The Hidden Cost of Bureaucracy: One Heat Pump, Three Permits, Six Weeks

Over a month ago, I decided to replace my aging furnace and install a high-efficiency heat pump. For years, British Columbia has encouraged homeowners to make exactly this choice, investing hundreds of millions of dollars in rebates and programs to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps and other clean energy technologies. My furnace was nearing the end of its life anyway, and with summer approaching, the prospect of adding air conditioning made the decision pretty easy. The difficult part, it turned out, wasn’t deciding to make the investment, or finding the right equipment. It was getting permission to install it.

The project required three permits: electrical, gas, and building. The building permit came as a surprise, given that nothing was actually being built. But, I assumed that there must be a good reason for this, and that the process would be straightforward. 

Then the application was rejected. Not because of a safety concern, or missing information, but because the supporting documents had been uploaded as a single PDF instead of three separate files. The contractor corrected the issue and resubmitted the application the same day. From there, five days passed before it was picked up by another department at the City, where it entered a “five-stage review process”. More than a month later, I was still in the queue. 

It might be tempting to simply label this a frustrating user experience. But, after asking the City of North Vancouver why such a routine application was taking so long, I received a detailed response that made me realize it’s much more than that. The following timeline was provided:

• Application received and passed to pre-screen review: June 11

• Application rejected: June 16

• Application received for pre-screen review (again): June 17

• Application accepted and Building Permit created: June 22

• Invoice issued: June 22

• Invoice paid: June 23

• Permit routed for departmental reviews: June 24

• Electrical review comments issued: June 25

• Plan Check review comments issued: June 26

• Plan Check requirements received: July 2

• Planning review (in queue): July 2-15

Their email also acknowledged another important point: Reliance Home Comfort—the company installing my system—responded promptly every time additional information was requested. Every review comment was addressed quickly, every document was resubmitted without delay, the invoice was paid upon issuance. In fact, the City specifically noted that Reliance’s responsiveness had been key to “expediting” things. In other words, the contractor wasn’t the bottleneck, the process itself was.

This isn’t a particularly complex challenge. Other jurisdictions have looked at the same problem and reached very different conclusions about the level of oversight needed per transaction. In Nova Scotia, the provincial Building Code exempts the installation or replacement of residential heat pumps from requiring a building permit in most cases.[1] If one province can safely determine that a building permit isn’t necessary for this type of work, it’s more than fair to ask what the additional six weeks of paperwork are buying British Columbians.

The implications extend well beyond a heat pump. It speaks to much bigger issues that Canadians have been grappling with for years, from housing affordability to economic competitiveness. Governments rightly call for more homes to be built—more supply to meet demand—but those ambitions become extremely difficult to achieve if the administrative systems underpinning those very transactions create and perpetuate unnecessary friction.

I’ve spent a fair chunk of my career helping governments improve how public services are designed and delivered. I’ve worked on digitization, program design, economic analysis, interoperability, and organizational transformation. Regardless of the project or topic, I’ve reached the same conclusion: good policy alone doesn’t produce good outcomes.

Governments tend to devote enormous effort to developing new policies, announcing priorities, creating new programs, and chasing “big ideas”. The same, if not more, attention needs to be paid to whether the systems, processes, and people responsible for implementing those priorities can do so effectively and efficiently.

Let’s go back to housing. Much of the public conversation on the topic focuses on considerations like zoning reform, financing, labour shortages, immigration, building incentives, and interest rates. These are all important factors in the battle of housing demand versus supply. But governments also control something critical that receives a lot less attention: their own processes and systems that power the machine. Information requirements, application procedures, review processes, departmental handoffs, inspection scheduling, invoicing, approval timelines, and more—they own every step required to issue the piece of paper that allows the work to move forward.

And yes, of course, it’s important to account for what’s within the control of provincial, versus municipal mandates. But improving these systems doesn’t need extensive legislative reform, major upheaval, or hundreds of millions of dollars in new spending on tools and technology. It does however, need governments to work better together to serve citizens, and routinely ask themselves a key question: If we were designing this process today, would we build it the same way?

The OECD’s 2025 Economic Survey of Canada identifies lengthy permitting and development approval processes as something that is actively stifling housing supply. According to that report, the average approval time for new housing projects in Canada is 14 months, with some municipalities ranging from 3 months to as long as 32 months.[2] These delays have real and tangible costs; they manifest as postponed construction, reduced housing supply, and ultimately, perpetually elevated housing prices. It is no surprise that the same OECD report identifies streamlining permitting as essential to boosting supply and improving affordability.

Every permit sitting in a queue represents a household waiting to spend thousands of dollars on a renovation, a contractor unable to begin work, workers left unscheduled, and suppliers waiting to deliver equipment. Multiplied across thousands of routine projects each year, the opportunity cost of administrative delay is significant.

Curious whether my experience was unusual, I spoke with a former City of Vancouver engineering project manager who spent years working within the permitting system before retiring. When I asked how the process worked “back then,” he immediately responded:

“It probably hasn’t changed much in twenty years.”

As he described the workflow of yesteryear, it quickly became clear that he was right. Applications moved from one department to the next—building, electrical, plumbing, gas—with each group completing its own review before passing the file along. If one reviewer identified an issue, the application was returned to the applicant, corrected, resubmitted, and put back into the queue. Reviews occurred largely sequentially, not concurrently, and while each department was responsible for its own part of the process, no one was accountable for the whole experience.

Think about what has changed in twenty years. The average Canadian walks around with more computing power in their pocket than governments had when these processes were designed. Today, AI can summarize thousands of pages in minutes, but a routine permit still moves through departments almost exactly as it did two decades ago. And for the applicant, little has changed. Citizens are left waiting between handoffs, with limited visibility into where their application sits, what is happening behind the scenes, or when it will finally be approved.

Some will undoubtedly argue that these administrative processes are necessary checks and balances; that it’s important to have oversight. Yes, oversight matters, no one disputes that. But the degree of oversight should be aligned with the degree of risk, and processes shouldn’t simply persist because they’ve always existed. Failing to make that distinction is why so many government initiatives fail to deliver the improvements they promise.

That said, there are reasons for optimism. Some governments have begun experimenting with a different philosophy based on a combined review of risk, impact, urgency, and value. While Alberta’s Automatic Yes framework is primarily focused on accelerating approvals for more complex projects and investments (not routine residential permits like mine), the underlying principle is important. Instead of assuming every application deserves the same treatment, the framework starts from a simple premise: government effort should be proportionate to risk and value. It encourages regulators to distinguish between activities that truly warrant detailed review and those that can be processed more efficiently through standardized requirements. According to the province, nearly one in five government permit streams has already reduced average processing times since the framework was implemented, with several permits improving by more than 30 days.[1]

Whether Automatic Yes would ever apply to a residential heat pump is beside the point. The broader lesson is that some governments are beginning to ask a question that should sit at the heart of every system: where do processes create public value, and where do they just create

friction? An engineering review that confirms a building is safe clearly creates value; submitting three separate files instead of one consolidated document does not.

Eventually, more than a month after the original application was submitted, my permit was approved. In perhaps the most ironic part of the story, Reliance Home Comfort called the very same day to schedule the installation—for the following morning. The installation itself took a matter of hours. The paperwork took more than a month.

We often think of government efficiency as an abstract discussion about budgets, productivity, or “red tape”. In reality, it shapes people’s everyday lives. When I escalated my application, I was told the City was still operating within its published service standards. Maybe so. But the yardstick shouldn’t be based on whether governments are meeting their own self-imposed standards; it should be whether those standards, and the processes that underpin them, are still capable of delivering the outcomes Canadians expect.

For me, a six-to-seven-week service standard for replacing a residential heating system isn’t evidence of good performance simply because it’s being achieved. Instead, I would argue it’s evidence that we’ve normalized unnecessary delay.

At the end of the day, good government isn’t measured by how efficiently it administers bureaucracy. It’s measured by how effectively it helps people get things done.

[1]  Government of Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia Building Code Regulations, Building Code Act: N.S. Reg, 198/20124 (effective April 1, 2025),novascotia.ca

[2] Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), OECD Economic Surveys: Canada 2025 (OECD Publishing, 2025), oecd.org

[3] Government of Alberta, “Automatic Yes Toolkit”, alberta.ca