Energy efficiency could be Canada’s most cost-effective economic lever. Building efficiency into our existing infrastructure would cut our energy costs by over 60%, create hundreds of thousands of jobs, and deliver economic returns in all parts of the country faster than any other energy megaproject. The numbers make the case.
But let’s be honest: Energy efficiency is not sexy. It can be hard to get excited about doing things a little (or a lot) better, and hard to see how saving a kilowatt/hour here or there adds up to anything meaningful in the grand scheme. Politicians tend to prefer photogenic megaprojects: Oil pipelines and nuclear plants are easy to visualize, like ancient pyramids. Monuments.
At the moment, big-ticket energy megaprojects are having their national moment. Much of that conversation centres on energy supply: pipelines, LNG gas exports, and nuclear plants. What’s missing from that debate is the single investment that would make all of them more effective, deliver results in years rather than decades, and pay for itself almost immediately.
A national program for mass-scale energy efficiency will:
• Create up to two hundred thousand jobs for skilled trades
• Drive down electricity costs for Canadian families and businesses
• Boost Canadian energy-efficiency companies and scale up their operations
• Ensure resilience for vulnerable Canadians in heat waves and cold snaps
Innovations in Efficiency Have Already Saved You (a lot of) Money
Let’s start with two surprising statistics. First, recent modelling [pdf] by Stanford University shows that a full transition to clean energy would reduce Canada’s total energy consumption by more than 60%. That’s 60%, not six. This massive reduction is not because Canadians would use less, but because electric systems, particularly heat pumps for heating and cooling, waste so much less energy than combustion systems like oil or gas.
So we could meet much of our future energy demand without more risky and costly megaprojects. Canada has already demonstrated this at a smaller scale, and that’s the second stop-and-gawk stat that most of us outside the energy-nerd sphere aren’t aware of: Since 2000, residential energy use has decreased by one per cent since 2000, but because of population growth and increased consumption, it should have gone up by 37%, according to the federal government’s Spring 2026 Energy Fact Book.
The reason your bills haven’t gone up? Energy efficiency.
So there’s no question that energy efficiency innovations can do (and have already done) an incredible job of keeping household costs down. The public knows it: recent polling shows that 86% of Canadians support stronger energy-efficiency requirements in new construction, polling by Abacus Data and the Canadian Green Building Council found earlier this year.
Our friends at Efficiency Canada reinforce [pdf] the benefits from a different angle: Every dollar invested in energy efficiency produces $4 to $7 in GDP growth. That productivity multiplier is larger than virtually any other infrastructure investment category.
The question now is whether Canada is ready to treat energy-saving innovations as the nation-building priorities they are—putting money and policy behind the massive effort to shift our energy systems into the 21st century. Directly in our sights should be residential and commercial heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems.
This would be a megaproject of a different kind: a monument to smart decisions.
Upgrades and Retrofits Mean Local Canadian Jobs
Unlike a pipeline or a nuclear plant, energy efficiency programs can be implemented quickly and show results in one to two years using existing municipal, federal, and utility-led delivery infrastructure, writes Efficiency Canada. Almost all energy-efficiency products and services can be purchased from Canadian companies or firms manufacturing in Canada: smart thermostats, heat pump water heaters, carbon-sequestering insulation, heat-recovery ventilators and high-performance windows. Large-scale purchases of these innovations boosts domestic manufacturing, and their installation encourages and sustains skilled, local jobs.
Nearly two-thirds of Canada’s housing stock was built before 2000, according to Efficiency Canada, and there are hundreds of thousands of aging industrial, commercial, and institutional buildings that need efficiency updates. This is our challenge, and our opportunity.
There is, to be clear, a massive amount of work to be done, and if properly handled and incentivized with training, it will result in a windfall of jobs for the skilled trades. Canada’s Building Trades Unions (CBTU) estimate in their Jobs for Today report that retrofits to industrial, commercial, and institutional (ICI) buildings in the push towards net-zero between now and 2050 will result in 1.1 to 1.7 million job-years of employment for the construction trades alone.
This is the kind of job-creation story that resonates in every community in the country. The trades involved—electricians, HVAC technicians, insulators, carpenters, and pipefitters—exist in every community. So does the work.
In the broader economic view, efficiency is the connective tissue of a competitive Canadian economy. A country that uses less energy to produce the same output is a more competitive country, of greater interest to businesses, industry, employers, and trade partners. It’s also aligned with the innovative, electrified economy the world is racing towards today.
Ending Energy Poverty and Boosting Livability
Energy efficiency is also an equity issue. Low-income households spend a disproportionate share of income on energy, and they are also more vulnerable to extreme weather, both hot and cold. This makes them the biggest beneficiaries of efficiency gains—if programs are designed to reach them.
Residential retrofit programs and energy-efficient building codes for new homes standards ensure long-term affordability and resilience against heat waves and cold snaps. Whole-building upgrades can cut energy use by as much as 90%, dramatically reduce emissions, and improve living conditions for the Canadians inside.
Energy poverty is generally defined as spending more than 6% of after-tax income on energy, according to MIT’s Sloan School of Management website. By that definition, 1.9 million Canadian households face energy poverty, nearly 13%, write researchers from McGill and the University of Otago in New Zealand in the journal Energy Research and Social Science.
Efficiency Canada notes that federal energy efficiency programs aimed at low-income households not only reduce emissions—they lower bills and improve health outcomes. For that reason, Efficiency Canada has called for increasing funding for the Canada Greener Homes Affordability Program—which delivers retrofits at no cost to low- and median-income homeowners and tenants—from $800 million to at least $2 billion. This is the most direct investment Canada can make in eliminating energy poverty.
We’re Ready for This—We Just Need Leaders to Commit
The good news is that none of this requires inventing anything new. The technology exists, the supply chains are largely Canadian, the trades are already here, and the evidence for what works has been accumulating for decades. What energy efficiency needs is the same thing every other major national project needs: political commitment.
The grid Canada is building, the homes Canada is constructing, the businesses competing on global markets—all of them work better in an economy that treats efficiency not as a footnote to the energy conversation, but as its foundation. That’s not a small ambition. It’s just a smart one.
