Climate was biggest winner in 2024 budget, but climate funding gap persists

The federal government’s budget includes more than $52 billion in new funding over the next five years to tackle affordability, build more homes and enhance tax fairness. But in terms of its climate investments, it fell short. 

In particular, the budget, released Tuesday, failed to clarify how the government plans to make up for its $14-billion climate funding shortfall – the gap that Corporate Knights has identified between federal commitments and funds disbursed as of the end of fiscal year 2024.  

While the federal government didn’t trumpet climate as a priority in its main communications about the budget, new climate funding over the next 10 years was the single largest spending increase in the budget, with a total of $14.2 billion in new climate funding commitments through 2035, according to calculations by Corporate Knights.  Two-thirds of that climate funding is via clean-economy tax credits meant to expire by 2035, while most new spending items are fanned out over the next five years.

The federal government has upped the ante on its running tally of climate funding commitments from 2015 through 2035, from more than $120 billion in Budget 2023 to more than $160 billion in Budget 2024. (While $40 billion in climate spending has been announced this year, only $14.2 billion of that was new in this budget.) But Budget 2024 reissued the same drawn-out timeline for the five climate-investment tax credits that were announced last year. And most of the new spending is backloaded into future years, with less than $1 billion flowing in 2024 to close Canada’s climate funding gap.  

When it released the 2022 budget, the federal government estimated the overall climate funding gap in Canada to be up to $125 billion per year. Over the next 10 years, planned federal climate investment averages $15 billion per year, mostly in the form of investment tax credits. 

This leaves a gaping hole of up to $110 billion a year, which the federal government along with other levels of government and the private sector will need to fill if Canada is going to meet its climate commitments and seize upon clean-economy growth opportunities.  

The federal government expects investments and tax credits for carbon capture, utilization and storage and clean technology to receive royal assent by June (six months after they were introduced in Parliament). It also plans to introduce legislation for the other previously announced tax credits for clean hydrogen, clean technology manufacturing and clean electricity this fall. The government plans to introduce a sixth climate-investment tax credit announced in this budget, called the Electric Vehicle Supply Chain Investment Tax Credit, in 2025. 

The government now estimates that its suite of climate-investment tax credits is worth up to $93 billion, up from $80 billion in Budget 2023. Normalized to gross domestic product, this would translate to about $1 trillion in the U.S., on par with the higher end of clean-economy funding the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act will provide.  

Considering that the lion’s share of the federal government’s planned climate funding over the next decade is via tax credits, it is concerning that none of the government’s six clean-economy tax credits worth $93 billion has yet been passed into law. 

But the government’s current timeline indicates that the most recently announced tax credit for EV supply chains may not be passed into law until after the next federal election. As the United States showed with the Inflation Reduction Act (with total climate spending ranging from $369 billion to $1.2 trillion), targeting clean-economy growth through more straightforward tax rebates tied to actual clean-economy outputs (such as kilograms produced of clean hydrogen), it is possible to move much faster with larger sums of money.  

 The federal budget’s running tally of climate funding commitments through 2035 leapt by almost $40 billion over the past year to $160 billion.