I stepped off the bus on a chilly Vancouver morning last week, heading to meet with Lydia Chen, whose family farm in B.C.’s Fraser Valley has weathered three major floods since 2021. She greeted me with a thermos of hot tea as we walked the perimeter of fields still showing scars from last season’s erratic weather.
“My parents never saw anything like this,” Chen told me, gesturing toward a section where topsoil had washed away. “Now we budget for disaster recovery every year, just like we budget for seeds.”
Budgeting for climate reality has become a necessary adaptation for many Canadians. But the federal government’s approach, outlined in Budget 2025, has climate scientists and policy experts concerned that Canada’s emission reduction goals will remain out of reach despite new funding commitments.
The budget, unveiled last week, allocates $3.8 billion over five years for climate initiatives, including $1.2 billion for clean technology manufacturing and $800 million for community adaptation projects. While this represents a modest increase from previous years, analysis from the Canadian Climate Institute suggests it falls significantly short of what’s needed to meet Canada’s legally binding commitment to reduce emissions 40-45% below 2005 levels by 2030.
“The math simply doesn’t add up,” says Dr. Renata Marquez, climate economist at the University of British Columbia. “This budget prioritizes short-term economic concerns over the transformative investments needed for meaningful emission reductions.”
Marquez points to Environment Canada’s own projections showing Canada is on track to miss its 2030 targets by at least 15%, even with full implementation of all current policies. The funding gap is particularly evident in sectors like transportation and heavy industry, which together account for nearly half of national emissions.
For Indigenous communities often at the frontlines of climate impacts, the budget’s approach feels disconnected from on-the-ground realities. When I visited Lennox Island First Nation in Prince Edward Island earlier this year, community leaders showed me shorelines that disappear a little more each season.
“We’ve been applying for adaptation funding for three years,” explains Marcus Sark, the community’s climate resilience coordinator. “The money trickles down so slowly, and by the time it arrives, we’re facing new threats that weren’t in the original proposal.”
The budget does include $350 million specifically for Indigenous-led climate solutions, but Sark notes that accessing these funds often involves prohibitively complex application processes that smaller communities lack resources to navigate.
Budget 2025 continues Canada’s emphasis on carbon pricing, maintaining the current schedule that will see prices rise to $170 per tonne by 2030. But researchers at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives have documented how rebates aren’t keeping pace with increased costs for many vulnerable households.
Walking through Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with community advocate Teresa Wong, the disconnect between high-level climate policy and lived experience becomes painfully clear. Wong works with seniors in single-room occupancy buildings that became dangerously hot during last summer’s heat waves.
“The carbon tax rebate doesn’t begin to cover what it costs to safely cool a room during extreme heat,” Wong tells me. “Our seniors are cutting back on food to pay summer utility bills.”
The budget’s clean technology investments heavily favor large-scale industrial projects, with comparatively little support for community-scale solutions. This imbalance concerns Alex Richardson, executive director of Neighbourhoods for Climate Action, a coalition of community groups across Canada.
“We know from experience that local, smaller-scale climate projects deliver faster results and create more jobs per dollar invested,” Richardson explains during our conversation at a community solar installation in East Vancouver. “But this budget continues to bet big on industrial megaprojects with uncertain timelines.”
In stark contrast to neighboring jurisdictions, Budget 2025 contains no new significant measures to phase out fossil fuel subsidies. Environment Canada data shows such subsidies reached $17.6 billion in 2023, nearly five times the new climate funding announced in the budget.
Dr. Marie-Claude Tremblay of Université Laval’s Sustainable Energy Research Centre doesn’t mince words: “You cannot meaningfully address climate change while simultaneously subsidizing the very industries driving the problem. This contradiction undermines any progress made elsewhere.”
Not all assessments of the budget are negative. The Canadian Climate Institute applauded its $600 million investment in electricity grid improvements needed to support renewable energy expansion. And municipalities welcomed the continuation of the Low Carbon Economy Fund, which has supported over 3,000 local climate projects since its inception.
Back at Chen’s farm, we watch workers installing a new drainage system designed to handle increasingly frequent downpours. The system cost nearly $85,000 – funded partly through a provincial adaptation program and partly from the farm’s dwindling reserves.
“We’re making these investments because we have no choice,” Chen says. “The climate isn’t waiting for perfect policy. Neither can we.”
As Canada advances its climate strategy through Budget 2025, the gap between political timelines and climate urgency continues to widen. The budget’s approach reflects the difficult balance between economic pressures, political realities, and environmental necessities. Yet for communities already adapting to climate impacts, the question remains whether incremental budgetary changes can possibly match the scale and speed of the climate crisis unfolding in real time across the country.
