Housing Cost Transparency Act

Bill C-287, the Housing Cost Transparency Act, would amend the National Research Council Act to add new transparency requirements around the development of Canada's national model codes (building, fire, plumbing, energy efficiency, and related codes). It applies specifically to "material housing-related model code proposals" — changes that could meaningfully affect residential construction costs, timelines, approval processes, or paperwork burdens for housing.

For each such proposal, the National Research Council would have to prepare and publish, in both official languages, a standardized cost and impact summary. This summary must explain the proposal's purpose in plain language, estimate its costs and benefits for typical homes (both single-family houses and multi-unit buildings), identify who would bear those costs, note key uncertainties behind the estimates, and name the individuals or organizations who proposed or advanced the change, along with their committee roles and affiliations. If detailed cost figures aren't available, the Council must at least give a qualitative explanation and say why numbers weren't possible.

The bill also requires the Council to publish information about who sits on the relevant governance committees overseeing these code proposals, and to maintain a public online registry tracking all such proposals — including their status, key milestones, combined cost impacts for each new code edition, and an annual summary of code development activity and recurring issues. The law clarifies that this new role does not give the federal government any authority over areas that remain under provincial, territorial, or municipal control, such as code adoption, permitting, inspections, or zoning. It also specifies that failing to publish or update this information does not invalidate any code or any related action taken by other levels of government.

This bill amends the National Research Council Act to require the National Research Council to prepare, publish and maintain cost summaries, governance information and a public registry for housing-related national model code proposals.

• New obligations on the Council — for every "material housing-related model code proposal" (one that could materially affect construction costs, timelines, approval delays or compliance burden), the Council must publish a bilingual, accessible housing cost and impact summary at the time the proposal is opened for public review.
• Content requirements — each summary must include a plain-language description, a detailed quantitative cost estimate (or, where not practicable, a qualitative description with an explanation), the party expected to bear the costs, and underlying assumptions and data limitations.
• Disclosure of individuals involved — the Council must name every individual recorded as having initiated, requested, sponsored or advanced a proposal, along with their committee role and institutional or organizational affiliation.
• Public registry — the Council must maintain an accessible public registry containing edition-level combined cost estimates and annual summaries of code development activity, recurring issues and process transparency.
• No power over other governments — the bill states explicitly that the Council's role must not infringe on provincial, territorial or municipal authority over code adoption, permitting, inspection, zoning and related matters.
• No invalidation consequence — if the Council fails to publish or update these summaries or the registry, this does not invalidate any model code or any action taken by a province, territory or municipality in relation to one; no other penalty or enforcement mechanism is stated.