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Consumer carbon pricing—scrapped. Electric vehicle mandate—delayed. Oil and gas emissions cap—all but gone. The headlines suggest Canada’s climate ambition is in retreat. However, much of the climate action-enabling capital has already been locked and loaded, with an estimated nearly $100 billion worth of incentives—by our count—ready to be deployed between now and 2035 for clean-tech and climate programs and initiatives.1
As part of the Climate Action Report 2026, which will be released on January 13, we analyzed the various federal government’s climate policy and commitments over the decades.
For the Canadian Government Climate Sentiment we used OpenAI’s advanced reasoning models to curate and analyze contextual framing of climate and related topics to assess government resolve around climate.
Federal Budgets: Evolving climate narrative
Our research applied the analysis to federal government budgets across three main categories: narrative (references to climate trends and past actions), policy, commitments and plans signalling government intentions, and new funding announcements.
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The Trudeau years were packed with talk—and action. Climate talk hit its highest levels during the pandemic years. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government started strong with a number of climate focused funding announcements in its first federal budget in 2016 to about $6 billion, according to our count.2
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Climate funding has been frontloaded. Since 2016, cumulative budgeted climate-related spending has risen to $150 billion. Clean economy Investment Tax Credits of around $78 billion as initially announced are already in place and will support adoption of low-carbon technologies for another decade into the 2030s.3 Program spending, transfer payments and other tax expenditures accounted for another $70+ billion in financial support.4
We track climate related funding and expenditures announced in the budgets of the federal government and the four largest provincial governments (British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec). This includes announced plans towards climate- and environment-related initiatives focused on decarbonization, innovation energy efficiency, fuel switching, clean and low-carbon technology manufacturing and deployment, skills, research and planning. It also includes transfer payments, program spending, tax expenditures, and select public financing. Total expenditure amounts are equally spread over timeframe announced in the budgets. For select items expenditure amounts are distributed over the years as prescribed in the budgets.
This number only refers to data calculated from the 2016 federal budget. It’s based on our tracking of budgeted climate-related spending from the federal government and the four largest provinces.
Based on original announcements across federal budgets. Budget 2024 updates the total value to $93 billion, and PBO’s Long-Term Fiscal Cost of Major Eco-nomic Investment Tax Credits estimates the cost at $103 billion.
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