Building science engineer Christopher Marleau brings enclosure expertise to northern communities and helps deliver durable, high-performance buildings in some of Canada’s harshest conditions.
In northern Canada, a building enclosure has little room for error. Extreme cold, large temperature swings, short construction seasons, limited materials and thawing permafrost can turn a small design or construction problem into a serious durability issue.
In 2025, Marleau, originally from Northern Ontario, founded Near North Building Science in Whitehorse, Yukon to provide locally based building enclosure and building science expertise for northern and remote communities in Canada.
“I could see that up here there was an inherent appreciation for building enclosure and building science consulting,” Marleau said. “In cold climates like the Yukon, people value it because it improves durability, indoor air quality and energy efficiency. People get it up here.”
Marleau works with architects, governments and building owners on both new and existing buildings. Equipped with infrared cameras, boroscopes and an infrared drone, he investigates thermal anomalies, moisture damage and difficult-to-access parts of buildings, then helps trace those problems back to their underlying causes. On new construction projects, that same experience feeds into enclosure design, detailing and construction review.
Being based in the territory also gives Marleau a closer view of how buildings perform over time and how local conditions impact their performance.
“I could recognize that you kind of had to be here,” he said
Whitehorse already has a relatively strong foundation for that work. Yukon follows the 2020 National Building Code, while Whitehorse’s green-building requirements set higher insulation levels, require EnerGuide labelling and limit new homes to no more than 1.5 air changes per hour at 50 Pascals. Triple-pane windows and heat-recovery ventilation have also been commonplace in the territory for years.
But northern conditions are changing. Canada’s North is warming roughly three times faster than the global average. Marleau described a recent winter when temperatures hovered around -40°C for weeks before suddenly climbing above freezing for just a few days, then back to long periods of freezing. Buildings accustomed to sustained winter cold were exposed to midwinter thaw, melting snow and water intrusion that historically would have been more characteristic of spring.
In a fly-in community, homes there are supported on steel screw piles above permafrost, which can conduct heat from the building into the ground. Marleau has implemented solutions such as high-density structural thermal break pads that are often used on things like balconies to reduce heat transfer from buildings into the ground. The detail helps limit thawing permafrost around the piles, which can destabilize the soil and eventually threaten the structure.
“Structural thermal breaks are mostly used down south for steel balconies or canopy supports that bridge from interior to exterior.,” Marleau said. “But up north the exposure to this technology is less common, but it is where it can make the largest positive impact on both the buildings and the environment.”
Marleau’s high-performance building experience comes from working as a building scientist in British Columbia, where he was exposed to a wide variety of construction and research projects across Western Canada. While working there, he studied the real-world performance of cold-climate heat pumps in B.C. The Yukon government later asked him to undertake similar work in the territory, bringing him north for several extended visits before he eventually moved permanently to Whitehorse in 2023.
Marleau later joined Earthrise Building Services, where he served as a project manager on work supported through Natural Resources Canada’s Greener Neighbourhoods Pilot Program. Led by Matthew Ooms, the initiative has explored how deep-energy retrofits can be delivered at greater scale in northern communities.
That experience adds to a growing body of northern building knowledge that Marleau can now bring from one project to the next. In a relatively small construction community, lessons can move quickly between architects, contractors, governments and First Nations communities.
“The further you go north, the challenges become pretty interesting,” Marleau said. “You really have to shift your mindset and be able to adapt to your surroundings.”
For Marleau, that means starting with proven building-science principles, but not assuming that the solutions developed elsewhere will translate directly to the North.
