British Columbia plans to reduce carbon pollution from buildings up to 64 per cent below 2007 levels by 2030. Central to that plan is a shift away from heating homes with natural gas, largely through incentive programs to upgrade buildings with heat pumps and more efficient windows and doors.
But according to a Glacier Media investigation, the cost to carry out green retrofits on many old buildings is deeply unaffordable, with provincial incentives falling woefully short.
It’s a problem B.C. is facing alongside Alberta, Ontario and Saskatchewan — all provinces that meet more than half of their heating needs with gas.
The gap in funding is especially acute for aging but still good mid-sized apartment buildings. Often described as the “missing middle” of the housing crisis, many buildings of this class offer community-oriented homes at a reasonable price.
But because of their age, ever rising construction and labour costs, and a lack of government funding, they often face insurmountable financial obstacles for residents looking to join what many hope is a green wave of retrofits.
Glacier Media profiled the experience of one such building in Vancouver’s West End, a 14-unit, three-storey walk-up built a few years after the Second World War.
Still in good condition and expected to last decades into the future, it is one of thousands of similar structures that will require retrofits across B.C.’s two largest urban areas. It’s experience offers a warning: unless the provincial government vastly expands incentive programs, aging buildings could blow a big hole in B.C.’s climate targets.
Here are five takeaways from what we learned.
1) Navigating B.C.’s green incentive programs is a bureaucratic nightmare
B.C. residents looking to get money to install a heat pump, upgrade their electric system, or otherwise retrofit their home face a patchwork of programs rolled out at different times across by utilities, and the B.C. and federal governments.
The result is a tangled web of program applications that even professionals in the sustainable building industry struggle to understand, Glacier Media has found.
The B.C. government says it is trying to streamline the process with the federal government, but has yet to do so.
2) Current retrofit incentive programs largely leave out mid-sized apartment buildings
Governments in Canada first started funding heat pump retrofits for people who live in single-family detached homes. Experts say part of the reason is simple logistics — a motivated owner who lives in her own building doesn’t have to negotiate with a strata.
However, the strategy has so far excluded people living in older mid-sized apartment buildings, where residents often have fewer resources and where emissions reach some of their highest intensities.
In the City of Victoria, for example, a post-war building boom led to the construction of 46 per cent of all rental buildings still standing. Of those, “all-gas, low-rise" buildings have the highest intensity of greenhouse gas emissions.
3) Green retrofits make life more comfortable and could save lives
In 2021, British Columbia was hit with a record heat wave, so hot it buckled sidewalks, killed billions of sea creatures and led to the death of at least 619 people.
Considered the deadliest extreme weather event in Canadian history, the heat wave was later found to have been made 100 times more likely due to climate change.
Public health authorities later found older people, living in unventilated homes with no cooling equipment were among the hardest hit. In a three-storey walk-up profiled by Glacier Media, one resident called her apartment “The Inferno” it was so hot.
This is one area where heat pumps offer a major advantage over traditional fossil fuel heating. In addition to nearly eliminating a building’s heating emissions, heat pumps also provide the life-saving benefits of mechanical cooling.
“Not having cooling in a building is no longer viable. People suffer in a building like ours,” said Mark Winston, the resident of one Vancouver building.
“But at the same time, I can't stomach the idea of throwing my neighbours out, my friends — making them find another place to live, because they live on a Canada Pension Plan and they can't afford to pay the steep price for electrification.”
4) It’s easier to re-install gas than upgrade to a heat pump
Many older buildings looking to switch out their gas furnaces for heat pumps first need to upgrade their electrical system to manage the electric load. But experts say the way utilities put those costs on to consumers still favours sticking with the status quo.
Gas utility FortisBC, for example, tends to spread out costs across its client base, whereas BC Hydro still requires individual buildings to cover most of the costs of electrical system upgrades, according to Jordan Fisher, a decarbonization consultant with Fresco.
That gives the gas utility an advantage, according to the consultant, whose company has worked across B.C. and Alberta.
“The reality is we still have an industry that’s geared toward using fossil fuels for heating and hot water,” Fisher said. “If you’re one of these unlucky buildings, you’re absorbing these massive costs.”
5) B.C.’s slow start on housing emissions still ahead of others
The B.C. government says it is working to close funding gaps for green retrofits of existing buildings. It did not provide any details on how and when that would happen.
Even with B.C.’s slow start, by 2030, it is still expected to outperform Saskatchewan, Ontario and Alberta — the three other provinces that get more than half their building energy needs from gas.
B.C.'s relative success through upgrading its building codes does not take away from the fact that there is not nearly enough government money available to meet its own targets, experts say.
According to a 2021 study from the climate think tank the Pembina Institute, the investment required to retrofit Canada's aging buildings is expected to cost governments $15 billion per year over the next two decades.
Until then, the cost to retrofit many “missing middle” buildings remains out of reach for many residents, leaving them with only one choice: stick with gas.
As Jessica McIlroy, a buildings manager at the Pembina Institute and a City of North Vancouver councillor, put it: “It's asking too much of individuals to take on that burden.”
