costs by up to 20 percent.

The five-year Advanced Wood Construction Action Plan focuses on four objectives:

• support initiatives that create awareness and encourage the use advanced wood construction
• identify and remove barriers in codes, standards and regulations for the use of advanced wood construction
• stimulate innovation and investment in advanced manufacturing facilities to grow Ontario’s advanced wood construction sector
• demonstrate and display examples of advanced wood construction to instill confidence in adopting new Ontario wood building products

"RESCON is pleased to support the Government of Ontario’s latest initiative to make more housing available in our province,” said President Richard Lyall. “Effectively meeting the challenge of housing affordability and supply requires investment in all forms of housing options including cross-laminated timber, a major component of advanced wood construction. The Advanced Wood Construction Action Plan will help build homes faster and we congratulate the province for this strategy to improve housing affordability."

To date, Ontario has committed over $13 million to enhance the province’s advanced wood construction capacity, including by investing:

• more than $8 million to establish and scale up production at Element5: the province’s first state-of-the-art, fully-automated manufacturer of cross-laminated timber,
• close to $3 million for wood-based construction education, research and training led by organizations such as the Canadian Wood Council and Canadian Wood Construction Research Network, to support building with wood,
• more than $1.5 million towards the construction of educational buildings incorporating mass timber at George Brown College and the University of Toronto,
• more than $750,000 to support FPInnovations’ research and testing of wood-based construction materials and development of technical resources, and
• more than $300,000 to help the University of Toronto’s Mass Timber Institute develop ways to use more underused wood for advanced wood construction and study modular housing deployment to maximize environmental and economic benefit.

Ontario’s forest sector generated $21.6 billion in revenue from the sale of manufactured goods and services in 2023 and supported 128,000 direct and indirect jobs in 2024.