A Healthy Environment and a Healthy Economy - Clean industry

One of the five pillars of the CAD15 billion A Healthy Environment and a Healthy Economy climate plan, announced in December 2020, is a collection of actions focussed on clean and decarbonised industry, described as Building Canada's Clean Industrial Advantage. Announced initiatives to support low-carbon industry include to: 

• Make investments to support decarbonization and drive the immediate creation of well-paying, resilient jobs, in complement to the Challenge. This would involve the Strategic Innovation Fund’s Net-Zero Accelerator Fund, through an investment of CAD3 billion over five years. The fund will rapidly expedite decarbonization projects with large emitters, scale-up clean technology and accelerate Canada’s industrial transformation across all sectors. 
• Invest CAD1.5 billion in a Low-carbon and Zero-emissions Fuels Fund to increase the production and use of low-carbon fuels (e.g. hydrogen, biocrude, renewable natural gas and diesel, cellulosic ethanol) in a manner that complements federal carbon pollution pricing, regulatory efforts and other federal programming. 
• Help accelerate the reduction in methane emissions through the CAD750 million Emissions Reduction Fund that provides repayable funding to eligible onshore and offshore oil and gas companies to support their investments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 
• Launch a Net-Zero Challenge for large emitters to support Canadian industries in developing and implementing plans to transition their facilities to net-zero emissions by 2050. 
• Use proceeds collected from the Output-Based Pricing System (OBPS) for industry to further support industrial projects to cut emissions and use cleaner technologies and processes. 
• Introduce Canada’s Hydrogen Strategy, which sets out a path for integrating low emitting hydrogen across the Canadian economy, before the end of the year. 

The government will also: 

• Propose to strengthen Canada’s approach to reducing methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by establishing new targets and associated regulations for 2030 and 2035, based on international best practices. The design of the amended federal regulations to achieve additional reductions in 2030 and 2035 will be determined through consultations with provinces, territories, the oil and gas industry and civil society. 
• Invest $165.7 million over seven years to support the agriculture sector in developing transformative clean technologies and help farmers adopt commercially available clean technology. 
• Set a national emission reduction target of 30 percent below 2020 levels from fertilizers and work with fertilizer manufacturers, farmers, provinces and territories, to develop an approach to meet it. 
• Continue to support Sustainable Development Technology Canada with an additional $750 million over five years. This would support startups and scale-up companies to enable pre-commercial clean technologies to successfully demonstrate feasibility as well as support early commercialization efforts. 
• Leverage the Government of Canada’s purchasing power to support emerging clean technologies across Canada’s economic sectors, such as technologies to reduce emissions in federal buildings and reduce embodied carbon in construction materials. This would be part of the updated greening government strategy. 
• Work with small businesses to get their feedback on all potential ways to further support them in taking action to reduce emissions, including through rebates, targeted investments, and other supports. 
• Continue helping Canadian businesses navigate available federal resources and measures, understand their environmental outcomes, while exploring opportunities to integrate into supply chains of larger private and public purchasers, and expand their reach in Canadian and global markets. 
• Develop new federal regulations to increase the number of landfills that collect and treat methane, and ensure that landfills already operating these systems make improvements to collect all they can.

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