By David Dodge, GreenEnergyFutures.ca
Amidst trade wars, geopolitical turmoil, and a worsening climate crisis, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that Canada will diversify its trading partners, prioritize domestic production, and streamline regulations to expedite “nation-building” initiatives.
The first five of these nation-building projects have been announced, and they focus on fossil fuels in the form of LNG, copper mining, expanding a container port, and building a small nuclear power plant in Ontario.
To address the housing crisis, Carney also announced the creation of a new agency called Build Canada Homes to fast-track the building of 4,000 affordable homes on federal lands in five locations across Canada.
This is pretty conventional stuff, perhaps what you might expect from the former and celebrated head of the Bank of Canada and England.
But isn’t Mark Carney Green?
But Prime Minister Mark Carney is also known for his concern about climate change and bringing values to economics. He even wrote a bestselling book entitled “Values: Building a Better World for All.”
The Pembina Institute has lauded the Build Canada initiative, which will also use modular construction, as we reported in our story about Landmark Homes building net-zero homes in Edmonton.
But Pembina wonders how efficient and low-carbon these homes will be.
Indeed, many are wondering what happened to climate change.
Evan Ferrari is the executive director of Emerge Guelph Sustainability, a local climate change action group in Guelph, Ontario.
Like Monica Curtis in our story about nation-building that also fights climate change, Ferrari would like to see a Marshall Plan-scale nation-building project that builds the new energy economy, creates local jobs, and fights climate change.
So What’s in it for Guelph?
To make his point, Ferrari wrote a blog entitled “Nation Building: What’s in it for Guelph.”?
Instead of ‘building fossil fuel and mining mega projects, ’ Ferrari says we need to build “decentralize megaprojects” that are “small hyper local projects that together add up to a massive megaproject.”
Buildings are responsible for about one-third of greenhouse gas emissions, and 80% of the buildings standing today will still be here in 2050 when the world wants to get to net-zero.
“We have about 14 million dwellings in Canada, and 8 million of those are single-family houses. We need to renovate about one every two seconds to be done by 2030. So, we’ve got a long way to go,” net-zero builder Peter Amerongen told Green Energy Futures in our story about his project to retrofit 59 townhomes to net-zero.
So far various levels of government have dabbled in addressing this massive challenge.
To Evan Ferrari’s point, retrofitting millions of buildings would bring a flood of local jobs to every community in the country and building owners would save money in the long run.
Better buildings, $48 billion in economic activity and climate resilience
In our previous story, Monica Curtis of the Pembina Institute told us a beefed-up retrofits national initiative would generate $48 billion in economic activity.
But the Greener Homes loan program has run out of funding, and local PACE-like programs designed to help building owners finance retrofits are too small for this task.
Ferrari says distributed mega projects could address electrification of transportation in the form of EVs and electric trains, and, like Pembina, they believe the idea of a massively expanded Greener Homes program would benefit more Canadians.
“I’m not disagreeing with the prime minister when indeed there is a crisis going on, an economic crisis going on here,” says Ferrari.
But “doing this locally will bring money locally, will put people back to work. It’s not a big ribbon cutting. It’s potentially thousands of ribbon cuttings,” he says.
“I’m really concerned with the path that he’s [Prime Minister Mark Carney] taking at this point. And I think we’ve got this perfect opportunity, especially given his climate change background and the climate change background of his wife and of his daughter.
“We need to be fighting climate change with stronger measures to achieve Canada’s 2030 emissions reduction target,” says Ferrari.
