By Christopher B. Smith
From September 27 to 29, I was at Blue Mountain Resort for my first Ontario Home Builders’ Association annual conference. I wrote about the three days for Canadian Contractor — you can read the full feature here — but I wanted to say something different here, for the people we actually build for.
Because the short version of the conference is this: renovators aren’t just part of the conversation anymore. We’re front and centre. And the things we spent three days talking about land, sooner or later, on your street and in your house.
Here’s what I brought home, and what it means if you’re thinking about renovating an older house in Toronto.
The renovators in one room
The conference started for me at the Ontario Renovators’ Council — renovators from across the province around one table. Different markets, different kinds of projects, the same problems. We talked about licensing. We talked about HST. Neither conversation is finished, and there’s plenty I can’t share yet. But I walked out of that room believing the right people are in place to make real changes for renovators in Ontario, and the homeowners who hire them.
HST: why renovating an older house can feel like paying twice
Monday morning opened with five provincial ministers on one stage talking about housing. The message was clear: keep the sector moving, cut the red tape that doesn’t need to be there, and keep listening to builders and renovators about what’s in the way.
For renovators, one issue came up again and again over three days: HST.
It matters most in places like Toronto. When a family buys an older house and puts a major renovation into it, they’re investing heavily in a property they’ve already paid tax on. By the time the work is done, the value of the house can put it outside the thresholds of some of the relief that was meant to help. A homeowner can end up feeling like they paid twice: once to buy the old house, and again to turn it into the home they’ll live in for the next twenty or thirty years.
That doesn’t square with what everyone says they want — to keep and improve the houses we already have, make them more efficient, let people age in place, and adapt them for parents and grown children. The goal is an HST credit, or another workable fix, that treats those homeowners fairly. More guidance is coming, and this won’t be the last you hear of it.
What it means for you today: there is real HST relief right now for some substantial renovations in Ontario — but the bar is high: generally 90% or more of the home’s interior removed or replaced, for a primary residence, and for owner-renovated homes the work has to start between April 1, 2026 and March 31, 2027. We keep the current details in our guide to Ontario renovation rebates. If you’re planning a major renovation, ask about it at the design stage, not after the work is done.
Renovate or relocate?
The session I’d circled on my agenda was “Renovate or Relocate?” — moderated by Peder Madsen, with fellow renovator Dwayne Butler on the panel. It’s the question a lot of our clients are already asking.
Finding a house in Toronto with everything you need, in a neighbourhood you love, at a price you can manage, isn’t easy. So more families are asking a different question: what if we stay? They’re making room for a parent. Making space for grown children who can’t buy yet. Planning to age in place. And they’re asking houses built 80, 100 or 120 years ago to work in ways nobody imagined when they were built.
That’s the work we do every day, and it’s why so much of what we write on The Blueprint is about it — bringing a parent home, aging in place in an older house, and the home you stop worrying about. Our job isn’t to make an old house look new. It’s to repair, reimagine and reuse the housing we already have.
On stage: AI drafts, a person approves
Monday afternoon I traded my seat in the audience for one on stage, on “The AI Builder” panel moderated by Brendan Charters of Eurodale, alongside Dan Foch, Craig Race and Pulkit Arora.
My part was about something every homeowner who has renovated will recognise: the broken chain of communication. You tell the designer something. The designer tells the project manager, who tells the site lead, who tells the trade. A decision gets made standing in your kitchen on a Tuesday morning — and three weeks later nobody can remember exactly what was decided.
It isn’t that people don’t care. It’s that nobody can write down everything that gets said on a job.
That’s where AI is starting to make a real difference for us. We can record a site meeting and have it turned into organised notes and action items the same day, so the office, the crew and the trades are working from the same page — and so are you. No relying on memory. No retelling the same conversation four times. No detail lost between you and the person actually doing the work.
But I have one rule: AI drafts. A person approves. Technology helps us capture and organise what was said. It doesn’t replace the judgment of the builder, the designer or the carpenter.
Generations of builders
The Chair’s Gala marked the handover from outgoing chair Christina Giannone to Tom McLaughlin — both from long-time Ontario building families. Sitting in that room, it struck me how many of the companies there have been part of this industry for generations.
I can relate. My father was an architect and builder, and I spent my younger years learning the trade on old Toronto houses. This industry gets into you. As a renovator, being in that room and feeling genuinely welcome in it meant a lot.
The conference closed with the Awards of Distinction dinner — a real celebration of the work builders and renovators are doing across the province — and the session on the evolution of ENERGY STAR, moderated by Gord Cooke of Building Knowledge Canada, was another highlight on the way out.
Licensing: the work still ahead
A few months ago, after the CHBA conference in Québec City, I wrote that renovators were finally being invited into the conversation. Blue Mountain felt like the next step.
There’s still a lot of work to do, and licensing is near the top of the list. Many of the trades and professionals on a renovation are licensed or regulated in some form. Yet the person you hire to coordinate hundreds of thousands of dollars of work on your house can still operate without an equivalent province-wide professional standard. That needs to change — and renovators need to be at the table shaping it, because we see every day what goes wrong when there’s no standard. (We wrote about that side of it in Renovations Gone Wrong.)
What it means for you today: until there’s a renovator licence, it’s on you to check. Ask whether your builder is HCRA-licensed and Tarion-registered where that applies, who carries the design responsibility, and who pulls the permit.
The drive home
What I’ll remember most about Blue Mountain isn’t a panel or a policy. It’s the people — builders, renovators and long-time OHBA members from across Ontario who are committed to helping each other and making this industry better.
It’s a tough market, and nobody in the room was pretending otherwise. But people are banding together, sharing ideas, challenging old ways of doing things and pushing forward. For Ontario’s renovators — and for the homeowners who hire us — finally having a voice and a home at OHBA is a very good step forward.
Thank you to OHBA and the Ontario Renovators’ Council for a great three days, and to Patrick Flannery at Canadian Contractor for running the feature.
