Steve Maxwell
Mandatory home energy labelling coming to Ontario
Canadian ContractorOntario's 57-page Climate Change Action Plan prescribes monumental changes to the way homes are heated and insulated.
If you haven’t yet heard of Ontario’s 57-page Climate Change Action Plan, you will soon. It includes 80 sweeping new policies aimed at reducing the province’s carbon footprint. The plan will cost $7 billion over the next four years and includes hard-to-believe hot-potato items such as the phasing out of natural gas in new homes by 2030, and the reformulation of gasoline so it contains less carbon. Policies like these will throw entire industries upside down, so things are bound to get noisy. One comparatively small detail that will probably get lost in the ruckus is something that will affect the homebuilding and real estate industries in a big way.
Mandatory home energy labeling is officially part of the Climate Change Action Plan, and it requires that all homes offered for sale undergo an audit that shows how much energy they consume and where. The requirement for an audit will apply to both new homes and resale homes and will be a required condition of sale. The first homes to get audited will appear in 2016 or early 2017. The rest of the action plan will come into force at different times because they’re the responsibility of different ministries.
Whether or not you believe that human sources of carbon are adversely affecting climate, this latest move by the Ontario government is huge. What will home energy labeling mean for you as a contractor? First, a lot more of your work will centre around energy issues. Conservation is no longer just something some people do because they believe it’s the right thing. Even homeowners who are functionally indifferent to conservation will be forced to hire you for energy upgrades that’ll let them keep up their home stats in their resale market.
And second, a lot more government money will be available to make this happen. It’s one of those good news/bad news scenarios. Good for your business, but bad if you believe that Ontario has no business saddling children and those not yet born with the burden of debt that extends way beyond the legitimate tax base. Either way, according to the Action Plan, $3.8 billion of government incentives will be up for grabs, ear-marked for upgrading homes and boosting energy efficiency in various ways.
On May 18, the Climate Change Mitigation and Low-Carbon Economy Act passed as Bill 172. This puts Ontario’s GHG targets into law: 15% reduction by 2020; 37% reduction by 2030; 80% reduction by 2050.
At least as influential as laws and money is the way home energy labeling will bring contractor accountability front and centre. Sooner or later the energy performance of every home in Ontario will become public knowledge, rewarding quality-minded contractors and punishing incompetence accordingly. Like it or not, this is where many Canadian contractors will find themselves in the future.
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Four things come to mind here:
1. Even with government subsidies, who’s going to pay for the balance of the upgrades when most people say they’re already eye ball deep in debt & can’t afford more?
2. Who’s going to control the material, appliances, etc. costs when demand goes up for these mandated improvements, since we all know the higher the demand equals higher prices?
3. I don’t see house prices dropping based on this mandated energy rating system. Instead, I see either the used real estate market evaporating even more than is currently happening, or real estate prices going through the roof, thereby not allowing anyone new to the market to be even able to afford a cardboard box, let alone a house, condo, townhouse, etc. Do they expect everybody to live in rentals? Who’s going to afford that when everybody is already complaining about the high price of rentals?
4. Although a noble initiative on the surface, I think a lot of what’s in that 57 page report will be repealed by the next government coming in, which certainly won’t be a Liberal one based on what complaining I’ve been hearing about them already here in 2016.
The global worming, climate change cation, and carbon is all bs, its another way for governments to grab more money from the people.
In Ontario some politicians are either puppets of hidden agendas or to stupid to understand what really goes on with clime changes.
With the chemical trails on the skies almost every day sprayed by aircraft to change the weather and clime changes, the founds to pay for these crimes above our heads, have to come from somewhere. Now with this energy bill stupidity will make life even harder in this Province.
Wynne Liberalism have to go before is to late.
This Ontario government is apparent disaster, 13 years of a course of puppets serving only their masters and their lobbying electoral money founders. Its amazing what they keep doing wrong after wrong nothing right only bills to pay.