{"id":18939,"date":"2025-07-23T21:36:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T21:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/18939\/"},"modified":"2025-07-23T21:36:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T21:36:07","slug":"canadas-outdated-elevator-rules-are-adding-to-the-housing-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/18939\/","title":{"rendered":"Canada\u2019s outdated elevator rules are adding to the housing crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Canadian developers and condo owners are at the mercy of an uncompetitive market, dominated by large manufacturers that insert proprietary technology into their elevators.Kat McCallum\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

Jonathan English is a Toronto-based infrastructure policy consultant and writer, and a fellow at the Marron Institute of Urban Management, New York University. Stephen Jacob Smith is the executive director of the Center for Building in North America, a non-profit organization that conducts research about building codes and standards.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s something to ponder the next time you\u2019re impatiently waiting for an elevator to arrive: Why do elevators in Canada cost three times more than in Western Europe? And what impact is that having on the development of new buildings at a time when Canada needs more homes? <\/p>\n

Canada is an increasingly urban nation, but the soaring cranes across its cities mask surprisingly few elevators \u2013 around four for every 1,000 Canadians, slightly ahead of the United States but behind every other high-income country with available data. Switzerland has half the population of Ontario and almost four times as many elevators. Greece has 10 times as many<\/a> elevators per capita as Canada.<\/p>\n

Elevators in Canada are far more expensive than in Europe. A new elevator in a small, mid-rise apartment building in Canada costs the developer upward of $200,000, compared to roughly a third of that cost in Europe. Canada\u2019s expensive elevators are both a cause and an effect of our more suburban, low-rise settlement patterns \u2013 we rely less on apartment buildings so there is less of an outcry over high costs, but those high costs also continue to make family apartment living less affordable and attractive in Canada.<\/p>\n

The high cost of elevators in Canada also means some smaller buildings have none at all, limiting accessibility. Larger buildings have fewer elevators, leading to longer waits and more disruption when one is out of service. As Canada opens itself up for more small-scale infill growth \u2013 with smaller rental and condo buildings made viable by pending single-stair reforms<\/a> and land use reforms \u2013 the high cost of elevators will become more of a barrier to the development of affordable, accessible homes.<\/p>\n

Behind Canada\u2019s lack of elevators is our reliance on rules mostly written by and for the United States. Standards regulate the fine details of how something must be designed, built, maintained and tested, but they also indirectly define the bounds of the market \u2013 who is able to enter and compete in it, and who is not. While nearly the entire world has harmonized on a single set of European-derived elevator standards, North America writes its own. You can sell the same elevator from Switzerland to New Zealand and almost everywhere in between, but not in Canada. This locks us into a tiny market because even the United States is only 5 per cent of the global elevator market \u2013 it has fewer elevators than Spain. While the provinces adopt these standards and use them as the basis for their regulations, in practice the standards themselves are written and updated mostly by the elevator industry itself.<\/p>\n

The so-called \u201cBig Four\u201d elevator manufacturers \u2013 Otis, Kone, Schindler and TK Elevator \u2013 have jumped through regulatory hoops to be allowed to sell elevators (however big and outdated) in Canada and the U.S. But the fact that we use a different standard from the rest of the world means that small and mid-sized manufacturers around the world, which sell kits of non-proprietary parts that small firms can install and service, stay away. This means far fewer parts available and less competition between manufacturers. It leaves small firms that install and maintain devices, often Canadian-owned businesses unlike the big players, unable to buy the latest technology, harming their ability to compete.<\/p>\n

One mid-sized non-proprietary elevator manufacturer has a map on its website of the countries it\u2019s active in<\/a>, from Norway to Nigeria. But there is a conspicuous void in North America. This leaves Canadian developers and condo owners at the mercy of an uncompetitive market, dominated by large manufacturers that insert enough proprietary technology into their elevators that it\u2019s difficult to switch maintenance firms if you\u2019re not satisfied with their service.<\/p>\n

And when residents in your condo need to line up to wait for the elevators because a few of the cars are out of service and awaiting replacement parts, our unique standard may be to blame for that too. Catalogues of parts sold in Canada are slim compared to what\u2019s available abroad. As an example, WECO, based in China, bills itself as the world\u2019s largest manufacturer of detectors to make sure elevator doors don\u2019t slam shut with you in the middle. They sell 20 different product series in Europe<\/a>, but only six models in Canada<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

The high cost of elevators in Canada means some larger buildings have fewer elevators, leading to longer waits and more disruption when one is out of service.<\/p>\n

The U.S. and Canada may have walled ourselves off from the competitive global market, but parts are still often made in China. By throwing our lot in with the Americans, we leave ourselves as an accomplice to their trade war with China. How much smaller will the market for North American-certified parts get if Chinese manufacturers continue to face punishing tariffs when selling parts for America\u2019s one million elevators, compared to a market around just a tenth of that size in Canada?<\/p>\n

Compounding the problem, a bigger-is-better mentality in North America has led to elevator cabin sizes that are the largest in the world. This may be fine for a 40-storey high-rise that needs a whole bank of elevators anyway, but huge cabins are tough to squeeze into a four-storey building on a small lot. Strict size requirements backfire when developers choose to forgo accessibility entirely and just build townhouses or small walk-up apartment buildings.<\/p>\n

Elevator policy is a unique opportunity for a quick win that could allow Canada to open itself to the rest of the world and break away from dependence on the American market. The integrated North American continent means that in many sectors, Canada has no choice but to harmonize its regulations and standards with those of the United States. Trains need to be able to operate across borders, electricity needs to be transmitted seamlessly throughout the North American grids. Elevators, however, are discrete units. They do not need to be integrated with the elevator in the building next door or across the border.<\/p>\n

Canada doesn\u2019t even have to choose between North American and global standards \u2013 we can recognize both and allow Canadians to buy any internationally certified product. We can move overnight from the least flexible elevator market in the world to the most flexible, giving Canadian elevator equipment manufacturers the widest possible export market and giving our installation and maintenance firms access to the entire global market for parts. <\/p>\n

The rest of the world has largely harmonized on the European elevator standard, turning it into the global standard, but it wasn\u2019t always like that. Many countries used to have their own standards. Over the last generation or two, they did exactly what we are advocating for in Canada. They recognized the benefits of global trade and market access, and brought their rules in line with those in Europe, the historical home of the elevator industry. Mechanics and inspectors learned new rules and ways of doing things, and markets gradually made the shift to producing and installing devices that now meet the European-turned-global standard. Canada\u2019s own elevator industry even has a recent history of evolving and adapting to a new standard, as the joint Canadian-U.S. standard is only a few decades old. Much like ordinary Canadians adapted to the metric system, the Canadian elevator industry is more than capable of adapting once more to new standards. British Columbia\u2019s municipality of Saanich is already calling on the province \u2013 with Canadian provinces having full authority to change how they regulate elevators \u2013 to consider adopting more European-style rules.<\/p>\n

Canadians are recognizing that it is time for the country to strike its own path in the world and shake off the narrow continental orientation that has bound us for so long. Canada\u2019s journey here will be long, and many of the steps ahead will be difficult. But the one we are proposing is an easy one \u2013 opening up to the world\u2019s elevators is a great place to start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Canadian developers and condo owners are at the mercy of an uncompetitive market,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18940,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,2922,66],"class_list":["post-18939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-environment","tag-noastack","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18939\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}