On March 28, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland unveiled the 2023 federal budget, hailing it as a “historic opportunity.” The budget was widely anticipated to include major green energy incentives in response to President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). It delivered on this front, providing Can$20.9 billion over six years bundled in a series of tax credits for clean electricity, clean hydrogen, and clean technology manufacturing. However, the overall budget is a mixed bag, with its climate initiatives serving as a proxy for other half measures contained therein. On matters of importance for working people — such as housing and public sector wages — the budget appears to be a total failure.

Environmentalist organizations, for starters, were ambivalent about the climate plans outlined in the budget. Keith Stewart, energy strategist for Greenpeace Canada, said the group “welcomes the unprecedented federal investments in greening the grid, which will be critical as we phase out fossil fuels by replacing them with electricity from renewable energy sources.” However, he cautioned, the budget outlines continued plans to subsidize oil and gas companies, sending mixed messages. “No money in the world could convince oil companies to become good actors on climate change, so it would be far more effective to simply regulate their emissions and invest scarce public funds into accelerating investments in efficiency and electrification,” Stewart added.

Equiterre, the environmentalist NGO where Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault worked before he entered politics, criticized the budget’s dependence on unproven carbon and storage technology, which allows oil and gas companies to continue production unabated. Equiterre’s director of government relations Marc-André Viau said: