Tackling Energy Poverty Can Help Tackle Raging Populism. Has Ottawa Got the Memo?
Building low-income energy retrofits into the upcoming Canada Green Buildings Strategy is the right thing to do. It also meets the politics of the moment.
It’s hard to put too much thought into climate change or carbon reductions when your family has to choose between food and fuel.
And that means Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson has at least one easy decision ahead of him as he ties down final details of his Canada Green Buildings Strategy before releasing it next month.
One of Ottawa’s smartest analysis and advocacy shops, Efficiency Canada, has already opened the door, with its call for a low-income energy retrofit program that would bring 4.5 million Canadians in from the cold, literally and figuratively. Now it’s up to Wilkinson and his team to seize the opportunity.
Efficiency Canada’s #Efficiency4All campaign site makes it easy to write to Wilkinson and send a copy to your Member of Parliament and the federal finance department.
Most of the items on Wilkinson’s to-do list aren’t nearly as simple or straightforward. His December, 2021 mandate letter from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau includes essential, high-stakes items like decarbonizing the grid, improving the connections between provincial power systems, ending subsidies for fossil fuels, helping Indigenous communities replace expensive, polluting diesel generators with renewable energy, and building clean energy supply chains and procurement plans.
Some of these issues have been around for decades. Some of them—interprovincial grid, anyone?—are a lot more complicated than they might sound.
By that measure, it’s almost simple to work through the financial barriers and split incentives that keep the cost savings and health benefits of energy efficiency out of the hands of people who need them most. Not that there are no obstacles or details to work through. But true to form, Efficiency Canada isn’t just telling Ottawa what to do. They’ve published a roadmap for getting it done.
One in Five Canadians Are Struggling
“Do I pay my energy bill? Do I buy food for my family? Do I pay my housing? Or do I put fuel in my car? All of these things are critical things that they absolutely have to do, but at the end of the day, which one do you choose?”
Efficiency Canada extracted that quote from an episode of CBC’s excellent What On Earth climate show that included a segment on energy poverty.
“Low-income Canadians have been excluded from federal energy efficiency and climate policy for too long,” the organization declares on its #Efficiency4All landing page. “One in five Canadian households struggle to meet their home energy needs due to rising costs of food and energy, leaving them to decide between heating their homes and feeding their families. Inadequate heating and cooling can lead to health problems and structural damage to buildings, making their homes unsafe.”
It's hard to decide which lens on this problem is more angering: that so many people in one of the world’s wealthiest countries are living in such dire energy poverty, or that government policy choices have been entrenching that unforced error for decades. Ever since the early 1980s, when federal and provincial governments decided on an administratively safer subsidy for early oil sands development, even knowing that a national home insulation program would save more energy and create more jobs.
We can’t rewrite that history. But now we’ve reached a moment when the right decision will go a long way toward flipping the script for 4.5 million Canadians facing energy poverty.
Existing federal grants already clear the barriers to energy retrofits for middle- and upper-income households. But those programs require an up-front investment that lower-income families can’t afford, and they leave out market renters. Which means they leave behind the people who live in the worst housing, have the most to gain from the retrofits, and most need a break on their home energy bills.
But that doesn’t have to be the final word. “By coordinating with existing regional programs and securing additional funding for energy efficiency programs, the federal government could fill policy gaps that exclude Canadians and provide energy justice for low-income homeowners and tenants,” Efficiency Canada declares.
The Canada Green Buildings Strategy can deliver on that promise if it:
Provides free energy upgrades for households with low enough incomes to qualify;
Delivers deep enough energy savings to “meaningfully reduce energy bills”;
Includes turnkey services to remove the “hassle and physical barriers” of living through a home retrofit;
Relies on community partnerships “to build trust and raise awareness in traditionally marginalized communities.”
Working from the Ground Up
Efficiency Canada’s call for community partnerships and local trust is every bit as important as its emphasis on free retrofits that deliver real energy savings without taking six months to complete.
If you stretched just a bit, you could argue that the absence of trust—and a failure of imagination on how to achieve it—set the momentum that brought us the carbon bomb that is today’s oil sands industry.
I mentioned that unforced error decades ago when federal and provincial ministers signed off on one of the country’s first heavy oil developments. An anonymous analysis at the time, printed on the recycled map paper used for in-house drafts at the then Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, looked at the subsidies governments would have to shell out to get industry onboard for the project. Then it calculated the costs and benefits of an equivalent investment in a national home insulation program, and the result was stunning: The insulation plan would save more energy than the heavy oil upgrader would produce, creating more jobs that were more evenly distributed across the country.
But there was a problem: from the lofty heights of a federal-provincial negotiation, it seemed to make so much more sense to go through hours or days of bare-knuckle bargaining, rather than counting on millions of Canadians to make the right choice. The missing element was trust. And to this day, when you see very serious industry lobbyists urging new financing for hydrogen home heating networks…or lavish subsidies for carbon capture and storage…or taxpayer support for small modular nuclear reactors…or—someone, please save us—so-called “pink” hydrogen derived from astonishingly expensive nuclear power plants, the baked-in assumption is that our energy and climate challenges can’t be solved from the ground up.
As usual, though, communities are far ahead of governments and industry. When Energy Mix joined with the Basic Income Canada Network and other groups to host the Green Resilience Project (GRP), with funding from Environment and Climate Change Canada, our partners in 33 communities checked in with more than 900 people across the country on the intersections between income insecurity, local resilience, and climate action. The response so vastly exceeded our wildest dreams that we’re close to launching a second round of listening sessions.
Some of the response in Round 1 pointed directly to the connections between incomes, health, and climate impacts that NRCan Minister Wilkinson now has an opportunity to address.
A participant from Toronto’s St. James Town community told us:
“When it’s winter, your heat bill increases. And when it’s summer, because of the humidity, your air conditioning bill increases, if you do have air conditioning. So it does affect us economically, in terms of how we have to decide what to do with our money…do we choose to pay the bill? Or do we go hungry?”
A participant from Prince Edward Island added:
“People who are financially secure have more freedom to invest in programs and goods which help to reduce their carbon footprint. People with fewer resources, less income, are not as free to engage in activities or programs that mitigate the impacts of the climate crisis.”
Seizing the Political Moment
Aligning with those community voices is one the most important things Wilkinson can do to keep the country on track to meet its climate targets. Delivering on a program that actually makes life better for people, delivering hope and real results for households that are falling into despair, is both the fairest and the surest response to the grassroot rage that Trudeau tried to address in his speech to the federal Liberal convention a couple of days ago.
“He doesn’t seem interested in building strong communities. He’s too busy building anger,” Trudeau said of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. “Our approach is to always be there for all Canadians.”
But the anger Poilievre is trying to channel is real, as we found out in Ottawa when the convoy occupation came to town last year. A lifelong political operative with no real-world work experience is an unlikely messenger for people who’ve been left behind by political decisions dating back decades. And Poilievre wouldn’t help matters with his pledge to dismantle the climate response that Trudeau’s Liberals have slowly patched together over the last eight years.
All of which gives Jonathan Wilkinson a powerful moment of opportunity to deliver on the PM’s promise to “always be there for all Canadians”. The Canada Green Buildings Strategy should include a low-income component because it’s the right thing to do. But it’s also one of the steps the government can and must take to meet the politics of the moment.
Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he scans 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix and The Energy Mix Weekender.
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I asked why small nuclear reactors have been chosen since this is the most expensive and worst choice. The answer was "it's what the lobbyists want". Apparently Chaulk River reactor was built to supply plutonium to other countries such as France, the U.S. and India to provide plutonium for nuclear weapons. The production of medical isotopes was a cover story.
Brilliant analysis and recommendations. I advocate for low income energy programs as a volunteer but you’ve added some surprising new insights like the comparison with early oil sands subsidies.
By the way your substack registration for being able to comment needs a lot more explanation about who will see the profile and what organization is managing the system. It’s very weird to be asked for the information and then asked to sign up for newsletters that have nothing to do with you just to be able to make a comment.