Ottawa's Latest Retrofit Target Only Reaches 6% of Homes — Here's a Bigger Lever

What's new: The federal government's latest electricity strategy commits to retrofitting up to one million homes. This sounds significant, until you learn this is roughly 6% of Canada's 15.7 million households. Efficiency Canada estimates this could mean a federal spend of close to $24 billion in capital based on the average cost of a Greener Homes Loan retrofit.

Why it matters: Even if the money materializes, rebates alone have a poor track record of moving the dial. While the Canada Greener Homes Grant increased retrofit activity between 2020 and 2022, based on the results, one estimate put the timeline to upgrade all of Canada's eligible homes at up to a century. And the average energy savings per retrofit barely moved, from 17% to 21%. Deep retrofits — that cut energy use by 40% or more — made up just 6.1% of retrofit projects in 2022.

The barrier was never just the money

The barrier has never been just the size of a rebate. Homeowners considering a retrofit face a genuinely complicated decision: who to trust among auditors, contractors, and financiers; whether the payback period outlasts how long they'll stay in the house; whether the upfront cost and disruption are worth it for savings. None of that gets easier with a bigger cheque. It gets easier with someone the homeowner already trusts walking them through it. It is the emotional and psychological barriers, not just financing gaps, that are keeping many people from retrofitting, and top-down programs built only around incentives and marketing campaigns keep running into that wall.

Communities are already building the missing piece

While federal programs default to rebates and low-interest loans, some municipalities have been experimenting with something rebates can't deliver on their own: a trusted local platform for actually getting the work done. Like Durham Region’s Greener Homes Program.

Many municipalities have also been testing Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing. Implemented through local improvement charges, they tie the cost of a retrofit to the property itself rather than the homeowner personally, so the payback risk doesn't fall entirely on however long someone plans to stay in the house. But again, this is only a financing tool.

In Newmarket, Ontario, a business plan considers how delivering standardizing retrofit packages at scale might cut the cost and complexity that currently make contractors reluctant to bid and homeowners reluctant to commit.

None of this replaces financial support. It answers a different question: who does a homeowner call, and why should they believe that call is worth making?

A dial versus a delivery system

There's a useful distinction buried in this: a rebate is a dial you turn — spend a bit more, and, up to a point, you get a proportional response. A trusted local retrofit program is something else entirely — new local capacity and relationships that didn't exist before, capable of doing what no rebate program can do on its own, which is make the process easy and safe to say yes to. Efficiency Canada's own recommendation points in the same direction: rather than only cheaper financing, it's calling for a national fund built around better retrofit delivery platforms. That's precisely the kind of institution municipalities have already been prototyping. And like all great ideas that emerge on the margins, a few have survived the boom-bust pattern of federal and provincial programs, although many have not.

Where the real opportunity is

A federal government serious about moving past 6% of the country's homes doesn't just need a bigger version of the same program. It needs to fund the thing that's actually been missing —local delivery capacity that homeowners trust, standardized enough to bring contractor costs down, financed in a way that survives a change of address. The building blocks already exist in Canadian communities. What they've lacked is a federal partner willing to back the platform, not just the rebate.

The bottom line: one million homes is 6% of the goal — and rebates alone won't get past that number any faster than they have for the last five years or more. The federal government's biggest available lever isn't a bigger incentive. It's helping communities build the trusted, standardized retrofit programs that make homeowners say yes in the first place.