Since the 1950′s, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation has provided years of excellent technical scientific research. The research at CMHC ran the gamut from purely academic research to consumer digested and accessible documents that offered pragmatic help to homeowners. But the times they are a changin’…
In the years I did energy audits (1999-2007) I would routinely send homeowners relevant research papers – especially Research Highlights - they would need to help them improve or inform the decision making process for upgrading homes which can be complicated.
Alas, the technical arm of CMHC is being dismantled by a government that’s focused on “profit” and is anti-science. Hedy Fry told the Straight that the Conservative government is “changing the mandate of CMHC” into a profit-making organization.
As a consumer and disseminator of these technical publications, its become increasingly difficult to get access to the documents as they get shuffled around and in many cases even off the CMHC website onto other governments web sites.
Recently, I was frustrated by Google searches not being able to find CMHC documents that were easily searchable a mere 5 years ago. Finally I got in touch with a very helpful librarian at CMHC. He told me that many of the publications are still available but can only be found on a Publications Canada web site. All this to say that if you’re having troubles finding research documents you need, you might find them at the two links above for a short while, but don’t count on it for much longer. I’ll go out on a limb here and recommend that you download what you can now to ensure access to this publicly funded and sorely needed information before it gets destroyed or worse you’ll have to pay for it a second time to a private corporation – just like the 407 highway.
Happy downloading!