ICC Global Membership Council profile: Lynn Balfour.

With more than 25 years of experience in the building code profession, Lynn Balfour is an active advocate for the certification, education and training of building officials as well as the consistent administration and enforcement of building codes in communities, her country, and around the world. Balfour is currently the manager of the Building Standards Division for the city of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. She has been a long-time member of the Ontario Building Officials Association (OBOA), serving on the board of directors and a two-year term as president. The OBOA has been the primary training provider and voice for building officials in Ontario. She has been involved in the Alliance of Canadian Building Official Associations (ACBOA) in which she served a term as president. ACBOA is an organization responsible for the creation of a national certification program for building officials, and dedicated to raising the profile and professional reputation of building officials across Canada. After the release of the 2006 Ontario Building Code, which introduced mandatory qualification requirements for building practitioners, Balfour was appointed by the Minister of Municipal Affairs to co-chair the Building Advisory Council, a multi-stakeholder group tasked with making recommendations to the Minister on changes to the building code act and regulations to facilitate the transition to the new mandatory requirements. Balfour became a member of the Governing Committee for the ICC Global Membership Council in 2013 to further the idea that "buildings don't have borders," and that building codes and the work of code officials have a common underlying theme. She was proud to have assisted in bringing together building officials from Canada to Christchurch, New Zealand, to assist after devastating earthquakes. "One day, I hope that the skills and certifications of building officials will know no borders," Balfour says. "We have done that in Canada through the development of the national certification program which provided a conduit for provincially certified building officials to cross over provincial borders. I truly believe that building safety is universal, our regulations may differ, but the how we do our business should not be that different. At the end of the day the skills of a building official in Canada or the U.S. should be no different than anywhere else in the world."

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