Thursday, May 18, 2006

Tories Scrap EnerGuide for Homes Program

Here is the notice on the Natural Resources Canada web site:

The EnerGuide for Houses Retrofit Incentive program has been discontinued as of midnight May 12, 2006.

It seems that they didn't like the fact that the Energy Advisors (who performed the home audits) were talking to people about climate change. According to this letter to the editor by a former Energy Advisor:
"The first thing the new Conservative government did when they were elected was to tell us to stop talking to homeowners about climate change through the One Tonne Challenge. Our focus was to be on energy savings."

This was a great program. We had an audit done a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, because of the incentive structure we didn't qualify for much of a rebate. But it did give us a list of things we could do, and how much energy and money we'd save for each item (which we're hoping to get started on this year).

The program could certainly have been improved, but that doesn't warrant scrapping it! Unfortunately, it seems that anybody who mentions climate change as a serious issue is not popular with the Harper government.

NOTE: The NRCan site also says "Property owners who have had a pre-retrofit evaluation performed prior to this date can have a post-retrofit evaluation and still qualify for a grant until March 31, 2007." So, if you've had the audit and are planning renovations, get them done soon!

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