Canada's Qeust for Clean Technology Development

The Canadian government has joined a 20-country international initiative to boost funding for technology – with Justin Trudeau’s Liberals saying they will make good on an election-campaign pledge to do Canada’s part.

The Mission Innovation initiative will see the countries, including the United States, China, India, Britain and France, double their own spending to develop clean technologies.

At the same time, a group of major global private-sector investors, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma, Tata group’s Ratan Tata, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates are promising to make private-sector capital available.

The Canadian government’s part will be to add $300-million to clean technology development – a Liberal election-platform plank that Mr. Trudeau promised in the recent election campaign.

That will include $100-million a year to be put into green-technology producers “and tackling Canada’s most pressing environmental challenges,” the government said in a press release, and $200-million per year to support the use of clean technology in the natural resources sector.

Expanding clean-technology investment is a key issue for several countries like the U.S., who are keen to show green jobs can be created and that new technology, rather than consumer sacrifices, will be a part of the solution for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions.

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, who has expressed concern that energy-sector jobs in his province could be hurt by the new federal government’s climate-change plans, indicated he wants to see his province get credit for investments in carbon capture and storage technology for the coal industry through a project in Weyburn, Sask.

That’s technology that would capture emissions for the burning of coal – but it has proven difficult to develop on a large scale at competitive costs.

“I hope we’re going to be getting some credit for what we think is the largest capital investment in technology that will mitigate carbon,” Mr. Wall said at the site of talks in Paris.

“There’s about a thousand coal plants on the books around the world … so if we’re serious about climate change, and doing something about climate change, Canada can actually have a big vision of contributing technology that will help clean up the transition energies like coal. So we’re hoping to get credit for that from any new federal program.”