Business View Magazine | January 2021

31 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JANUARY 2021 busy period. We do a lot of education, including online courses targeting 42,000 education hours in 2020 for engineers, architects, etc. Right now, we’re involved with over 60 tall wood building projects and about 780 mid-rise construction projects that are built or at the conceptual and design stage. Really impressive projects have included: Brock Commons at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver – that one really made a statement for mass timber. It was the first tall wood building in Vancouver and for a few years was the world’s tallest wood building. Now there’s the Arbora project in Montreal that will be the largest complex built of CLT mass timber in the world, with 434 residential units in three, eight-story buildings. At 285,000 sq. feet, Shane Homes YMCA in Calgary will be the biggest YMCA in the world. The Olympic Oval in Richmond, BC, more than six acres completely made of wood, is truly a marvel. “We get involved in any large mass timber construction project, usually at the outset, so they have access to engineers and expertise that can help guide them in making estimating decisions or in design considerations. That is the task of CWC and WoodWORKS! – to support the Canadian wood products industry in a direct way. “The forest industry, itself, contributes over 1 percent of Canada’s GDP and directly employs over 200,000 people, including several thousand indigenous people and immigrants. Couple that with the extensive number of wood construction projects underway, and you have a massive economic driver for Canada. Many single-family homes importantly use light-wood frame construction, and now with mass timber construction, there’s an entirely new set of design, manufacturing, and assembly skills being developed in our workforce. We have a federal government-supported “Advanced Education Roadmap” for wood construction being deployed in Canadian universities (see woodSMART.ca ). This will help provide graduate engineers and architects with needed wood design and construction to support Canada’s growing wood CANADI AN WOOD COUNC I L