GlassTalk is Canada’s discussion channel for the architectural glass industry. If it has to do with glass building facades, you’ll find expert commentary and industry insight right here. Join Glass Canada editor Patrick Flannery for in-depth conversations with influential executives, top experts and entertaining opinion leaders.
Subscribe:.rss.atom.json.md.m3u.pls
Live Last read · last published · next check
Saves to your Listen queue, to pick up on another day or another device.
Lorrie Rand, co-founder of ReCover (a Halifax-based building science research non-profit), has completed a big study into how much deep retrofits might help the envelope performance of 10 different types of Part 3 buildings in Atlantic Canada. Crucially, her team also looked at total cost of ownership to evaluate whether upgrading commercial buildings would ever pay off through energy savings.…
Much has been said about the promise of AI and its possible threat to jobs. But how might this powerful new technology affect an old concern: your company's data security? David Mill, CEO and founder of Scelta , a Windsor, Ont., construction software provider, joins GlassTalk to talk about the ways AI might empower bad actors to produce better scams, steal data from your systems, spoof your…
Paul Amato of Tallinn Advisory brings 20 years' of professional experience advising construction companies to the question of how to get the different parts of your organization working better together. He joins The Hammer to talk about what he means by “alignment”; the elements of a good mindset; the barriers to great customer service and quality; and how to build a culture that succeeds. Take…
Amanda Spann is the author of I Have an App Idea – The Essential Guide to Building an App Without Tech Skills and she has good news for all of us. You don’t need to spend in the five figures or burn hundreds of hours of staff time to develop an app any more, thanks to new AI-powered tools and reasonably priced professional services. The even better news is, as experts in touch with the needs of…
As the president and founder of DPI Lab, an industrial printer manufacturer, Lon Riley knows a lot about the chemistry and technology that makes it possible to produce remarkable images on glass. He joins GlassTalk for a deep dive into the technology and what makes glass printing a special challenge. He addresses the considerations we need to have when seeking the highest productivity and uptime…
With his degrees in engineering and business, and his fascinating LinkedIn posts discussing everything about glazing and facade engineering, Adrian Lowenstein is most accurately described as a building engineering influencer. He joins Glass Canada editor Pat Flannery for a wide-ranging discussion of Flannery's One Number hobby horse; the differences between the Canadian and American glass markets;…
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…
Across the world of construction and trades, failure to secure payment for work done and materials purchased is probably the biggest and most common threat to any company’s survival. The system of bonds, liens and sureties we rely on to safeguard contractors and subcontractors can be so arcane that many of us simply don’t bother – and take on massive risk in doing so. Steve Ness of SAC says the…
Chris Magwood of the <a href="https://rmi.org/">Rocky Mountain Institute</a> 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…
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…
The Ontario government’s award of a $140 million hospital façade project to American contractor Permasteelisa/Benson is making waves in Ontario’s glass community. After receiving multiple angry comments and calls from members, the Ontario Glass and Metal Association has taken the unusual step of going public with an open letter to the Ford government, complaining about the lack of support for our…
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…
Registration for Canada’s architectural glass show is open and the agenda set. Join us April 29 – 30 in Mississauga, Ont., for a day of great discussion with all your friends in the industry. And get a behind-the-scenes look at Trulite Glass and Aluminum Solutions, one of Canada’s top glass fabricators. Glass Canada publisher Pat Flannery shares all the details – see you at Top Glass!
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.
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…
Steve Johnston of Omnigence, a private equity firm investing in the construction sector, has a stark warning. He sees a real risk of long-term stagflation (inflation coupled with low productivity and high unemployment) in our present conditions and government policies. His white paper lays out the broad details, but he joins GlassTalk to talk about the specific effects in Canada’s construction…
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…
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. NSF Product Category Rule for…
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…
Canada’s architectural glass show comes to Calgary Oct. 16 – 17 and Glass Canada’s intrepid brand manager, Leslie Osborne, joins GlassTalk to give you all the details. We’ll be touring the local glass fabrication plant of the might Oldcastle Building Envelope. We’ll be talking about office-to-residential conversions. We’ll be looking at the future of glass. We’ll be debating contract changes from…
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…
Glass Canada editor Patrick Flannery has a big announcement for you! Top Glass, Canada’s trade event for the architectural glass industry is coming to the Best Western Premier in Calgary on Oct. 17. And that’s not all…on Oct. 16, you can tour Oldcastle Building Envelope’s Calgary fabrication facility and see advanced glazing components being manufactured before your very eyes. Tune in as Flannery…
Helen Sanders, general manager at Technoform and chair of the Fenestration and Glazing Industry Alliance Glass Products Research Committee, celebrates her 30th year in the industry by joining GlassTalk to talk about their work on the cutting edges of glass technology. The Committee is looking at new ways to confirm the amount of argon fill in IGUs; developing industry Product Category Rules for…
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…
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 Glass Talk 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. Choosing the…
When Andrew Haring announced he was leaving his role as business development director for the National Glass Association, it set off a mini-storm on social media. Why? Because in his time with the NGA Haring became one of the better known and respected personalities on the North American glass scene. His blend of humour, honesty and deep familiarity with our business has made him someone we’d all…
It’s happened – a Canadian jurisdiction has mandated a maximum allowable temperature inside a dwelling space. The Vancouver rule is related to health and safety rather than energy efficiency, but it seems likely that requirements for cooling homes will soon put pressure on fenestration designers to restrict solar heat gain in addition to insulating against heat loss. Is the market reacting? How…
Our fast-changing world of tightening energy standards and embodied carbon is challenging us all to look at different design approaches and different materials. Enter a true Canadian glass innovator – Advanced Glazings in Sydney, N.S., and their Solera and SoleraWall products that use an aerogel fill to make translucent architectural glass products with energy performance similar to vacuum…
Storm clouds are gathering over the architectural glass industry as 2024 starts. FenCan Commercial business development director and Glass Canada columnist Rich Porayko joins GlassTalk for a New Year episode looking back at the top stories from 2023 and ahead to what they might mean for 2024. Embodied carbon, bankruptcies, VIG, new organizations and events, labour…it’s all on the table in our…
Another year has gone by and it’s time for a high-level view of our business conditions and results in 2023. Marvin Cruz, research director, and Christina Santini, national affairs director, for the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses join Glass Talk to tell us what they are hearing from small and medium-sized businesses across the country. We hit inflation, labour shortages, regulations…
Jeff Dalaba, program director for North American Contractor Certification and Architectural Glass and Metal Technician, joins Glass Talk to update us on recent developments with these important certification organizations. Interest and participation in these certification programs continues to grow, with U.S. states demanding it for public project bids and major general contractors joining the…
It’s everyone’s least favourite part of the project – the value engineering phase. When general contractors and project owners turn to finding ways to save cost while preserving specs, we often feel the squeeze. But there’s a difference between the way it is supposed to work and how it gets implemented when people are just looking to save costs without regard for other considerations. And,…
Specialty Fenestration Group makes commercial fenestration for two of the toughest applications there are: security glazing and drive-through windows. Marketing director Brian Hanson joins GlassTalk to tell us all about ballistic and blast-resistant glass – what it is; what the standards are; how it’s made; how it’s tested and what works in what situation. And yes, they do get to shoot, smash and…
When you look at the big picture for yourself and your business, what do you see? Dawn Bloomer is a business consultant who helps small business owners get out from under the day-to-day grind of putting out fires and fixing leaks to take a look at their goals and find ways to organize their businesses to meet them. She joins Glass Talk to offer some sage advice on issues like delegation,…
It’s safe to say Kelly Doran is one of the people driving Canada’s approach to limiting the carbon dioxide emissions in our built environment. He’s an architect by training who has counseled Toronto on embodied carbon standards for its Green Building Standard, worked with NRCan on its plans for meeting Canada’s Paris Agreement commitments, attended UN climate conferences and is speaking to…
Suhel Kachwala’s last name means “glass man” in Parsi. It doesn’t get a lot more fitting than that, because Kachwala is the second-generation managing director of FG Glass, one of India’s largest glass fabricators. His father and uncle started the business in 1976, the year he was born, and now he runs it alongside his brother and two cousins – all engineers. Kachwala’s business brings him to…
Amy Roberts, Canadian operations and glass technical director for the Fenestration and Glazing Industry Alliance, has been looking into where we might find the skilled and unskilled labour we are all lacking in our operations. Roberts’ research has revealed that there are several provincial and federal programs – some with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding – aimed at helping you recruit,…
A new world of sustainable building practices is bearing down upon us, with embodied carbon considerations pushing to the fore. Air/water tightness and insulating factors are so last century. Vancouver will begin asking for environmental product declarations on new builds this summer, with limits on the allowed embodied carbon coming within two years. Here to explain it all is Caroline Butchart, a…
There are two industries putting glass on buildings: the residential side working mostly with vinyl in punched openings and the commercial side working mostly with aluminum to produce engineered facades. Even 20 years ago, the distinctions between the two were fairly clear and few companies did both. Today, there’s vinyl going on to high rises and aluminum windows going into suburban tract…
New concepts are emerging in construction contracts aimed at bringing project owners, contractors and subcontractors closer together as partners rather than bosses and hirelings. But to navigate these new structures, especially on today’s larger P3 projects, glazing contractors are going to need to be prepared for a world of enhanced transparency, data collection and communication. Michelle…
Glass Talk host Patrick Flannery reconnects with an old friend who is now a lecturer in mechanical engineering with a focus on fenestration technology at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Thomas Simko has travelled the world researching the latest concepts in glass, glazing and building facades and he joins the podcast to give us the view from Down Under. Simko’s message is compelling:…
Glass Canada’s That’s Rich columnist, Rich Porayko, joins the podcast to look over some of the top stories from 2022 and engage in general industry gossip. Glass prices – should we be surprised? Embodied carbon – are we going to end up going back to monolithic? Contracts – who’s the dog and who’s the tail? Associations – what are they good for? And more. Happy New Year!
Ontario’s Bill 23 has attracted some hot reaction from environmental groups, up to and including claims it has taken away municipalities’ ability to enforce environmental regulations on construction. In the glass industry, most of the questions are concerning Toronto’s bird-friendly glazing rules. As one of North America’s preeminent bird-friendly glass suppliers, Walker Glass is keeping a close…
Dr. Mukhopadhya is a building science professor researching thermal testing and modeling at the University of Victoria and he joined Glass Talk to explain his latest work on thermal testing that may open the door to understanding thermal performance of facades based on smaller test sample sizes. He also discusses measuring thermal transmission through building materials and what the future may…
The Ontario government has announced a string of programs and restructurings aimed at improving and promoting skilled trades training. Robert Bronk is CEO of the Ontario Construction Secretariat, an agency that acts as a forum for construction contractors and construction unions to work together. As such, he has some great perspectives on the state of skilled trades learning and the apprenticeship…
The Fenestration and Glazing Industry Alliance continues to evolve into a truly North American organization for the architectural glass and window and door industries. It’s most recent move is the absorption of Fenestration BC, the association created 10 years ago out of the merger of the Canadian Window and Door Manufacturers Association of BC and the Glazing Contractors Association of BC. With…
