The Conservative government recently rebranded the Liberal government's acknowledges that:
Only one to two percent of Canada’s housing supply is built new each year. Therefore, an important way to reduce household energy use is to make existing Canadian homes more energy efficient. It is expected that the ecoENERGY Retrofit incentives will promote smart energy use in more than 140,000 homes.
A personalized checklist will show homeowners the best upgrades for their homes and how much financial support is available to make those improvements. The average grant is expected to be more than $1,000 and will yield an average 30 percent reduction in energy use and costs.
The Government of Canada will also encourage the construction, operation and retrofit of more energy-efficient buildings and houses using complementary activities such as house and building energy rating and labelling systems. Part of the investment will go into new design tools and training so designers, builders, owners and operators can learn about and use best practices and new technologies.
But, in a Toronto Star article, Mark Winfield, a director with the Pembina Institute, an environmental think tank, points out that
for homeowners to qualify for retrofit grants, they must first get an energy audit done on their homes. Under the former Liberal government's EnerGuide program, the cost of that audit was subsidized. "The removal of the upfront subsidy for the baseline audit will probably adversely affect program uptake as it means the cost will be in the $500 range, which may be enough for most people to hesitate. At $200 it was quite accessible.