May 31, 2005

Labour and Immigration Minister Nancy Allan announced new guidelines in the appendix of the Manitoba Building Code that would facilitate the rehabilitation and reuse of older residential and office buildings in Manitoba will take effect tomorrow.

“The new guidelines will support economic development and revitalization efforts in Winnipeg’s downtown and in older buildings across all of Manitoba’s municipalities,” said Allan. “The initiative will help bring older, underutilized or vacant buildings back into active use while ensuring all safety and structural requirements are met.”

The Manitoba Building Code contains minimum construction standards for the structural sufficiency, life safety and fire protection of buildings. Allan noted that property owners, designers and contractors often face difficulty in renovating older buildings because the standards that were in existence when the buildings were originally constructed have often changed and applying current standards to older buildings can be difficult.

The new guidelines identify equivalent protection measures that can be used in existing buildings as an alternative to current provisions in the Manitoba Building Code.

“The guidelines make use of the concept of fire-risk indices to assess risk,” said Allan. “The idea is to calculate the risk of a code-compliant design, use the index as a benchmark to compare to alternate designs and then identify those alternate designs that meet or surpass the index of the code-compliant design.”

Those seeking to propose code alternatives must submit sufficient evidence the proposed conversion or rehabilitation of an existing building will provide the level of performance and protection intended by the code. It is up to the authority having jurisdiction for enforcement of the code to determine if the alternative is acceptable.

Allan noted the initiative is based on comparable guidelines in other North American jurisdictions and received support from stakeholders.

The Fire Risk Indices for the Application to the Rehabilitation and Re-Use of Existing Building in Manitoba for Residential and Business and Personal Services Occupancies can be found online at http://www.winnipeg.ca/ppd/.

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