Lies, damn lies, and Fraser Institute studies

Maybe they didn't expect anyone to fact check their work. I did it anyways.

For more than 50 years now the Fraser Institute has been churning out studies and reports that validate the priors and confirm the biases of this country’s Conservative politicians and voters. But even by its own reliably partisan standards the recent publication on the fiscal cost of Canada’s low-carbon economy is a textbook exercise in policy-based evidence making.

Its findings were, of course, dutifully reproduced by this country’s right-wing media outlets, including The Hub. “Green economy jobs created in the last 10 years cost Canadian governments an estimated $2.32 million per position, totaling $158 billion in 2024 dollars,” senior editor Graeme Gordon wrote in his October 31 “analysis” of the Fraser Institute studies. Sounds bad, right?

That’s because it’s designed to.

Let’s unpack their numbers. We’ll start with the federal side of the equation, where a combined $66.2 billion was spent since 2014 on so-called “environmental and clean technology”.

Here’s the key part, which you can find on page 13 of their first report.

“The growing share of green initiatives in total ECT costs is primarily due to the introduction of climate action incentive payments in 2018–19. From that point through 2024–25, these payments totalled $42.1 billion, making it the largest single cost among green initiatives.”

In other words, 64% of the funding they frame as being dedicated to creating green jobs was actually returned to Canadians in the form of carbon tax rebates. That’s either a fundamental misunderstanding of what the rebates were for or a deliberate misrepresentation of their purpose. I’ll let you decide which one fits best here.

This “error” is, of course, repeated for provincial rebate and incentive systems in British Columbia and Alberta. Here’s British Columbia, where the vast majority of spending on low-carbon economy initiatives came in the form of tax credits.

The vast majority of said tax credits, meanwhile? You guessed it: they went to households and businesses in the form of rebates and tax cuts.

For the mathematically challenged out there, that’s 96%.

Alberta might be the funniest/worst example of all here. Yes, there was money spent on transitioning the province off coal-fired electricity and supporting renewable electricity — both of which, it should be said, were roaring successes. Before the UCP deliberately choked it off with red tape and regulation, Alberta’s wind and solar sector was responsible for both the highest rate of renewable energy growth and lowest prices in the country. The coal phaseout, meanwhile, happened almost a decade faster than the government had predicted.

But look at this — and try to ignore the obvious typo in the “water management infrastructure” line.

The Springbank reservoir, which was created in order to prevent another flood like the one that destroyed so many homes and businesses in the 2013 flood, wasn’t about creating “green” jobs. Neither is Water for Life, which is a provincial program first created in 2006 that’s designed to help manage the province’s increasingly scarce fresh water resources. And the vast majority of that $1.1 billion attributed to the Climate Leadership Plan was for — you guessed it — rebates.

On to Ontario.

We’ll start with the innocuously named “Greenhouse gas reduction account program/cap and trade wind down account”, which is actually just some of the cost associated with the Ford government’s decision to cancel Ontario’s cap-and-trade program in 2018. It’s hard to see how you can describe that as being part of an attempt to create green jobs, since it’s effectively the exact opposite — an attempt to prevent their creation.

There are a bunch of other items included here that are equally misleading. The Ontario electricity rebate is just a politically-motivated fiscal transfer to households aimed at reducing their electricity bills. It has nothing to do with creating or supporting green jobs. The same can be said for the $5.1 billion going to “electricity rate mitigation” and $6.4 billion to “electricity cost-relief programs”.

The “comprehensive electricity plan/renewable cost shift” is a little trickier here, since it represents a decision by the Ford government to shield ratepayers from the wind and solar contracts signed by the previous government — ones that helped build up the province’s renewable energy sector but also locked in higher costs and prices. So yes, in a kind of backwards-looking way, it does represent funding used to support green jobs — but only because the Ford government wanted to find a politically convenient scapegoat for rising electricity prices in the province.

Those prices continue to rise, by the way, even with the public now protected from these so-called “bad deals”. That might be in part — and maybe a large part — because the Ford government turned its back on increasingly inexpensive wind and solar. As the Green Party’s Mike Schreiner said:

“This month, electricity prices surged by 29 per cent because of the Ford government’s hostility to low-cost, reliable renewable energy. To bring down costs for everyone, we need to expand and update Ontario’s electricity grid. The cheapest, fastest way to do that is to invest in made-in-Ontario wind, solar and energy storage solutions.”

Anyways. The point in all of this is that the Fraser Institute authors are including a bunch of items under the broader heading of green spending that clearly have nothing to do with job creation or economic development. It is a transparently obvious attempt to mislead the public about how much money has actually been spent on trying to create new green economy jobs. And they just keep pushing it out there.

Witness the op-ed that was just co-authored by senior fellow Kenneth Green and natural resources studies director Elmira Aliakbari. “Between 2014/15 and 2024/25,” they write, “federal spending on green initiatives (such as subsidizing renewable power, providing incentives for electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, funding for building retrofits, and support for alternative fuels such as hydrogen, etc.) went from $0.6 billion to $23 billion—a 38-fold increase.”

But, of course, we know the vast majority of that money actually went to the thing they didn’t bother to list: rebates. In 2024-25, those cost the government $14.7 billion. Funny, that.

I have two smaller bones left to pick here. The first is that the vast majority of this funding — stripping out the rebates and so forth — has been committed over the couple of years, whether it’s to EV battery plants or critical minerals projects. Expecting them to instantly produce tens of thousands of new jobs is to misunderstand (deliberately, I think) the nature and scale of the challenge ahead of us. That challenge has only gotten bigger with the election of Donald Trump and his increasingly clumsy attempts to protect the fossil fuel industry and its interests.

But that metaphorical puck is still going to end up somewhere else, whether he and his supporters here in Canada like it or not. What matters is how we navigate the middle distance in front of us right now, one that separates the economy of the present from the possibilities of an indeterminate but inevitable future. I am, as always when I think or write about this challenge, reminded of Niccolo Machiavelli’s famous words, ones I’ve quoted before and will surely quote again.

“It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.”

The Fraser Institute is the perfect mouthpiece for those who have done well under the old conditions. We should not be too surprised, then, when they try to gerrymander the data in front of them in ways that flatters their version of reality and undermines the new one fighting to be born.

There’s a second study here, by the way. I’ll get into it next week.