What Chrystia Freeland told CTV News about Canada’s 2023 budget

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland says spending on clean energy and green technology might not have been the big items in the 2023 federal budget if it weren’t for the need to compete with spending infrastructure in the United States.

After tabling the budget in the House of Commons on Tuesday, Freeland told CTV’s Power Play host Vassy Kapelos that his government had been “in this business for a long time,” campaigning on “the economy and the accompanying environment”.

Still, she said she doesn’t think she would have invested in a clean economy on the scale of the 2023 budget if it weren’t for the need to compete with the Cut Inflation Act, which offers billions of dollars in energy incentives south of the border.

“I don’t think we would have done as much if the IRA hadn’t been introduced,” Freeland said, adding that the Liberal government had been pushing for clean economy policies for years and citing the price of carbon as example.

“It is also true that the American plan, the IRA, is a game-changer,” she also said. “They 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.