Tuesday, December 2, 2025
More than 250 people assembled at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre this week for the second National Building Decarbonization Forum, the only event in Canada to bring together voices from across the entire building sector to prepare for the electrified future economy.
“The expertise needed to shape Canada’s building transition is not somewhere out there… It’s right here, in this room,” said Bryan Flannigan, executive director of the Building Decarbonization Alliance (BDA), an initiative of the Transition Accelerator.
Attendees included leaders from the construction and manufacturing industry, electricity utilities, banking and finance, all levels of government, and other key parties with influence in Canada’s building sector.
“Preparing Canada’s buildings for an electrified future economy calls for a new understanding of this $6 trillion asset class,” said Flannigan. “Modernizing our commercial and residential buildings means changing our view of buildings: from passive investments to critical infrastructure, contributing to grid readiness, industrial competitiveness, affordability, and emissions reduction.”
For attendees, the National Building Decarbonization Forum proved an ideal space to co-develop the solutions that will help deliver the benefits of modern, electrified buildings across the country.
Realizing those benefits efficiently and affordably will take a shared vision across the sector and a coordinated plan of action. Guided by the BDA’s new Associate Executive Director Steven Pacifico and dozens of expert speakers, conference attendees explored the sector’s most pressing challenges over two days of in-depth conversation and interactive sessions.
Acclaimed journalist and political commentator Chantal Hébert shared her insights into Canada’s rapidly changing political landscape in a keynote address, while Dr. Jan Rosenow, leader of the Energy Programme at the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford, provided an optimistic international perspective in his opening keynote, sharing practical lessons for the Canadian context.
“We should be hopeful for what will happen in the next 10 years in the building space, because innovation is already coming,” said Rosenow, an expert on the global energy transition who recently addressed energy ministers from all 27 EU member states. “It’s there. The sector is ripe for it. And with events like this, we’re going to harness it and channel it.”
Buildings are where Canada’s electrified future economy become a lived reality—where heat pumps, energy storage, EV chargers, smart panels and other emerging technologies turn into flexible grid assets and, more importantly, into comfort, savings and value for Canadians.
Featured image: Bryan Flannigan, executive director of the Building Decarbonization Alliance, welcomed more than 250 building sector leaders to the National Building Decarbonization Forum in Ottawa on November 26 and 27, 2025. (Transition Accelerator)
