Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland says clean energy and green technology spending may not have been the big-ticket items of the 2023 federal budget if it weren’t for the need to compete with infrastructure spending in the United States.
After she tabled the budget in the House of Commons Tuesday, Freeland told CTV’s Power Play host Vassy Kapelos that her government has been “at this for a long time,” campaigning on “the economy and the environment going together.”
Still, she said she doesn’t think it would have invested in a clean economy at the scale of the 2023 budget if it weren’t for the need to compete with the Inflation Reduction Act, which offers billions of dollars in energy incentives south of the border.
“I don’t think we would have done as much, had the IRA not been introduced,” Freeland said, adding the Liberal government has been pushing for clean economy policies for years, and citing the carbon price as an example.
“It’s also true that the U.S. plan, the IRA, is a game changer,” she also said. “They have put a ton of money on the table, and it was really important for us, having been ahead in this race, not to fall behind.”
Freeland discusses the 2023 federal budget in the video at the top of this article.
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