Good morning, everyone, and thank you for having me. I'd like to thank the committee for allowing me to appear and speak on the advancements in home building technologies.

My name is Ian Arthur, and I am the founder of nidus3D and PrinterBuilder Consulting. I oversaw the construction of Canada's first 3-D printed homes, as well as the first two- and three-storey printed structures in North America.

Our buildings are strong, resilient and beautiful, and built to net-zero ready standards. Our goal is to transform the build process and in doing so, dramatically increase the speed of delivery of affordable, beautiful homes. Using a first principles approach, we are stripping away unnecessary complexity and rethinking every aspect of the process of how we build homes.

This is because, while we need to look at every avenue possible to increase supply, at the heart of our housing crisis is a process issue. We will not be able to subsidize our way out of this crisis. We build homes with hundreds of materials, thousands of components and tens of thousands of process steps. Each step is performed by dozens of different labourers working for many different companies. Each part of this drives up costs, timelines and inefficiencies. The structure of the sector is fragmented and, by this very nature, conservative and resistant to change. It prevents a whole-of-building approach and resists the introduction of new methods and technologies. As a result, it is one of the least technologically disrupted sectors on the planet.

We are, though, beginning to have an opportunity to change this if we move decisively. Global demand for housing is spurring innovations that have the potential to meaningfully increase the supply of housing with rapid, repeatable processes. By using advanced automation and 3-D printing, we can cut through the complexity issues, reducing material requirements, labour costs and, most importantly, process steps.

I'm starting with 3-D printing, although honestly, I'm technology agnostic. I would use any tool that allows me to advance the speed and quality of home delivery. 3-D printing, though, is the first technology I've found that fundamentally begins to address this process complexity issue, and we must act soon. Canada is already behind in the development and implementation of new building technologies. We are lagging behind the U.S., Europe and Asia, and it gets worse every single day. We are slow to look at disruptive technologies, and we tend to have a wait-and-see attitude until it's proven elsewhere before attempting it here.

There is a near infinite amount of support for small-scale pilots in Canada. We love them. They're great headlines. They're fairly easy to pull off. What we are missing to meaningfully move the needle on housing supply is helping companies scale production to the level that will actually increase the supply of housing in Canada.

Exacerbating this issue is the political desire for solutions that fit into election cycles. The crisis is incredibly complex and has millions of moving parts. What we need from the government is consistent policy that extends from mandate to mandate and from party to party, and allows us to bring in new technologies that are complex, expensive and hard to deliver initially, although they have a huge amount of promise in the long run.

An example of this is a near singular focus on modular. While I believe it has a role to play in the future of housing, we need to not put all our eggs in one basket. We need to apply “best fit” technologies where they're best used. I think 3-D printing, modular and other forms of robotic, automated construction are all part of that solution.

I will briefly address two of the common points of resistance that are often brought forward when automation and 3-D printing are brought up, particularly in the realm of housing.

One is the potential loss of jobs commonly associated with automation. While automation construction will disrupt the sector, it will continue to grow as a key employment industry. The scarcity of skilled labour and the demand for housing underpin the need to aggressively recruit into this sector. The tools may change—we used to dig holes with shovels, and now we use excavators—and a 3-D printer is, honestly, just a bigger tool. It still needs incredibly smart, skilled operators to run it. I believe the jobs will change, and I believe the introduction of new building technologies is actually a wonderful opportunity to recruit new people into the skilled trades and convince a new generation of youth that this is a fantastic career path they can pursue.

The other point of resistance I will briefly address while I have time is this. Because I use concrete as my building material of choice—the embodied carbon of the material itself—I would urge the members to understand the need to separate the technology from the product that is actually being extruded.

We need to decarbonize the concrete sector. It's one of the worst polluters on the planet, and there are incredibly smart people working on this. I am working with companies from across Canada and around the world to deliver materials that are significantly lower in terms of embodied carbon, and there is a path to carbon neutrality. The process, though, of using 3-D printing to construct housing should and can be agnostic of the material that goes into it.

With that, I'll conclude my remarks, and I look forward to questions from the committee. Thank you very much.