You can tell that the pandemic is subsiding because politicians are starting to travel again — and more to the point, the prime minister and Cabinet members are starting to spread out across the country in order to start making funding announcements. Naturally, this is immediately being billed as election speculation, never mind that this happens every year once the House of Commons rises, and that there is certainly a pent-up desire on the part of government to be back in the spotlight doing these kinds of announcements. (But seriously, let’s ban the phrase “campaign-style” from news copy).
The major announcement yesterday was announcing $420 million in fully repayable loans to Algoma Steel to move away from coal-fired production to electric-arc production, which aims to reduce as much as 300 million tonnes of GHGs from their process every year, which is huge. Steel and cement are some of the biggest producers and some of the toughest to achieve GHG reductions with, so this is a fairly substantial announcement that will have a meaningful impact when it comes to reducing Ontario’s emissions.
https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1412085236264013825
https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1412089902326587399
Heather Scoffield, meanwhile, complains that while the announcement sounds good on its face, too many of the details are obscured and not made transparent, so we don’t know if it’s really a good deal for Canadians or not — though I will note that Power & Politics interviewed one of the Algoma executives who said that some the details around who much of the loan could be forgiven if carbon reduction targets were met are still being negotiated, so perhaps the rest of those details will be made public once they are finalised.