Fenestration Conversations

Tune in for some high-level thinking about how to make your business run better. Paul Amato is a business and management consultant with Tallinn Advisory and has spent over 30 years in the fenestration and construction industries. He's developed key insights around the concept of "alignment" – getting the different people and departments in organizations to have common goals and the same understan...

When Vasilisa Lave reached out to tell us what she and her classmates at Bramalea Secondary in Brampton, Ont., are doing, we knew we had to get her on the podcast right away to get everyone in the area involved. Lave has started an initiative called Re:Build where she helps construction contractors and subtrades to support high school trades programs by dropping off their site waste at schools ins...

Contractors work in a high-stress jobs for sure, where frustration, time pressure, conflict and long hours can grind us down. We view workplace stress as part of the lifestyle, but Sandra Primiano from online mental health services provider, Dialogue, says it has very real and measurable effects on productivity and quality. Those effects can include workplace accidents and addiction problems, so i...

We're all looking for top engineering talent and the fenestration and glass industry has a lot to offer any technical person who enjoys innovation and experimentation. But our companies just aren't on most engineers' radar screens, making it important for us to be proactive in attracting and retaining talent. Eddy Atausi has made the unusual choice to learn as much as he can about fenestration and...

On his podcast Better Buildings for Humans , Joe Menchefski explores ways to make our built spaces healthier and more liveable with top building science experts from around the world. As part of the team at Advanced Glazings, a Nova Scotia fabricator specializing in aerogel products, Menchefski has deep knowledge of innovative energy-efficient technologies. Who better to ask about the state of sus...

Skip Maclean has retired from ODL, his last stop on a 53-year journey through the Canadian window and door manufacturing industry. Along the way he rose to the top, chairing innumerable committees, serving as president of Fenestration Canada and being honoured with its 2019 C.P. Loewen award. He did it with humour, humility and intelligence, and counts many of today’s industry leaders as his prote...

Our business is making things, not talking about them. So it’s no surprise that many of us struggle with the demands of promoting our businesses to potential clients and customers. Alison Simpson, president and CEO of the CMA, has been helping major corporations do just that throughout her career and she joins Pat Flannery for a lively conversation chock full of good advice. She also has details o...

Chris Magwood of the Rocky Mountain Institute joins the podcast to discuss the One Number approach to sustainable building regulation…and he has some objections. While a performance-based approach aimed at regulating the whole-life carbon impact of a construction project should be our ultimate goal, Magwood feels the upfront impact of embodied carbon needs to be evaluated separately, but adjacent...

How would it be if all the databases and charts and spreadsheets and regulations and tiers defining whether our products comply with sustainable building laws just…went away? Replaced by one number: – the only number that matters – the amount of carbon dioxide emitted over a building’s lifetime as a result of its manufacture, construction, use and disposal. Partner at Layton Consulting, Jonathon “...

High-profile wildfires doing substantial property damage to urban areas in B.C. and Alberta have spurred NRCan to look at creating Canadian building standards for wildfire resistance. The consultation process has just begun, but it seems likely that some day soon we may see new codes requiring resistant windows, doors and other components in wildfire-prone areas. What might these rules look like?...

FenCan codes and regulatory affairs direction, Adrian Edge, is back on to talk about the latest trade war developments and how they might impact the glazing and fenestration industries. Our sector avoided new tariffs on April 2, but the stunning measures announced by Trump against the rest of the world are crashing markets and have already, in the words of our prime minister, ended the free trade...

David Cooper has been researching and developing vacuum insulating glass for over a decade and chairs multiple international standards committees that will define how it can be used, how its quality can be assessed and how to test its performance. With demand for VIG growing and producers multiplying, specifiers and contractors need guidance on what to look for in these products – guidance that ma...

FenCan’s director of government and regulatory affairs, Adrian Edge, joins to talk tariffs. What is the status? Are they gone or are they coming back in a month? Either way, what can we and our governments do to protect ourselves and our businesses going forward? Things get political and practical in this edition.

Keith Daubmann is an owner of MY Architectural Glass and MY Shower Door , a glass fabricator and custom glazing contractor serving southwestern Florida. What makes Daubmann unique is his thunderous presence on social media, running accounts with around 30,000 followers and hosting a weekly YouTube show, Hard Hat Highlights . He claims he has never had a guest on his show that didn’t become a clien...

Langley, B.C.,-based Cascadia has published its first environmental product declarations for its fibreglass fenestration systems and its happy it did. Marketing manager Chris Guelpa joined the Conversation to talk about the process; the help they got; the markets and opportunities the EPDs are opening up; and how fibreglass stacks up in the embodied carbon discussion.

Movember is back with an added focus. The popular fundraising drive for men’s health has added support for mental health to its efforts along with prostate and testicular cancer. Mitch Hermansen joined Annex Business Media publisher/editor, Patrick Flannery, to talk about why these issues are important and what we in the construction community can do to help the guys who work for us.

Those of us who ship product across provincial borders have probably noticed that it can be easier to ship to the United States than inside our own country. Recently, the federal Committee on Internal Trade has announced a pilot program that would see any province’s trucking regulations acknowledged in all the others’. Duncan Robertson, senior policy analyst for Nova Scotia, joins the podcast to t...

Natural Resources Canada is working on a new label that will be required to be displayed on manufactured window products that are shipped across provincial borders or imported into Canada. The label would display the same energy efficiency information as NFRC, CSA and Energy Star labels, and could act to replace them if the manufacturer desired. Adam Buist is helping to develop the new label and j...

New standards for energy efficiency and low carbon impact in construction are demanding new skills in the trades – skills your young workers might be more familiar with than you are. Chad Flinn, associate vice-president of academics at Red Deer Polytechnic, and Judi Varga-Toth, manager of the ImpAct-Climate program at Colleges and Institutes Canada, are working to educate today’s construction indu...

The steadily rising concern with environmental protection has brought concerns about the amount of plastic we put into landfills and oceans. Durable plastic products, such as vinyl window frames, are in danger of being swept up in government efforts to mitigage these risks. Tony Vella of Vision Extrusions Group and chair of the Vinyl Insitute of Canada has been working hard to educate decision-mak...

By Anton Van Dyk’s count, there are now up to 15 separate areas where fenestration products have to demonstrate compliance to one regulatory regime or another. Embodied carbon will soon become another, yet both end users and manufacturers have been slow to understand things like Environmental Product Declarations and how they will affect product development. Van Dyk and Layton think the approach t...

When information technology is the topic, media outlets across the country turn to Carmi Levy to explain what is going on and give them the deep background on the issues. So we invited him to the Conversation to share some very practical advice on how to think about your IT department and personnel and how to source and vet providers that will make your life and business better, not worse. Choosin...

Terry Adamson, technical director for Fenestration Canada, joins The Conversation to preview the proposed changes to the National Building Code related to window and doors. Wider door openings for accessibility…tighter air tightness…solar heat gain requirements…upper storey window fall protection…glazing guard loads…it’s all here in an information-dense download.

Cornerstone, owner of Ply Gem and Northstar, has made some significant investments to double capacity in several key manufacturing areas including insulating glass and extrusions. Marketing manager Richard Hill joins the Conversation to tell us what they did, why they did it and where they hope it takes the company in the future.

As executive director of the Canadian Association of Consulting Energy Advisors, Cindy Gareau has been intimately involved with the federal Greener Homes Initiative rebate program for energy-efficient home upgrades and other rebate programs across the country. She joins Fenestration Conversations to update us on the status of the program and what led to its sooner-than-expected demise at the start...