EDITORIAL: Three myths about the 'clean economy'

Second, that Canada would hit the government’s industrial greenhouse gas emission reduction targets. Third, that most Canadian households would be financially better off as a result. To the contrary, a recent study by the fiscally conservative Fraser Institute estimates that over the past decade, the federal, Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and B.C. governments have spent or foregone revenues of $158 billion in inflation-adjusted 2024 dollars to create a mere 68,000 “clean energy” jobs. That’s an estimated cost of $2.3 million per job. “Governments, activists and special interests groups have been making a lot of claims about the opportunities of a clean economic transition, but after a decade of policy interventions and more than $150 billion in taxpayers’ money, the results are underwhelming,” said Elmira Aliakbari, co-author of the study titled The Fiscal Cost of Canada’s Low-Carbon Economy. A second Fraser Institute study – Sizing Canada’s Clean Economy – concluded that after almost a decade of federal and provincial governments funnelling billions of dollars into the “clean economy” from 2014 to 2023, its percentage of Canada’s total economy of $3.3 trillion barely moved from 3.1% of GDP to 3.6%.