Similar but worse

In trying to differentiate their home-efficiency credit from the program they were eager to demolish last year, John Baird seems proud of the Cons' refusal to fund building audits:

He countered claims that the initiative is nothing more than a repackaging of the EnerGuide program, one of the former Liberal government's programs that was cancelled by the Conservatives.

"It's important to note under the old Liberal program, almost 50 cents of every dollar spent went to doing audits and administration," he said.

"But even worse than that, of those people who had the audits done, only 30 per cent of those actually went on to do renovations. Seventy per cent of the people didn't do anything, and nothing was done for the environment."

Now, that lack of uptake indeed sounds like a problem worth fixing - by tweaking the program to make sure that more EnerGuide participants followed through on the second step. But are the Cons really far enough out of touch with reality to think that their program will be more efficient by providing no means to determine which upgrades will be most effective in which homes?

(Elevated from the comments here.)