There’s nothing else like it in Canada.

Since the early 1970s, Manitoba’s provincial government has covered a full 50 per cent of the operating costs for Winnipeg’s public transit system. That means that half of the money required to make transit actually run — salaries and benefits, maintenance, fuel, bus parts — is guaranteed by the province.

“It actually gets at what transit really is,” Joseph Kornelsen, chair of Function Transit Winnipeg, told DeSmog Canada about the arrangement. “Emphasizing that kind of funding is actually how other jurisdictions should be doing it.”

But the setup is almost certainly about to end with the passage of Bill 36 by Manitoba’s Progressive Conservative government.

To be sure, Winnipeg will continue to receive funding from the province. But none of it will be specifically earmarked for transit, leading some transit advocates to express concern that routes and frequency of service could diminish significantly.

In short: Manitoba is about to join the rest of Canada with uneven, ad-hoc and underwhelming transit funding.

Higher Levels of Government Fund Capital, Not Operating Spending

It’s not exactly that federal and provincial governments don’t fund public transit.

Rather, it’s that they almost exclusively focus on capital funding. That means paying for the material infrastructure of transit: light rail transit lines, subway tracks, street cars, bridges.

“Oftentimes, we focus heavily on the capital and getting new projects built,” said Matti Siemiatycki, geography and planning professor at the University of Toronto, in an interview with DeSmog Canada. “I would say there’s a political favouritism to projects where you can cut a ribbon. That tends to be new, large-scale infrastructure investments.”

For instance, the federal government announced $20.1 billion over 11 years for public transit projects in its March budget. It was a gargantuan figure relative to previous commitments.

Patrick Leclerc, president and CEO of the Canadian Urban Transit Association, described it in an interview with DeSmog Canada as “unprecedented,” noting that “it’s never been better than it is today and it will be in the coming years.”

But it’s all capital funding: money allocated for only building stuff, not actually running it.

Similarly, transit quality is often evaluated in a way that emphasizes infrastructure investments (such as the length of transit lines) over metrics like frequency of service or percentage of people who use a certain type of transportation.

“When you look at the operating funding, this is where it’s more difficult,” Leclerc said.

“You can buy as many buses as you want and a new maintenance facility. But if you cannot increase the number of service hours, or hire more drivers because you don’t have the operating budget then you won’t be able to expand service, you won’t be able to offer more frequency.”

Here’s Why #Canadian Cities Struggle to Pay for Public #Transit https://t.co/x2p3zEhMv7 #publictransit #Voices4Transit #cdnpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) October 24, 2017

Municipalities Forced to Rely Heavily on Unpopular Property Tax

That’s why the esoteric budget bill in Manitoba is a bit of a flashpoint for the conversation in Canada.

It’s one thing to build transit tracks and lines. It’s quite another to make sure they’re properly operated and maintained.

For example, a hot topic among transit geeks is “public-private partnerships” or P3s, in which the private sector finances the construction of a project. But as Siemiatycki pointed out, financing is only where the money comes from upfront.

Funding is how the money is paid back. Cities are almost always often left out to dry on that front, relying on a combination of fares and municipal funding.

“One of the ironies about transit is even when the federal or provincial government provides significant capital dollars to help a municipality build new transit, that creates additional long-term financial liabilities for that municipality that they then have to raise additional revenue to pay for,” he said.

Unfortunately, cities in Canada exist in a fiscal straightjacket of sorts, with a heavy reliance on property taxes: a highly visible and politically difficult form of revenue generation.

Municipalities also have the least ability of any level of government to borrow money as they can’t run deficits or administer less conspicuous forms of taxes on residents. In addition, cities only receive around eight cents of every tax dollar, but own about half of the country’s public capital stock.

That can result in a flatlining or declining of transit ridership year over year.

Stefan Kipfer, professor of environmental studies at York University, told DeSmog Canada that most major cities in the country have a transit ridership of between 20 and 25 per cent.

In turn, that can mean transit becomes a low-priority issue for politicians to seriously address.

“If you’re a politician in most jurisdictions, the vast majority of your constituents don’t use public transit on a regular basis,” he said. “We’ve got a big problem in terms of building a constituency that actually starts to have an impact on the national scale.”

Wide Range of Options Available to Help Fix Situation

With that said, experts have offered up some clear solutions to fix the transit crisis.

Higher levels of government — in a better position to borrow and raise revenue — could provide predictable and long-term funding to help cover operating costs (revenue from carbon pricing would likely help with that). Or the federal Liberals might reverse their controversial decision to cancel the transit tax credit, which was claimed by almost two million people in 2014 and helped to boost ridership in Toronto by 2.3 per cent.

Leclerc added there’s an incredibly wide range of alternative funding models that could be introduced: road pricing for cars, special taxation within a certain transit hub, allowing for an employer-provided and tax-exempt transit benefit.

“There’s no magic bullet to this,” Siemiatycki said. “It just requires very careful attention and ongoing diligence. Putting regulatory frameworks in place like having an asset management plan would be one, and in some cases using public-private partnerships to lock in long-term maintenance arrangements.”

‘It’s Important to Me As A Financial Issue for My Future’

The ideas are clearly out there. What’s missing is the sheer political will, combined with the recognition that public transit serves a vital role in cutting greenhouse gas emissions and creating a more socially equitable society.

Of course, it’s a complicated conversation in a federation like Canada. Each level of government wants to keep taxes and expenses low. But the “clean energy revolution” appears to offer up an opportunity to rethink how governments coordinate and fund transportation. Why shouldn’t that apply to public transit?

“It’s important to me as a financial issue for my future,” concluded Kornelsen of Functional Transit Winnipeg. “I want a city that I can be proud of and one that’s not going to break my bank account.”

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Essential information on Arctic climate change, ozone depletion and pollution reaching the Arctic from B.C.’s recent forest fires will be lost unless the federal government comes through with funding to save Canada’s unique high Arctic research station.

After years of funding cuts to scientific and climate change programs under the Conservatives, the Liberal government’s emphasis on making science-based decisions in response to climate change was a welcome relief to researchers, but some are now shocked that crucial projects are about to be lost because the 2017 budget did not renew the five-year Climate Change and Atmospheric Research (CCAR) funding which expires this year.

Unless the Trudeau government comes up with approximately $7-million a year, six projects, including the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) on Ellesmere Island, will close down next year. A seventh — Canadian Sea Ice and Snow Evolution Network — will shut down the following year.

The projects, in addition to providing vital information about climate and atmosphere, serve as training grounds for up-and-coming researchers at Canadian universities.

If funding is not renewed it will mean gaps in data that has been painstakingly collected over the last 12 years and will also mean an exodus of young scientists, predicted James Drummond, PEARL principal investigator.

“I can’t imagine how many researchers will be looking for positions in other countries. This would dislocate research programs and mean we can’t progress with the knowledge we have been working on. The time sequence of measurements will be lost,” Drummond said.

In addition to PEARL, other threatened projects are the Network on Climate and Aerosols, Canadian Arctic GEOTRACES Program, Ventilation, Interactions and Transports Across the Labrador Sea (VITALS), Canadian Network for Regional Climate and Weather Processes and the Changing Cold Regions Network.

PEARL has operated in Nunavut, about 1,100 kilometres from the North Pole, since 2005 and research has focused on ozone gaps and pollution and, most importantly, climate in the high Arctic, where changes are taking place at a much faster rate than in the south.

Lab team members out for a hike near the PEARL research centre in Nunavut. Photo: Dan Weaver via CREATE ArcticScience

“We are one of very few stations in the high Arctic. We are right at the top of Canada. Some maps cut off before they get to us,” Drummond said.

“We are also one of the very few stations operating 365 days a year… I think the government needs to get a grip on this and realize how important it is,” he said.

Without funding, mothballing plans will get underway early next year and the operation is already being affected as it is not known whether new equipment should be purchased and shipped up to the station, Drummond said.

It is not the first time PEARL has faced such a crisis. Mothballing plans were underway in 2012 when the Harper government cut the previous program, the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Services. However, at the last minute, after an outcry by scientists and the public, the CCAR program was announced.

Stable funding is needed in order to do good research, said Drummond, adding that he is an optimist and believes that the Trudeau government will come through with the cash once the importance of the programs is understood.

The budget set aside $73.5-million over five years to set up a Canadian centre for climate services, but that funding does not appear to support networks funded by CCAR.

In an emailed statement, in answer to questions from DeSmog Canada, Minister of Science Kirsty Duncan said the Liberal government is doing more to combat climate change than any other government in history.

“While the CCAR program has reached the end of its funding cycle, officials are working with researchers to find other avenues of support, including through the approximately $50-million in climate change research that the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council funds annually,” she wrote.

“As a researcher who led an expedition to the Arctic, I know we need a thoughtful, comprehensive approach to Arctic research — one that includes indigenous voices and the role of traditional knowledge. I am working to deliver on this ambitious vision,” Duncan said.

But time is running out, according to Duncan and she is pleased that PEARL is now getting a boost from the group Evidence for Democracy, which has launched a petition asking Duncan to reinstate stable funding.

Key Arctic Research Station Set to Close As Liberal Governments Cuts Funding https://t.co/p11hO6jVJ9 #PEARL @E4Dca @CREATEArcticSci #cdnsci

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 20, 2017

“With the impacts of our changing climate already being felt in Canada and around the world, investing in climate science is a necessary part of ensuring that our decisions and actions around climate change mitigation and adaptation are based on up-to-date science and evidence,” says the preamble to the petition.

Katie Gibbs, Evidence for Democracy executive director, said the group was surprised at the funding cuts.

“(The projects) seem to fit very well with the government’s stated priorities acting on climate change according to science. That’s exactly what this research does,” she said.

The funding appears to have fallen through the cracks and government initially seemed to be taken by surprise. However, months after it was brought to their attention, no solution has been presented, so it is necessary to let Canadians know what is being lost, Gibbs said.

The petition was launched Friday and already has over 1,500 signatures, including many scientists, she said.

“I have been in touch with a number of the principal investigators of the networks that are going to have their funding cut and they are very alarmed… We are losing a whole funding stream dedicated to climate research and it doesn’t seem there is any other funding to replace that,” she said.

In the grand scheme of federal government finances, $7-million annually is a relatively small amount to spend on unique and important research, Gibbs said.

“Over 300 students have been trained at these research networks over the past five years of this grant, so it’s not only paying for the current professors, it is also necessary for training the next generation of climate scientists,” she said.

Image: Researchers at PEARL. Photo: Dan Weaver via CREATE ArcticScience

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The University of Alberta and TransAlta, a major Alberta utility company and coal producer, struck an agreement for the company to pay the university $54,000 to research the health impacts of coal-fired power plants near Edmonton, according to documents obtained by DeSmog Canada.

When TransAlta published the research — a study entitled Investigation of Fine Particulate Matter Characteristics and Sources in Edmonton, Alberta — on its website last spring the company initially stated it had sponsored the work, co-authored by Warren Kindzierski and fellow University of Alberta professor Aynul Bari.

But that sponsorship disclaimer was abruptly scrubbed from the company’s website.

Documents released to DeSmog Canada through Freedom of Information legislation show TransAlta did indeed enter into a sponsorship agreement with the University of Alberta that provided Kindzierski, as principle investigator, $54,000 to conduct the research.

TransAlta says that although it did provide the funds to the university, the university did not use the funds to support Kindzierski’s research.

“They kept our funds but did not use them towards the study, they redirected them elsewhere,” Stacy Hatcher, spokesperson for TransAlta, told DeSmog Canada.

Hatcher said because TransAlta did provide the funds to the university “we erred on the side of being completely transparent and stating up front that we had paid for it as that had been the offer.”

“It was a mistake on our part not to circle back and correct the news story once we learned the university did not accept the funding,” she added.

The undocumented movement of industry money on university campuses is nothing new.

Private sponsorship agreements, gifts, grants and donations have all been used as ways to financially support research, resulting in what some critics have identified as a problematic purchase of academic credibility by corporations.

In this instance, the question comes down to whether and how private funds are influencing public conversations about coal-fired power generation in Alberta.

Industry-Friendly Study Used to Fight Coal Phase-Out

The study, made available to the public on TransAlta’s site in late 2015, bears the branding of the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health and concludes the high number of coal-fired power plants near the city of Edmonton doesn’t negatively impact the health of local residents.

The research has been used by TransAlta to push for an alternative to the Alberta government’s plan to phase-out coal by 2030 (which is no small feat: Alberta uses more coal for power production than all other Canadian provinces combined).

In its submission to the Alberta Climate Change Advisory Panel TransAlta referred to the research as “commissioned independent work through the University of Alberta” that was done “in response to continued unsubstantiated claims that coal-fired generation was a major contributor to Edmonton’s air quality events, and a rationale for the need to accelerate the retirement of coal units.”

“You will see that the research shows minimal airshed impacts from operation of coal-fired generation to the west,” the submission read.

The research has also been used by vocal coal advocates, such as Robin Campbell, president of the Canadian Association of Coal, to argue against a coal phase-out.

TransAlta owns and operates Canada’s largest surface strip coal mine, the Highvale Mine. The 12,600 hectare coal mine, managed by TransAlta’s wholly-owned subsidiary Sunhills Mining, produces 13 million tonnes of thermal grade coal each year which is used to power three of TransAlta’s power stations. Since 2006, TransAlta stopped mining operations at two additional coal mines and as a result now purchases coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana.

TransAlta (burns coal and) paid U of A to conduct a health study (about coal). But there’s no connection, OK? https://t.co/SimArg2eOH #ableg

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) November 8, 2016

Corporate Sponsorship Agreements Commonplace

Sponsorship agreements between the University of Alberta and TransAlta are commonplace, Hatcher said: “TransAlta has a relationship with the university, and we have provided non-directed funding in the past for research and academic projects.”

Documents released to DeSmog Canada confirm this, showing TransAlta provided at least another $175,000 to the university between 2013 and 2015 through additional sponsorship arrangements.

However, the retroactive decision to ‘redirect’ the Kindzierski study funds raises questions about transparency and accountability.

The university’s Research Services Office, which appears as a signatory on the TransAlta sponsorship agreement, said it could not provide comment or release information regarding sponsorships.

A woman at the Research Services Office said simply, “We would not release any information to you of any kind” and recommended all inquiries be directed to the principle investigator: Kindzierski.

“No funds were expended [on that study],” Kindzierski told DeSmog Canada. “They were used after the study was done to support a post doctorate RA (research assistant) on other research activities.”

“Are you familiar with soft dollar funded positions? Why don’t you go ahead and learn about that?” Kindzierski said during a phone interview.

‘Soft money’ positions at universities are those funded by grants, awards and other forms of sponsorship that are usually impermanent and must be regularly sought after through application processes. Alternately, ‘hard money’ positions usually refer to tenure-track positions that are funded by tuition, endowments, government funding and philanthropy.

“All faculties, all programs, all departments at all universities have soft dollar funded positions, totally above board and everything,” he added.

Kindzierski said the research, which was published online without going through a full peer-reviewed process, has since been peer-reviewed, accepted and published at three “high-quality impact journals.”

When asked which journals the research appeared in, he responded, “I can name them but I have no desire to give them to you.”

“Go search. That’s good homework for you.”

“You’re no different than a reporter that is too lazy to find this stuff themselves,” Kindzierski said during the interview.

A similar paper by Kindzierski recently appeared in the journal Environmental Pollution, a peer-reviewed publication, but DeSmog Canada was unable to find the exact study in question published anywhere other than TransAlta’s website.

Documentation released to DeSmog Canada via Freedom of Information shows Kindzierski sent TransAlta a proposal of the study before research was undertaken. Records show this proposal was sent to Don Wharton, TransAlta’s vice president of policy and sustainable development, at TransAlta’s request in May 2015. The sponsorship agreement was signed in July 2015. The contents of the study proposal, sent from Kindzierski to Wharton, were redacted in the released documents.

Coal Pollution Still Dangerous to Health, Physician Says

Critics have called the independence of the study into question, saying TransAlta’s planned sponsorship could have introduced bias in the research questions pursued.

“I think after they published it they realized [there were going to be] a lot of people making a stink that there was a conflict of interest,” Joe Vipond, physician with the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), told DeSmog Canada.

“The optics were quite bad as far as bias is concerned in funding the study and that’s why they moved to make the money trail less obvious.”

Vipond is concerned about the way the study has been used to influence public debate about coal-fired power plants.

“It really distorts the conversation,” he said.

“I work in the medical field… and there is so much evidence of how funding and bias impacts conclusions in the scientific literature in health.”

But, he added, the average person isn’t taught to look as critically at this kind of literature as health professionals are.

“I think it’s very hard. People underestimate the power of money.”

He added that working in the medical field also exposes him to evidence that coal pollution affects respiratory health.

The Kindzierski study goes to great lengths to say pollution in the Edmonton airshed isn’t due to coal-fired power plants, Vipond said.

Recently Vipond co-authored a report, Breathing in the Benefits, released by the Pembina Institute, the Asthma Society, Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and the Lung Association, that estimated the phase-out of coal by 2030 in Alberta would avoid approximately 600 premature deaths, 500 emergency room visits, 80,000 asthma episodes, two million days of respiratory difficulty for individuals and nearly $3 billion in health benefits.

A previous report from the same group of organizations, A Costly Diagnosis: Subsidizing Coal Power with Albertans’ Health, found pollution from coal combustion affects respiratory and cardiovascular health as well as the central nervous system. The report says exposure to these pollutants can result in chronic respiratory illness and premature death.

“There is such a broad mix of emissions that come from coal: SOx, NOx, particulate matter 2.5 and mercury,” Vipond said.

“Then there’s a whole host of others like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and benzenes. That mix comes out of the stack and there is a lot of evidence for how [those pollutants] pollute lungs and the evidence on the impacts to cardiovascular health is even better.”

Particulate matter 2.5 is so fine, Vipond said, it gets into your lungs and can dissolve immediately into the bloodstream.

Andrew Read, environmental policy analyst with the Pembina Institute and contributor to the Breathing in the Benefits report, told DeSmog Canada there are no safe levels of particulate matter 2.5.

“Particulate matter doesn’t have a lower threshold where health impacts aren’t identified,” he said. “There is no argument that burning coal for electricity does not have substantial health impacts.”

Read added that reality should influence how we think about the future of coal-fired power.

Source: Pembina Institute

“The fact that there is no safe level of exposure to pollutants that are emitted by coal electricity is really important to consider,” he said. “If we expect to grow the economy and add industry to the province we have to remove some of these sources of emissions.”

The Kindzierski study produced for TransAlta “was really a political piece,” Read said.

“That’s the main frustration with the Kindzierski study — he could have added to the conversation or contributed in a way that added to the discussion but didn’t.”

Vipond said a presentation by Kindzierski to the Air and Waste Management Association found the short-term presence of particulate matter in the atmosphere resulted in fewer hospital visits for heart attacks.

“The conclusion was breathing coal-fired pollution is good for your health,” Vipond said.

“My feeling on the matter is that people who already have an agenda then go to find evidence that goes to back up that agenda. I think that’s true of humanity: it’s what we do.”

Vipond published a rebuttal of the Kindzierski study, saying there were major flaws in the methodology, including using limited air quality inputs and wind pattern information.

“I was annoyed [Kindzierski’s study] was out there and annoyed no one was challenging it.”

Research Shows Industry Funding Influences Academic Research

While industry funding doesn’t necessarily influence scientific research, a broad survey of research shows that it often does, according to Garry Gray, assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Victoria.

“If we just look at the outcomes [of research] — and that’s where we should focus — if we look at meta-analyses of funding, we see this in many areas over and over again, the source of funding does matter,” Gray told DeSmog Canada.

Gray spent three years as a research fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard’s Law School studying unethical behaviour in public interest institutions and conducting interviews with researchers in the field of public health and medicine.

His research (which he presents cogently in this TEDx talk) found that, yes, where research money comes from does indeed influence research outcomes.

“There is definitely a funding effect bias that takes place in research, especially when you can show where the funding sources are coming from.”

Gray’s research found that in often minor and subtle ways, researchers found ways to make their findings palatable to their funders.

“It doesn’t mean people were doing unethical research,” Gray said, “it means they were maybe framing their questions in certain ways or asking question A and not question B.”

Gray added universities are trying to better manage the problem of conflict of interest funding, but said they stop short of actually eliminating those funding relationships.

“I think there are a lot of problems today around research funding relationships,” he said.

Many of those ethical problems are not fully resolved by simply asking researchers to sign conflict of interest disclosure forms, he added.

There is often little transparency in how universities accept funding, Gray said, adding that can complicate the issue of public trust.

“Trust is definitely at stake,” he said. “There is this idea that universities are independent and this idea they are, for the most part, serving the public good. So there is this more implicit trust that we have for a project that comes out of the university.”

Yet with increasing amounts of private funds on university campuses, researchers may not be asking “the tougher questions” that are likely to benefit the general public.

“The question is, if we continue to shift funding models, who is going to ask those questions that are not going to be of interest to companies and industry and those types of funders?”

Laurie Adkin, associate professor in the University of Alberta’s Department of political science, told DeSmog Canada there are a lot of concerns about universities’ increasing reliance on corporate funds.

“It has been rather difficult to document the amount of corporate funding for individual researchers and their projects,” Adkins, who is a researcher with the Corporate Mapping Project, said.

“Partly because that information isn’t published anywhere and partly because it is difficult to record unless there is some sort of public announcement made.”

A request for comment from Samantha Pearson, director of corporate and foundation relations at the University of Alberta, went unanswered.

As a part of her research Adkin maps funding of energy-related research at the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary.

There is a significant amount of funding from the fossil fuel industry but also from the federal government at the University of Alberta, Adkin said, adding “a lot of that funding has been going into social licence research or prolonging the life of fossil fuels rather than going into renewable energies.”

“Of course in Alberta the University of Alberta has, at least under its previous president, billed itself as a flagship university for fossil fuel research,” she said.

The University of Alberta used to report industry funding but has since merged that category with funding from public institutions in its annual reporting, so there is no easy way to decipher where funding is coming from.

“You don’t know what faculty is getting what share or what research is getting funded,” she said.

Adkin said the question of the appropriateness of this practice is never raised.

“This is viewed as the model for what everyone should be doing.”

University of Alberta TransAlta Sponsorship Agreement for Kindzierski Coal Study FOI 2016 by DeSmog Canada on Scribd

Update: This piece was updated Thursday, November 10 at 11:46 a.m. to reflect TransAlta’s use of Kindzierski’s research to push for an alternative to Alberta’s Climate Change Plan, not to explicitly argue against the coal phase-out.

With files from Michael Fisher. 

Image: Emissions from a coal-fired power plant chimney in Germany. Photo: Patrick via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

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By focusing on fossil fuels, Canada is missing a tremendous opportunity to capitalize on clean energy technology, according to a new report from the Pembina Institute.

Through both a review of recent literature and one-on-one interviews with 21 of the country’s “clean energy leaders,” the report, entitled Competing in Clean Energy: Capitalizing on Canadian innovation in a $3 trillion economy, exposes the financial cost of the federal government’s overwhelming emphasis on the short-term profits provided by oil, gas and shale.

Interviewees include Nick Parker of Cleantech Group, who admits he finds it “difficult to not be acerbic or negative when it comes to how Canada ranks in the clean energy race.”

What are we missing?

As world leaders move to make the changes necessary to comply with the Copenhagen Accord which aims to limit global temperature rises to two degrees Celsius, they are increasingly looking for options to cut down on carbon emissions and move to renewable energy sources.

“Yet much of the focus of leaders in government and business has been on Canada’s abundance of raw fossil fuel commodities — from oilsands to shale gas and coal — and the opportunity to generate prosperity by exporting these resources.”

Thus far, the Canadian government has favoured a “go slow” approach to energy innovation, “betting on a slower emergence of a low-carbon economy, and a reluctance to impose additional costs on domestic industries and consumers to address a global problem [climate change].”

This has left us behind in the lucrative field of energy innovation. Although Canada is one of the top research and energy development funders in the world, our rate of funding as a percentage of GDP is presently less that the peak in 1984. Furthermore, poor coordination and short-sited funding have left us in fifth place in terms of clean energy inventions behind Korea, Germany, Japan and the United States. 

The report shows that aiding in the global transition toward clean energy is not only a moral imperative, but also a potential windfall for Canadian businesses, as well as an excellent way to create new jobs for Canadian workers. 

“With more than 700 companies, the cleantech sector has emerged as a major driver of innovation and employment growth in Canada, investing almost $2 billion in research and development and seeing an 11 per cent increase in employment between 2008 and 2010. Yet Canada currently captures just one per cent of the $1 trillion global clean technology industry. It is estimated that, as this industry grows to a projected $3 trillion by 2020, Canadian clean technology companies have the potential to increase their market share from today’s $9 billion to $60 billion.”

What can we do?

The report outlines three opportunities for the Canadian government to encourage growth in the clean energy entrepreneurship:

• Improve access to capital to keep emerging companies from falling into financial “valleys of death” before they are able to bring their new technologies to market. Chief Environment Officer of TD Bank Karen Clarke-Whistler provides advice on what the government could do to make banks more “comfortable” with supplying much needed financial resources to clean energy companies which tend to be high risk and have high capital needs.

• Create a national energy strategy that would focus hitherto poorly distributed funds. Many interviewees, including Tom Heintzman, co-founder and CEO of Bullfrog Power, suggest using fossil fuel resources to fund clean energy research, thus aiding in the smooth transition to sustainable technology.

• End preferential tax treatment for fossil fuel production and begin to figure the real cost of greenhouse gas pollution into the price of carbon-based energy. Dawn Farrell, CEO of TransAlta, encourages us to see the atmosphere that takes up CO2 emissions as a scarce resource and then price that resource to encourage more efficient use.

It concludes that if the federal government can go the way of some provincial governments and shift its focus away from the development and sale of fossil fuels, this country is, “well positioned to compete in the field of clean energy technology, creating jobs and economic prosperity across the country.”

Image Credit: Green Energy Futures on flickr.

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