For a country with such a severe shortage of housing, the way Canada builds homes hasn’t changed that much since the country was founded.

Workers arrive on site with building materials they assemble piece by piece, a little like how cars were built until Ford invented the assembly line more than a century ago.

The federal government is aware more productive methods are needed so it’s pushing for modular construction, where homes are fully or partially assembled in a factory before onsite installation.

“When I talk about making it faster to build homes, modular housing is a big part of it,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a July statement.

The process can get housing built anywhere from 20 to 50 per cent faster, according to a report from consulting firm McKinsey, while also cutting down on neighbourhood disruption, reducing waste, requiring fewer workers, and potentially being upwards of 20 per cent cheaper.

To speed up adoption, the government is earmarking $500 million in loans for apartment builders that use modular construction and other innovative techniques. It’s also providing funding for local innovative housing solutions and research to develop new ones, and has committed to reducing regulatory barriers and standardizing designs.

But while some initiatives are underway, industry insiders say much more is needed to create a foundation for the streamlined building technique to grow from its paltry two per cent of the market.

“It is not as simple as, oh, well, somebody just thought of modular housing, so let’s do it,” said Kevin Lee, chief executive of the Canadian Home Builders’ Association.

Along with targeted support for the method, wider issues in the housing market like regulatory delays, development charges and mortgage rules also need to be fixed for modular to really gain traction, he said.

“There are a lot of barriers, there’s a lot of risk, and that’s why we need all of these systemic changes to make sure that the investment pays off.”

The case of Z Modular shows that support is increasing, but still isn’t enough.

Last fall, the company proudly announced it was the first to secure insurance from Canada’s housing agency for a modular apartment build, helping to lower costs.

Some eight months later though, Z Modular said it was closing its housing factory in Kitchener, Ont., at a loss of about 150 jobs, and would be focusing instead on the U.S. market.

The company said the decision was prompted by inefficiencies in financing, rising costs and regulatory delays.

“Despite an obvious housing crisis, Canada has lacked the foresight to enact the changes necessary to encourage investment and enable developers to be successful,” Barry Zekelman, CEO of Z Modular owner Zekelman Industries, said in a June statement.

“Unfortunately, despite our investment of tens of millions of dollars, our teammates have become the victim of the tragic reality of a broken system,” he said.

A big part of the challenge with ramping up modular construction is that it costs a lot to get a factory going, and it needs steady demand to pay for all the fixed costs. That doesn’t fit well with the vagaries of Canada’s housing market, said Lee.

“Because of the boom-bust cycle, it’s really tough to make those investments … if you have that big overhead, instead of just slowing down, it can make you go bankrupt.”

The modular industry is littered with examples of the bust side, ranging from Nomodic Modular Structures Inc. going under last fall with social housing projects half built and a few million dollars in debt, to B.C.-based Nexii Building Solutions, which boasted of a more than $2 billion valuation two years ago before going bankrupt earlier this year.

There are companies managing to make inroads, however.

Bird Construction Inc. bought into a modular business in 2017, and last year it secured a contract to build Canada’s tallest modular project: a 14-storey apartment in Vancouver for B.C.’s housing agency.

“Modular construction is gaining considerable momentum in North America,” Bird chief executive Teri McKibbon said in a statement at the time.

Alberta-based Northgate Industries Ltd., which has been in the modular business for over 50 years, has succeeded in part through diversification, said director Ali Salman.

The company builds everything from remote work camps to rural hospitals and has shipped housing units everywhere from Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T., to Hawaii and South America.

A push for government-led rapid housing supply has helped create demand closer to home in places like Edmonton, but there’s less traction on the private side, said Salman.

“The private sector is picking it up only if the area has a very high labour cost, or it’s a very remote area.”

There’s also resistance within the housing industry, as everyone from contractors to engineers to architects defend their territory, and keep doing things the way they’ve always done, he said.

But not having a predictable, steady flow of demand is still the biggest barrier, said Salman. He said he would like to see the kind of government support for growth that industries like automotive and oil and gas have received.

Such support has proven to work in places like Scandinavia, he noted, where modular construction makes up almost half of the housing stock.

But given Canada’s largely fragmented construction sector, more awareness is also needed to increase adoption, said Steven Beites, a professor at Laurentian University’s McEwen School of Architecture.

He said that while most homes won’t be rolling out of factories any time soon, there’s plenty of room to increase the use of prefabricated parts like wall panels.

“It’s really about educating and sharing that knowledge, and allowing local builders to continue to do their traditional way but also start to engage in more prefab in hopes that they’ll see the benefits.”

Advances in building techniques would open up the potential for more sustainable building materials, and moving away from “really antiquated methods of building,” said Beites.

“We’ve been building stick-frame homes for 150-plus years … it’s critical for us here in Canada to start embracing prefab and modular as a way to gain those efficiencies.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 4, 2024.

HALIFAX – Funeral directors across the country are warning grieving families about a trend of third-party websites republishing obituaries for profit.

Jim Bishop, the funeral director for Bishop’s Funeral Home in Fredericton, said he’s noticed an increase in grieving people who use his services complaining of altered death notices — sometimes with erroneous details — appearing on one such website called Echovita.

Bishop said Echovita’s actions are part of a trend of scraping information from funeral home and newspaper websites and reposting it alongside options to buy flowers and digital candles. He said this data-scraping poses “a moral issue” because it is capitalizing on obituaries without the families’ knowledge or permission.

“When people click on Google, and they search a person’s name … they don’t always realize they’re not dealing with the funeral home’s website with that source. They’re being sent a link to a third-party outfit they think is us, and it’s not.”

He said that since mid-July, about a dozen people have advised him their loved one’s obituary had been taken.

Jeff Weafer, president of the Funeral Services Association of Canada, said the practice is particularly problematic because writing an obituary is the last chance a family gets to tell the story of their loved one’s life. Having that story taken and used without permission can feel like an invasion of privacy during an especially vulnerable time.

“Part of the expression of grief for families is they want to proudly tell the story of their father, their brother, their mother. It’s very therapeutic to tell that story, whether that’s done through an obituary or a Facebook note that shares the details of one’s life,” Weafer said in an interview.

The website of the Better Business Bureau, which has not awarded Echovita accreditation, shows five complaints against the company. One complaint from 2022 called Echovita a “trolling company” for posting an unapproved and altered version of an obituary, causing great distress to the grieving family.

An unnamed Echovita official responded to the complaint that the company had removed the obituary from its site. “I would like to add the information we share was not private as stated, since the original obituary was posted publicly on the internet,” the response said. “In further sharing the basic facts, as we do, which is legal, we made a human error and we apologized.”

A review of Echovita last month on the Better Business Bureau site also expresses distress over the website’s practices.

“My grandfather recently passed away, and when I Googled his obituary, the first hit was from some random site I’d never heard of, Echovita. The obituary was not what my family had published,” the review reads. The review continues to say that on top of “being terribly written,” the republished obituary named living family members mentioned in the original notice as deceased.

“My family was devastated that this fake obit was the first hit people would see when they looked up my grandfather’s name. We were so embarrassed that people would think we’d written something of such poor quality to ‘honour’ our late loved one.” In a reply to the review, Echovita apologized “for any errors within the obituary.”

Echovita representatives did not agree to an interview with The Canadian Press. In an emailed statement, a public relations agent speaking on behalf of the company said family members who notice errors in obituaries can request a revision directly on the website but provided no details about the company’s verification processes.

The Canadian Press also asked how Echovita verifies that flowers purchased on the website — which range in price from $90 to $334 — make their way to grieving families or the funeral homes where services are held, but Echovita did not provide any details.

Weafer said the Funeral Services Association of Canada is lobbying the federal government to strengthen privacy legislation and prevent families from suffering more, but he said the funeral association has yet to see a “significant response” from lawmakers.

The Bereavement Authority of Ontario has also published two separate notices about Echovita’s practices, one in February 2021 and another in February of this year. A spokesperson for the authority said 11 people have complained since the beginning of this year about being “deeply upset” about their loved ones’ obituaries being used on the website.

Quebec’s registry of businesses lists a Quebec City address for Echovita and says Paco Leclerc is the president.

In a 2019 court decision, Leclerc was named as one of the directors for the now-defunct website Afterlife, which was ordered to pay $20 million in damages to grieving families for the unauthorized use of death notices and photos. The ruling found that Afterlife repeatedly violated copyright rules by using data to market flower sales.

At the time, Erin Best, the lawyer representing the plaintiff, expressed hope the decision would act as a “deterrent” against pirating obituaries, and warned that people copying obituaries should expect legal action.

While their push for tougher legislation continues, Bishop and Weafer both encourage grieving families to ask any third-party companies posting obituaries to remove unauthorized posts, or to contact government consumer protection where it is available.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 4, 2024.

OTTAWA – How old are you? What is your gender? Are you Indigenous? Are you a Canadian citizen? Do you have a family?

Those are just a few of the data points that a new artificial intelligence system will use to determine if somebody might be at risk of chronic homelessness in Ottawa, thanks to a team-up with a Carleton University researcher.

The national capital is not the first municipality to use the emerging technology as a tool to mitigate a worsening crisis — London, Ont., previously pioneered a similar project, while in California, Los Angeles has an initiative that identifies individuals at risk of becoming homeless.

As cities increasingly turn to AI, some advocates are raising concerns about privacy and bias. But those behind the project insist it is just one tool to help determine who might need help.

The researcher developing the Ottawa project, Majid Komeili, said the system uses personal data such as age, gender, Indigenous status, citizenship status and whether the person has a family on record.

It also looks at factors like how many times they may have previously been refused service at a shelter and reasons they received a service.

The system will also use external data such as information about the weather and economic indicators like the consumer price index and unemployment rate. Komeili said the system will predict how many nights the individual will stay in a shelter in six months’ time.

“This will be a tool in the service providers’ toolbox, ensuring that no one falls through the cracks because of (a) human mistake. The final decision-maker will remain a human,” he said in an email.

That information is available in the first place because people are already “highly tracked” in order to receive various benefits or treatments, argued McGill University associate professor said Renee Sieber.

“Homeless people, unfortunately, are incredibly surveilled, and the data is very intrusive,” Sieber said.

The data might include details about medical appointments, drug addictions, relapses and HIV status.

Sieber said it’s important to ask whether AI technology is really necessary. “Do you know any more about chronic homelessness with AI than you did with a spreadsheet?”

It was only a matter of time before AI got involved, suggested Tim Richter, president of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness.

Though they are not widespread, such tools “can to a degree probably anticipate who’s more likely to experience homelessness or chronic homelessness,” he said. “Using AI to do that could be very helpful in targeting interventions to people.”

Most places do not have good enough data to establish such systems, said Richter.

His organization is working with cities across the country, including London and Ottawa, to help collect better “real-time, person-specific” information — “in a way that protects their privacy.”

Chronic homelessness means an individual has been homeless for more than six months, or has experienced repeated episodes of homelessness over that time frame.

While 85 per cent of people are in and out of homelessness quickly, some 15 to 20 per cent “get stuck,” Richter said.

AI systems should be able to do their job and flag individuals who are at risk by looking at aggregate community-level data and without knowing the specific identity of the individual involved, said Richter.

That’s the approach the Ottawa project is taking. Identifiable information like names and contact information is replaced by codes.

“There is a master list that includes the linkages between the identifier codes and user identities. AI training and testing operate solely on the coded dataset. The master list is stored separately on a secure server with restricted access,” Komeili explained.

He noted the system uses data that has already been gathered in previous years and isn’t specifically being collected for use by AI.

Vinh Nguyen, the City of Ottawa’s manager of social policy, research and analytics, said in a statement that any sharing of data collected by the city “undergoes rigorous internal review and scrutiny.”

“Data we share is often aggregated and where that is not possible, all identifiable information is removed to ensure strict anonymity of users,” he said, adding that collaborations with academics must be reviewed by an ethics board before data work takes place.

Nguyen said the city is currently conducting “internal testing and validation” and plans to consult with the shelter sector and clients before implementing the model, with consultations planned for late fall.

Alina Turner, co-founder of HelpSeeker, a company that uses AI in products dealing with social issues, said the “superpowers” of AI can be useful when it comes to comprehensive analysis of the factors and trends that feed into homelessness.

But her company made a conscious choice to stay away from predicting individual-level risk, she said.

“You can just get into a lot of trouble with bias in that,” she said, noting that data vary between different communities and “the racial bias of that data is a major challenge as well.”

One long-acknowledged problem with AI is that its analysis is only as good as the data that is fed into it. That means when data come from a society with systemic racism built into its systems, AI predictions can perpetuate it.

For instance, due to systemic factors, Indigenous individuals are at a higher risk of homelessness.

If an AI system were to automatically give someone a higher score once they come into a shelter and identify as Indigenous, though, “there’s a lot of ethical issues with taking that approach,” Turner argued.

Komeili, the Ottawa researcher, said bias is a “known issue with similar AI-powered products.” He noted humans have biases too, and different individuals might make different recommendations.

“One advantage of an AI-based approach is that, when used as an assistive tool in the toolbox of human experts, it can help them converge on a standard approach. Such an assistive tool helps human experts avoid missing important details and may reduce the likelihood of human errors.”

Luke Stark, an assistant professor at Western University, is working on a project studying the use of data and AI for homelessness policy in Canada, including the existing AI initiative in London, Ont.

He said another problem that human decision-makers need to think about is how predictions can cause certain segments of the homeless population to be missed.

Women are more likely to avoid shelters for safety reasons, and are more likely to turn to options such as couch surfing, he noted.

An AI system using data from the shelter system will focus on “the kind of person who already uses the shelter system … and that leaves out a whole bunch of people.”

Stark described predictive systems as the latest technology that risks obscuring the root causes of homelessness.

“One concern that we have is that all this attention to these triage-based solutions then takes the pressure off of policy-makers to actually look at those structural causes of homelessness that are there in the first place,” he said.

As Richter put it: “Ultimately, the key to ending homelessness is housing.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 4, 2024.