Contractor rushing to meet cutoff for Green ON funding
Energy-efficient windows, heat pumps, insulation must be installed by October
The shuttering of the Green Ontario Fund by the incoming Progressive Conservative government has left at least one Ottawa contractor with a warehouse full of energyefficient windows and under intense pressure to get them installed by the end of October.
If Brian Bailey, the owner of window, door and renovation company Best Can, isn’t able to meet that deadline, his customers risk missing out on the opportunity to recoup up to $500 per window, to a maximum of $5,000 per home — as he’d advertised.
When the previous provincial Liberal government announced the Green ON window rebate program last December, “we were very excited about it. We spent money on advertising about it. We were all systems go,” Bailey recalled.
Bailey sent his employees for the necessary training to get certified as Green ON contractors.
The “unbelievable window of opportunity” his website touted brought a rush of business. Customers started buying the highperformance windows required for a Green ON rebate, “and your warehouse is filling up, and then you’ve got to rent containers because your warehouse is so full,” Bailey described.
“We always figured that whoever bought would be grandfathered in.”
Last Tuesday he discovered that wouldn’t be the case.
That’s when the Green Ontario Fund’s website as it existed was taken down and replaced by a notice listing the closure of various Green ON programs, including the rebates for various home-- efficiency upgrades.
Funded by Ontario’s carbon-pricing system — which Premier Doug Ford has also pledged to cancel — the Green Ontario Fund is a nonprofit provincial agency the former Liberal government paid $377 million to establish with the stated goal of helping homes and businesses reduce energy costs.
“The people of Ontario gave Doug Ford and the Ontario PC Party a clear mandate to cancel Kathleen Wynne’s cap-and-trade carbon tax and the slush fund that was paid for by the carbon tax,” said PC spokesperson Simon Jefferies in an emailed statement.
The new Green ON webpage declared the fund’s rebates would be honoured if applicants had a signed work agreement with a participating contractor who could finish the work by Aug. 31, and submit the rebate application by Sept. 30. (The Green ON-eligible windows may have been purchased months ago, but a rebate is only issued to the applicant after the fund receives proof the windows were installed to standard.)
When his customers got wind of the program’s closure, “my phone was ringing off the hook,” Bailey recalled. “It would have been a tremendous amount of work, and we would have had to work around the clock and on weekends. It would have been non-stop.”
The Progressive Conservatives then announced that the work and rebate application submissions deadlines would both be extended two months.
Bailey, for one, was grateful. “I’ve got to give a lot of credit, I really, really do, to Doug Ford for listening to the outcry of what was going on,” he said.
He’s fairly confident he can get the work done by the extended deadline, but he’d like to see the government honour all pre-cancellation enrolments for GreenON window rebates, regardless of when they can get the windows installed and final paperwork submitted.
When asked for program enrolment numbers, a spokesperson for the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change directed the request to the premier’s office.
Casey Grey, another entrepreneur who leveraged GreenON rebates for his customers, was comparatively unfazed by their cancellation. His employees at the Conscious Builder undertook the mandatory GreenON contractor certification process in response to requests from clients they already had, rather than from a desire to attract new business, Grey said.
“I’m not going to build my business on something that could be taken away in the next year.”
Fewer than 10 clients took advantage of GreenON rebates in their contracts with the Conscious Builder. Only one is potentially affected by the closing date announced last week but was planning to go forward with a new air-source heat pump regardless, according to Grey.
Frequently, it’s this kind of customer that have been attracted by decades of rebate programs in same vein as GreenON, according to Warren Mabee, director of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen’s University — the ones who were going to do the renovation anyways, rebate or no rebate.
But things can also go wrong if the rebates are too enticing. “If you throw a lot of money at it, you distort the market completely, and people do things that might not be rational otherwise,” Mabee said.
While he acknowledged it’s hard to judge the success of the fledging GreenON rebate programs, he thinks some may have fallen into the overly-generous category.
In addition to $5,000 for windows, the fund offered the chance to recoup up to $7,200 for insulation and $20,000 for ground-source heat pumps, among other rebates.
For industry, consumers and climate-change targets, “I think that there is a middle ground,” Mabee said: small rebates, which can be maintained for longer, and spread among more people.
“If you aim those subsidies right, you do end up (enticing ) some people that wouldn’t enter the market otherwise, and that is a net benefit for us.”