Government of Canada Releases the New Green Buildings Strategy: A Plan to Help Canadians Save Money on Their Energy Bills
Informed by the input received during the consultation stage, Ministerial roundtables, and multilateral conferences, the Strategy concentrates on improving energy efficiency in Canada’s homes and buildings, with a key focus on addressing the country’s pressing political challenges of affordability, the housing crisis, and climate change.
Green Building Strategy Overview
This month, the Government of Canada launched the Canada Green Buildings Strategy, which aims to save Canadians money on their energy bills, create good jobs, and seize the economic opportunity that the clean economy presents. As buildings are the third largest emitting sector, the Strategy is aligned with Canada’s National Adaptation Strategy and is intended to accompany the Government of Canada’s already established efforts, including targeted Budget 2024 funding, to decarbonize and reach its ambitious 2030 and 2050 environmental targets.
With climate change and its associated impacts in mind, old buildings, including those that are federally owned, must be updated and new homes must be built to withstand the changing climate. In order to realize this green solution to the housing crises, the Government of Canada is calling for prompt action that includes collaboration with Provinces, Territories, Indigenous and Municipal partners, the financial sector, the building industry, and other businesses to help spur innovation.
Canada’s Building Landscape
Canada has a vast building stock that includes over 16 million used for residential purposes, over 564,000 commercial and institutional buildings, and over 34,000 that are owned and managed by the Government of Canada. While the majority of these buildings are expected to be standing in 2050, upgrades and retrofits will be required, as well as a looming demand for millions more homes to be built to address the country’s growing housing needs. While a substantial expenditure, the Government has concluded that taking proactive action is ultimately a cost-effective solution that will address both climate risks and housing affordability.
Canada’s Opportunities
Prioritizing green buildings are set to present a multitude of opportunities and benefits for Canada, including being:
- Affordable, livable, and resilient: Building new green homes and investing in energy efficiency and climate resiliency improvements can reduce energy usage, energy bills, and the costs associated with climate impacts, which are significant and projected to grow.
- Spurring economic growth and competitiveness: Bolstering Canada’s future competitiveness in the green buildings sector will harness low-carbon technologies that will spur economic growth through skilled workers, a clean grid, and intelligence to support the pursued advancements. This will position Canada, including Canadian companies, as leaders in the green buildings industry both domestically and internationally. Additionally, this will be supported through federal investments in CCUS, green hydrogen, and electrification.
- Advancing jobs, skills and training: Canada’s workforce is primed to be the foundation to support the transition to green buildings at all stages, including the development, promotion, installation, and maintenance of the necessary infrastructure and technologies. This will continue to advance the already present employment opportunities in Canada’s green building sector by creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs. The projected labour market need will be supported through the Sustainable Jobs Plan, federal collaboration with the provinces, and upskilling initiatives.
- Promoting clean technology development: Collectively greening Canada’s buildings presents unique opportunities for clean technology innovation, development, and deployment across Canada. To do so, the Strategy proposes a technology-neutral approach through 2050 that provides opportunity to adapt strategically over time. This includes advancing the role of electrification, supply-side management, demand-side management, roof top solar, bioheat, renewable natural gas, shared energy solutions (district energy systems), prefabrication (including modular construction), and existing building commissioning.
- ‘Buy Clean’ – low carbon construction materials and design: As Canada’s green building industry continues to advance, so will the demand for renewable and / or net-zero-embodied carbon construction materials. As such, Canada is uniquely positioned to supply the global economy with green construction materials, such as wood. The ‘buy clean’ momentum and policy approach in Canada promotes federal procurement and investments in the following four ways:
- Reduce embodied carbon in Government of Canada infrastructure procurement;
- Reduce embodied carbon in federal investments in public infrastructure assets;
- Support market transformation through disclosure, guidelines, and demonstration projects; and
- Complementary measures to decarbonize the construction industry through research, development, demonstration, and deployment.
Strategic Priorities
Through extensive Natural Resources Canada engagement with the building sector, industry partners, Indigenous partners, municipalities, provinces, territories and the Canadian public, the Strategy is underpinned by the three strategic priorities of:
- Accelerating retrofits: This is considered the upmost priority of the Strategy due to the dramatic scale-up needed. While retrofits do not guarantee net-zero compatibility and energy savings, efforts should be focused on reducing the emissions from heating sources, which contribute over 96% of direct building emissions.
- Building green and affordable from the start: It is estimated that Canada will need at least 3.5 million new homes by 2030. However, if built with current practices, materials, and standards, the environmental impact will be damaging. Thus, green and resilient electric-powered buildings must be constructed to responsibly meet the demand.
- Shape the buildings sector of the future: Given that fossil fuel heating is the largest source of emissions in the buildings sector, the Strategy emphasizes the importance of the electrification of space and water heating to advance decarbonization. This will be supported through the development and implementation of the Clean Electricity Strategy, Clean Electricity Regulations, and the 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan.
Path Forward and Insights
Overall, the Strategy is intended to be perceived as an initial step towards greening Canada’s buildings, and a pathway that recognizes the importance of prompt collaborative action and shared responsibility. Despite this idealism and the fact that greening the building sector does provide great promise for Canada’s environmental and clean economy goals, much more needs to be done beyond the federal government’s already invested $20 billion in green building initiatives since 2016 and Strategy priorities.
All facts considered, it is evident that if the federal government truly wants to achieve Strategy success and promptly transition the complex building market to enable net-zero emissions by 2050, further funding allocations, regulations, and targeted incentives that actually encourage transformation and collaboration across all stakeholders will be necessary.