Canada's 2009 Budget: A Disappointment for Renewables
Call the Conservative’s Economic Action Plan blue, red, yellow or purple, but whatever you do, do not call it green…
When releasing the federal budget yesterday afternoon, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty summarized his government’s action plan as follows:
“With this stimulus plan, Canada will emerge from this recession with a more modern and greener infrastructure, a more skilled labour force, lower taxes and a more competitive economy.”
While the Budget does contain something in the neighbourhood of $3-billion in spending to address the environment, it didn’t do nearly enough to lay the groundwork for a new green economy.
The Budget includes a $1-billion fund aimed at developing clean technologies over the next five years and another program worth $1-billion to help pay for environmentally sustainable infrastructure.
Other “green-ish” highlights of the Budget include $300-million to expand an existing home retrofit program that gives grants for improvements to energy efficiency and $10-million to better monitor water and air quality and greenhouse gas emissions. Also, apparently the $292-million to help develop the CANDU nuclear reactor and operate the Chalk River facility (which, incidentally, just experienced a leak in early December) is a green initiative...??
With all the exciting new and emerging clean and renewable energy sources and businesses in Canada (many of which we’ve written about here on Megawatt), it’s disappointing that the Conservatives focussed narrowly on nuclear energy and carbon sequestration and didn’t seize this chance to set Canada up to be a leader in the green and renewable energy sector. The government has clearly drawn a line in the (oil)sands and shown Canadians, and the world, where its priorities do and don’t lie.
CanWEA weighed in yesterday, saying that it was disappointed with the Budget and stating that the lack of expansion of the government’s ecoENERGY for Renewable Power Program means that incentives for wind and other renewable energy will run out before the end of the next fiscal year and that new projects will suffer a loss of financial support as a result. Programs like ecoENERGY create opportunities and jobs for green-energy developers and spur on our economy. The government’s decision not to allocate funds in Budget 2009 to the ecoENERGY program is discouraging, especially since Obama just renewed a similar U.S. program for three years.
Unfortunately, this was one of the best opportunities we’ve had yet to set Canada up with the foundation for a vibrant, green economy that would be good news for citizens, the environment and business and the government didn't do as much as it could have or as much as the green and renewable industries had hoped. However, over time and as Canadians demand more, hopefully the government will make greener decisions in the future.
