Ask people across Canada about this summer’s wildfire season and they will tell you how the resulting smoke affected their daily lives. This underscores the urgency of getting our country on a credible path to net-zero by 2050. I’d like to think this might help us return to normal summers at some point – even if that’s decades from now.

For now, as summers such as these prove, climate change is not a distant risk. Its impacts are showing up in our homes and communities.

So, it’s increasingly important that the buildings sheltering us are prepared for these next few decades and can provide comfortable, healthy, affordable environments that protect people from extreme weather, power grid disruptions and uncertain global conventional energy markets.

That is why we need to rethink how we see buildings in general because they are a central lever of an electrified economy.

Buildings are part of the electricity system

When recognized, designed and retrofitted as efficient and resilient energy resources, they help expand local power generation – and much more. We have an incredible opportunity to draw more value from our buildings. We just need to look at them differently.

Earlier this year, the federal government released its electrification strategy,with a bold and necessary goal of doubling electricity supply over the next two decades.

But to get this right, Canada needs to achieve two equally ambitious, complementary goals by 2050: double electrification (the share of Canada’s final........

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