Canada is building 500,000 affordable homes. Let’s make sure they’re also climate-friendly.

We have a time-sensitive opportunity to convince the Carney government to ensure that the millions of new homes they’re promised to build are also climate-friendly and equipped for the future.

Prime Minister Carney has promised to create a new federal agency, Build Canada Homes, to develop much-needed affordable housing at speed and scale, and the government has invited input into the criteria for investment by this Friday, August 29th.

This is a big opportunity to ensure that new homes built with our tax dollars are equipped with electric heat pumps rather than polluting gas or oil furnaces – which is the number one way to cut climate pollution from buildings while making them safer and more affordable.

Buildings are the third biggest source of climate pollution in Canada (after oil & gas and transportation), and transforming our building supply is a tangible action that we can take now to cut this pollution while making our homes safer, cooler and more affordable into the future.

Will you take 5 minutes and send a message to decision-makers calling on them to ensure all new housing is built with climate-friendly electric heat pumps?

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Honourable Minister

Gregor

Robertson

Housing and Infrastructure

Dear Prime Minister Carney and Honourable Minister Robertson,

I’m so glad to see your government taking on the massive and much-needed challenge of building hundreds of thousands of new affordable homes, and I appreciate the opportunity to give feedback on the Build Canada Homes Market Sounding Guide.

First of all, thank you for mentioning low carbon construction and efficient design in the ‘innovation’ investment criteria. I’m supportive of their inclusion and I hope they both remain part of the criteria. However, as it’s currently written, the criteria is very broad and vague, and doesn’t mention any specific low carbon technologies.

Right now you’re missing a real opportunity to rapidly scale up the adoption of electric heat pumps by requiring them in all projects supported by Build Canada Homes.

Electric heat pumps:
- provide cooling;
- are several times more efficient than gas or oil heaters; 
- cost the same as other systems to install;
- clean the indoor air when it’s smoky outside because of wildfires or other pollution; and
- are a crucial part of reducing the climate pollution from buildings – one of Canada’s most polluting sectors.

They also work effectively in climates as cold as -25c, and especially when paired with a backup energy storage technology, they can work well across all parts of Canada.

Build Canada Homes could easily add a requirement to include electric heat pumps or other non-emitting heating sources (like geothermal systems) in all new homes built with government support. Not only would this modernize our housing stock with the best technology (and avoid expensive and cumbersome retrofits down the road), but it would also encourage the construction industry to step into the future.

At a time when wildfires are once again engulfing our forests from coast to coast and prompting the evacuation of tens of thousands of people, we can’t forget our obligation to our children to take action now to limit the devastating impacts of climate change before it’s too late. In this vein, we have many hard and expensive decisions ahead of us – but building homes right the first time isn’t one of them.

I’m calling on you to make the installation of electric heat pumps or other non-emitting heating sources a requirement in the Build Canada Homes investment criteria.

Thank you,

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{user_data~Zip or Postal Code}

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