Canada faces a once-in-a-generation imperative to invest in clean energy, housing and resilient infrastructure. We estimate that the clean-energy transition alone could require roughly $2 trillion in investment over the coming decades, with about $1.2 trillion well suited to community-scale projects such as solar, retrofits and microgrids. At the same time, Canadians hold an estimated $4.2 trillion in mutual funds, stocks and exchange-traded funds. If even a small share of household savings were directed toward investments that deliver real benefits to Canadians, the impact would be enormous.
In early September, we held a roundtable with leading practitioners and advocates to examine what community finance has achieved, what continues to hold it back and what could help it reach scale. Here are six smart takeaways for putting more capital to work for Canadian communities.
Watch the full roundtable
Big idea: Community ownership changes how people experience major infrastructure.
Stephanie Pinnington, Director of growth and partnerships at Tapestry Community Capital
In Denmark, a great deal of wind development is community-owned: projects are held by farming communities and groups of 20 to 30 families. When I was there, I was struck by the contrast with Ontario, where wind projects have attracted highly visible opposition. Denmark had turbines everywhere, yet people were not protesting in the same way. The straightforward explanation was that local people were benefiting. The infrastructure changed the landscape, but it also gave residents a meaningful stake in something they could see as valuable and exciting. Community finance is powerful because it lets people participate economically in the projects that shape their places, rather than simply having projects imposed on them.
Big idea: Foundations should deploy their full balance sheets for public benefit.
Bill Young, Founder of Social Capital Partners
Canada’s foundations hold roughly $160 billion, yet the conventional model gives them a tax advantage in exchange for making charitable grants while allowing the overwhelming majority of their assets to be invested without regard to impact. That is a mismatch between public purpose and capital allocation. A useful policy signal would be to announce that, five years from now, the investment earnings of foundations that are not impact-invested will be taxed. Foundations could avoid that outcome by directing capital toward affordable housing, clean energy, community bonds and other impact investments. This approach would not require a new government outlay; it could generate revenue from non-compliant foundations while mobilizing substantial capital quickly. An institution should be defined by how it uses 95% of its assets, not merely by the 5% it grants away.
Big idea: Government support can normalize participation and unlock capital.
Chris Caners, Director of clean electrification at The Atmospheric Fund
New financial models require trust before they can attract broad participation. At SolarShare, people were being asked to contribute money to something unfamiliar, so the organization had to build trust gradually through its relationship with members. Government and regulatory support can extend that trust beyond any one issuer. When governments signal that investing in one’s community is a legitimate, supported and mainstream activity, people are more likely to see it as accessible rather than obscure or risky. Canadians already possess substantial investable capital. The opportunity is to give people practical, credible ways to direct some of it toward projects in their own backyards. When participation is easy, trusted and supported, community investment can become a normal part of building Canada’s infrastructure and resilience.
Big idea: Cooperative real estate can turn tenants into local asset owners
Don Iveson, Executive adviser for the Resilience Acceleration Lab at Co-operators
The Homestead Investment Co-operative in Edmonton offers a practical model for community ownership of commercial real estate. It is raising equity from people who use and value a deeply retrofitted building with long-term tenants and co-working space. The aim is not rent-to-own, but ownership that lets members effectively pay rent to themselves and fellow co-owners while sharing both risk and the incentive to grow the tenant community. More than 100 investors have contributed more than $2 million toward the purchase, and the model is intended to expand into a portfolio of buildings. Making the equity shares eligible for registered retirement savings plans and tax-free savings accounts has been particularly attractive. Community bonds could eventually complement conventional debt as leverage, creating another pathway for local capital to own local economic infrastructure.
Big idea: Utilities and regulators must become active partners in community finance.
Vicky Sharpe, Member of the board of directors at EfficiencyOne
Utilities need to be major participants in community-based energy and infrastructure investment, and regulators need to be more innovative. Many grid challenges are local and geographically specific. Those needs create an opportunity for place-based community solutions that reduce system costs and manage grid-edge risk. But projects often fail to proceed because regulatory treatment is uncertain, including whether investments can enter the utility rate base. Better-designed rules could allow utilities to support community projects where they provide measurable system value. Removing barriers to tools such as virtual net metering would also improve payback periods for households and communities, making investment propositions more compelling.
Big idea: Community investing should be easier than riskier alternatives.
Tim Nash, Founder of Good Investing
Even motivated and informed investors encounter psychological, technical and financial obstacles. The sector must translate good intentions into a frictionless user experience, rather than expecting individuals to overcome complex processes just to direct savings toward projects they support. Community and impact investments need to be as easy to buy within registered accounts as conventional products. The contrast with mainstream financial innovation is striking: Canadians can buy highly speculative products in registered accounts while struggling to hold a community investment there. Removing this mismatch would lower barriers, improve after-tax returns and make values-aligned investing a normal option rather than a specialist workaround.
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Read the transcript
This version has been edited and condensed.
Toby Heaps: Hello, I’m Toby Heaps with Corporate Knights. Welcome to our roundtable on community finance. We have gathered leading people in this space to explore what has worked and what would be needed to move from promising pilots to meaningful scale. I’ll begin with Stephanie Pinnington of Tapestry Capital.
Stephanie Pinnington: Thank you, Toby. I have worked with Tapestry for nearly a decade and was part of the team that launched it. Tapestry grew out of the Toronto Renewable Energy Co-operative, which had raised community capital for renewable-energy infrastructure.
My background is in renewable energy and environmental science. What interested us was whether community investment could become a scalable source of capital not only for energy projects but also for organizations working in affordable housing, arts and culture, recreation and other community needs. Tapestry has become a wraparound support organization that helps these groups access the capital required to deliver their missions.
An early experience working in Denmark shaped my thinking. Denmark’s response to the 1970s energy crisis included policies that encouraged community ownership of energy infrastructure. In the 1980s, many wind projects were owned by farming communities or groups of 20 to 30 families.
At the same time, Ontario was seeing significant opposition to wind energy. In Denmark, I wondered why turbines were not provoking the same response. The simple answer was that residents benefited from them. The infrastructure changed the landscape, but people could participate in it and share in its value. That is the power of allowing communities to invest in critical projects: people become participants and beneficiaries, rather than passive observers.
TH: Denmark’s community-energy model also helped create fertile conditions for national champions such as Ørsted and Vestas. There is an important connection between community participation, strong domestic markets and the development of globally competitive industries.
Bill Young, you have helped pioneer social and impact finance in Canada for more than two decades. What have you seen work?
Bill Young: I now represent the grumpy-old-man segment of the impact community. There have been successes worth celebrating, but none of us should be satisfied with where community finance is today or where it could have been.
I have two relevant perspectives. First, through Social Capital Partners, we supported employment-based social enterprises across Canada. We provided something akin to angel financing to start-up businesses where most employees came from disadvantaged populations. Some became strong examples of organizations that combine a social mission with a viable, investable business model.
We then moved toward a community-employment loan program because start-ups are hard, and social-enterprise start-ups can be especially hard. We lent to business owners on the condition that they implement community hiring programs. They received attractive financing, but the loan included a social covenant: they had to hire a specified number of employees through community-service agencies. We made 85 loans, were repaid successfully, and helped thousands of people facing barriers to employment find jobs.
A recurring goal was to prove a model and then hand it to institutions with real scale — banks, pension funds and others — rather than trying to scale everything ourselves. We have had less success in that handoff than I would have liked.
Through my foundation, which is 100% impact invested, I have also learned that a diversified, fully impact-oriented asset-allocation strategy is possible. There are community bonds, private-equity and venture-style impact funds, and public-equity options. A foundation can pursue its financial-return objectives while investing in vehicles designed to produce social and environmental benefits.
The difficulty is access. Many good opportunities are purpose-built and not delivered by mainstream wealth advisers. I have made more than 50 impact investments because I am inside the ecosystem. Most Canadians are not. If we want to tap even a small portion of the country’s trillions in investable assets, these opportunities must become much easier to find and use.
TH: Chris Caners, you led SolarShare, the largest issuer in the community-bond space to date. What was inspiring about that experience?
Chris Caners: Community finance lets Canadians invest in themselves. It is community-to-community lending that can build wealth in our own jurisdictions and country.
SolarShare emerged from the same ecosystem Stephanie described, and it would not have become what it was without Tapestry Community Capital. Despite real headwinds, SolarShare raised more than $100 million over about 15 years from roughly 2,000 members. In a co-operative, people are members rather than investors, but the underlying concept is similar.
That record is impressive, but it also shows how much potential remains untapped. We built trust over time. Asking people to give money to a new kind of renewable-energy investment was unfamiliar. By showing that the model worked and communicating consistently, we expanded membership. Still, we are only scratching the surface given the range of infrastructure Canadians need and the capital available to support it.
TH: Don Iveson, you bring perspectives from municipal leadership, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Co-operators and a recent community-finance raise of your own.
Don Iveson: The big unfinished issues from my time at Edmonton City Hall are housing, climate and adaptive governance. They all converge around finance, land use, risk, insurance, regulation and incentives. We need to build and retrofit in ways that reduce climate pollution while protecting communities from worsening physical climate risks.
CMHC is a financial Crown corporation, demonstrating that public institutions can use their balance sheets to de-risk projects and policy goals through tools such as loan guarantees and insurance. Those tools matter in housing but could also be relevant to community energy and retrofits.
We have an enormous building stock that needs energy-efficiency upgrades and fuel switching as electrification expands. But a transition investment must also be adaptive. For example, installing solar on a roof without ensuring adequate protection in a hail-prone area can be maladaptive. We need to connect transition and resilience, which too often proceed separately.
At Co-operators’ Resilience Acceleration Lab, we are working to mobilize institutional capital for resilience projects or blended-outcome projects: retrofits, district-energy systems and cooling infrastructure that both reduce emissions and protect people during severe heat. Climate-related losses are rising at roughly a 9% compound annual rate. If that continues, premiums rise and coverage erodes, creating early signs of systemic financial strain. We need to get ahead of that.
I also co-founded the Homestead Investment Co-operative in Edmonton. We are buying a deeply retrofitted commercial building with long-term tenants and co-working space. We have about 110 investors and have raised just over $2 million in equity. The model is not rent-to-own; it is ownership that lets members pay rent to themselves and fellow co-owners, share risk and benefit from a stronger tenant community.
We made the equity shares RRSP- and TFSA-eligible through Common Good Capital, which has been highly attractive to investors. That shows there are existing tools that can make community investments competitive in both return and tax treatment.
TH: Vicky Sharpe, you helped scale clean venture capital in Canada through Sustainable Development Technology Canada. What lessons should community finance take from that experience?
Vicky Sharpe: Capital deployment has to be integrated and holistic. There are too many disconnected efforts. We need to bring large capital together with players that can provide improved loan terms, lower costs and regulatory support, while also helping communities participate.
Trust is essential. Communities need a clear line of sight to personal benefit, and investment has to be easy. Education and communication matter.
At Ontario Hydro, I saw an entire pulp-and-paper town in Espanola undertake energy retrofits, with about 87% uptake. Ontario Hydro spent approximately $30 million, and the community contributed another roughly $2.5 million for complementary work. That kind of integrated approach shows what is possible.
At SDTC, we supported a housing project with a private developer that combined ground-source heat pumps, rooftop solar and other features that created long-term value for homeowners. These models can work, but public programs need to be better integrated with the practical knowledge that community-finance organizations have developed.
Utilities must be major players, and regulators need to become more innovative. If appropriate projects can be included in rate base, utilities will have a stronger incentive to support them. Grid-edge issues — such as EV charging in particular locations or pressure on transformers — are geographically specific. Community-scale solutions can reduce costs and manage those risks.
We also need to revisit barriers such as virtual net metering. In other jurisdictions, pre-approved participation frameworks allow households and communities to make fuller use of clean-energy investments. Canada needs to move beyond old ways of doing things.
TH: Tim Nash, you work directly with individual investors. Who is investing in community finance, and what are the barriers?
Tim Nash: I am a certified financial planner, so I see the retail-investor side. I have helped perhaps 20,000 people take some action with their money: joining a credit union, divesting from fossil fuels, or pursuing investments aligned with their values.
The people I work with are often already making intentional choices in their careers, volunteering, charitable giving and consumption. Considering their savings and investments is a logical next step. They want to do good while still meeting goals such as retirement, home ownership or family security.
One major positive is the track record. We now have impact funds, organizations and foundations with fully impact-oriented portfolios that have performed competitively. Investors are understandably reluctant to be the first through the gate, but community and impact investments are increasingly tried and tested.
Clients generally have three questions. First: what can I invest in? There is a large information gap around products, minimum investments and risk levels. Second: how much should I invest? Diversification matters; most people should not put all their money into community bonds. Third: how do I actually do it? This remains a major problem.
We have made many financial activities extremely easy. Someone can quickly make a speculative sports bet or buy a leveraged cryptocurrency ETF in an RRSP. Yet buying a community bond can still involve psychological, technical and financial barriers.
Registered accounts are particularly important. It was briefly easier to hold certain impact investments in self-directed RRSPs and TFSAs, but that door largely closed. When investors have unused registered-account room but must hold a community investment outside it, they perceive it as less safe — even though the account type does not determine the investment’s underlying risk. They may also face tax costs that reduce already modest or concessionary returns. If I had one priority, it would be to make it straightforward to buy suitable impact investments within registered accounts.
TH: Stephanie, what policy changes could materially alter the landscape?
SP: Tapestry helped establish the Coalition for Community Capital, now a network of 30 organizations advancing national policy reforms. Three priorities stand out.
First, community-investment vehicles need to be easier to hold in registered accounts. That is practical and would make a substantial difference.
Second, Canada should consider a tax credit for qualifying community investments. Investors are helping build critical social and environmental infrastructure, including affordable housing and community-owned energy. Government can use tax policy to de-risk and incentivize private capital. There are Canadian precedents for incentives crowding in investment.
Third, loss deductibility could help acknowledge that these investments carry risk, as all investments do. Together, these tools could make community finance easier and more mainstream. Our modelling suggests they can pay for themselves rather than impose a net cost on government.
TH: Tax credits for retail investments can raise concerns about misuse. What would make this different?
SP: There needs to be a tight framework. We would want an accreditation system for organizations raising capital in this way, but it must not be overly burdensome. The organizations involved are trying to build housing and energy infrastructure, not become capital-markets specialists.
Awareness is also vital. Policy approval is only a first step. For a program to succeed, Canadians need to know it exists and understand how to use it. The aim should be for a person to be able to put 1% of their portfolio into a well-designed community-investment opportunity as easily as they make other investment decisions.
CC: I agree. The policy measures Stephanie described are important not only financially, but because they build trust. Government signals that community investment is legitimate, useful and desired. That helps people see it as a normal way to invest in their own backyards rather than as an obscure niche.
Ontario’s renewable-energy cooperative ecosystem grew because the province created a supportive framework. Federal action can similarly create the conditions for success. Community finance needs to be accessible, smooth and trusted.
DI: Favourable tax treatment could also mobilize institutional capital. If an insurer invests in projects that reduce future physical climate risk, that can be a two-for-one benefit. Pension funds with impact mandates could also participate if products were clearly labelled and supported by a credible impact taxonomy.
Municipalities are another major opportunity. Nearly everything they borrow for — district energy, building retrofits and affordable housing — has measurable impact. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities has discussed tax-exempt municipal bonds, as exist in the United States. A carefully bounded class of investments supporting sustainability, resilience, affordability or food systems could receive preferential tax treatment. That would lower capital costs and broaden participation.
BY: I support all of that, but I do not believe this will truly scale until mainstream wealth advisers can offer these products. People should be able to invest in SolarShare-type opportunities through TD, RBC or any large institution. They should not need to find a specialist adviser or navigate a niche ecosystem.
Public policy should press the major banks to integrate community-finance and impact products into their core wealth-management and investment-banking operations, rather than treating social benefit as a philanthropic sideline. Canada’s financial system is highly concentrated. Social Capital Partners has documented how that structure leaves Canada behind comparable countries in lending to small and medium-sized enterprises. The same structural problem affects community finance.
We need a financial ecosystem that includes purpose-built institutions, credit unions and cooperatives, alongside mainstream banks. Ideas akin to a Canadian Community Reinvestment Act — or an Opportunity Finance Act — could encourage capital to reach communities that conventional financial institutions overlook.
I would also consider a different kind of incentive: announce that, five years from now, foundations will pay tax on investment earnings unless their assets are invested for impact. Canada has about $160 billion in foundation assets. Foundations receive major tax benefits but generally need to distribute only a small portion annually to charity while the rest can be invested without regard to mission. We should judge an institution partly by what it does with 95% of its assets, not only by what it grants with 5%. That policy would mobilize capital without costing government money; it could generate revenue from foundations that choose not to adapt.
VS: The overarching priority is to make Canada’s federation work more efficiently. We need to reduce barriers across provincial securities regimes, prospectus exemptions, registration rules and ongoing disclosure requirements. Those requirements can make it difficult for smaller organizations to raise capital even when there is demand.
The model is clear: banks, pension funds and foundations should partner with communities, backstop some risk, educate investors and make participation easier. Tax incentives can help, but the essential task is removing friction so people can make decisions and act on them. We know what many of the barriers are. We need to stop merely identifying them and start fixing them.
TH: That is a strong note to close on. Community finance has demonstrated that Canadians will invest in projects that improve their communities. The next task is to make those investments visible, trusted, tax-effective and accessible through the financial institutions people already use.
Thank you all for your ideas and for the work you have done to build this field. The opportunity is to move from hundreds or thousands of participants to millions of Canadians helping finance a stronger, more resilient and more locally owned economy.
