Green Communities Canada made the following statement in response to the federal government’s announcement to retrofit one million homes:
Green Communities Canada welcomes this investment in reducing fossil fuel emissions and household energy bills while also making Canadian homes more efficient, resilient, and healthy. Supporting more homeowners to switch to heat pumps can lower energy costs and strengthen the economy. Our Energy Advisors know homeowners have many questions about heat pumps, and we’re here to answer those questions during Heat Pump Week (October 13-16) and all year round.
Ambitious and sustained investments in retrofitting homes have the potential to create a thriving made-in-Canada retrofit economy that supports hundreds of thousands of good jobs and robust supply chains across the country.
Reflecting on the past success of the Canada Greener Homes Grant (CGHG), this new announcement is a step forward in several ways.
The CGHG was designed to achieve a pace of approximately 100,000 retrofits per year. Described as a “victim of its own success,” the CGHG actually achieved about 120,000 retrofits per year over five years.
This new commitment aims to retrofit one million homes over eight years. This increases the pace to support 125,000 retrofits per year and sustains that over a longer period of time than the CGHG. The economy thrives when businesses and communities can rely on predictable and sustained investments. This new announcement is a step towards moving beyond the boom-and-bust cycle that has hamstrung past efforts to retrofit Canada’s homes.
The new announcement and program also anticipate the need to ensure industry is prepared to meet demand.
Green Communities Canada is pleased to see the commitment to renewing the Deep Retrofit Accelerator Initiative. The multiple crises we face – habitat loss, climate change, lack of affordable housing – require that we not only focus on retrofitting the millions of privately-owned homes across Canada, but also accelerate retrofitting social and subsidized low-income housing.
Green Communities Canada continues to make recommendations to the federal government that will accelerate deep energy retrofits and help Canada meet its net-zero targets while creating healthier, more resilient, and more affordable homes:
1. Integrate EnerGuide Energy Advisors and home energy assessments into the process:
- The recent announcement from the federal government states that no pre- or post-energy assessments (also known as “audits”) are required in this new program.
- The role of the Registered Energy Advisor is to be an impartial source of information to homeowners, as well as a verification system for incentive programs, ensuring that the upgrades being funded have been completed as claimed. Without an assessment, homeowners will have only contractors, who have a large sale at stake, to rely on for information, and the incentive program will be more vulnerable to fraud.
- Without a home energy assessment, retrofits may also waste money, strain equipment and the electrical grid, reduce efficiency gains, and leave homeowners and landlords with more costly retrofits down the road. Installing a heat pump when a home is leaky or poorly insulated requires a far more expensive heat pump than would otherwise be needed and sets homeowners up for a frustrating experience with drafts and unnecessarily high energy bills. This contradicts the goals of the program to lower energy costs, reduce emissions, and provide more affordable, reliable, and cleaner electricity to Canadians.
2. Roll out funding and training for the HVAC industry and Energy Advisors to support Heat Pump Right-sizing.
- Green Communities Canada has been working with industry and government partners to develop a heat-pump right-sizing program and ensure it can be available across Canada.
3. Expand the scope and scale of the Canada Greener Homes Affordability Program.
- Expand the budget and ramp up operations to reach 40,000 low- to median-income Canadian households per year.
4. Accelerate the pace
- Ramp up the ambition of this recently announced investment to retrofit 1 million homes over 8 years. Accelerate the pace to 2 million retrofits per year (each achieving at least 50 per cent energy savings) so that Canada has a plan to meet emissions reduction targets, create resilient, healthy homes, and build a thriving made-in-Canada retrofit industry.
About Green Communities Canada
Green Communities Canada (GCC) has been leading community-based climate action since 1995. With over 100 member and partner organizations located across Canada, GCC shares resources, co-creates programming, and advances transformative and equitable change. As a national non-profit charity, organization, GCC’s goal is to support and sustain grassroots community-based action. GCC does this by acting as a network, funder, backbone, and accelerator. As the longest-serving licensed EnerGuide Rating provider in Canada, Green Communities Canada (GCC) has been a trusted source of advice and advocacy for home energy solutions for over 30 years. GCC is a non-profit charity and does not sell renovations or home heating or cooling appliances. GCC’s energy advisors are based in communities across Ontario and many of them work for locally-based non-profit charities.