Canadian Mortgage Trends reported on Nov. 2, 2026 that Montreal is working with its boroughs to adapt the Quebec designs in the federal Housing Design Catalogue, a set of more than 50 low-rise designs, into local rules, with the aim of lowering costs and shortening approval times. Site-specific review is still required for each project, and no borough timeline has been given.
A catalogue design removes one kind of work: drawing a house from scratch. It does not remove the approval itself. Every project still moves through municipal intake, review and sign-off, and that movement happens in software and in queues, not in the catalogue. If the workflow stays manual, a standard plan simply arrives faster at the same bottleneck.
A standard plan only moves at the speed of the system asked to approve it.
The opportunity is to digitize around the catalogue: online intake that checks a submission against the pre-approved design, clear status tracking for applicants, and review steps that focus staff time on the site-specific questions that genuinely vary. Municipalities modernizing that flow can look at how KSPACE TECHNOLOGIES approaches digital service solutions for public-facing processes.
Borough-by-borough adoption adds a second risk. If each borough adapts the designs and the process differently, builders face the same patchwork the catalogue was meant to end, in digital form.
Builders should watch which boroughs adopt first and what submission route each one opens. Cities should treat the catalogue launch and the approval workflow as one project, because applicants will experience them as one.