Three years ago, while much of the world hunkered down to wait out the COVID-19 pandemic, the B.C. government set its sights on the sky. It began planning how to fill urban horizons with more highrise living space and office towers using wood as the structural skeleton instead of traditional cement and steel. It was a lofty goal that’s being emulated in cities around the world.
To do it, B.C. created the Office of Mass Timber Implementation (OMTI), the first government office in the world with a broad and powerful mandate to make it easier to build with mass timber — a catch-all term that encompasses a variety of engineered
