Agreed. But there are poor people in Canada, and forcing them to pay more money (and slightly lowering their own quality of life) so that wealthier Canadians can install solar panels is, at least, a debatable policy.
We have progressive tax rates in Canada which should offset this to some extent.
Also, you keep ignoring that the environment is a public good. Poor people in Canada will also be disproportionately impacted by bigger temperature extremes (heat waves, extreme cold), worse air quality, etc.)
Does Canada not have progressive taxation? How do poor people pay more than rich people?
To be clear, I don't think rooftop solar subsidies are the best use of government money either. Governments should subsidize utility-scale solar, EVs, efficient buildings, and mass transit. They should focus on cheaper and more efficient permitting, and better grids.
> Does Canada not have progressive taxation? How do poor people pay more than rich people?
It’s not that they’re paying more than rich people. It’s that even with progressive taxation, tax(everything the government currently spends money on) < tax(current spending + solar subsidies). That is to say… giving solar subsidies to rich people causes the tax paid by everyone to increase. Those making more money pay a larger fraction of the increase because of progressive taxation but everyone who is paying taxes pays incrementally more when the government spends more money.
Canada should invest in Nuclear. Solar is far less efficient in Canada than somewhere like California - whether rooftop or utility-scale. The short winter days, low angle of incidence, and snow means that panels are basically non-operative for 3-4 months a year. This is a huge problem if you also want people to switch to efficient electric-powered heating in the form of heat pumps.
Great, if the break ground today the first nuke will be online in absolute minimum 10 years (likely 20) and cost absolute minimum of $15 billion (likely closer to $30 billion)
Do you want to guess how cheap solar will be in 10-20 years, and how much power we could generate in the mean time.
The efficiency of solar does not matter in 2026. Panels are so cheap that just you don't have to think about it if you have abundant land. If solar is 4x less productive in the winter you just build 4x as many panels. Panels have to be angled more vertical the further north you go so the snow will just slide off. They are not "non-operative 3-4 months a year" - this is just Big Oil FUD.
Everything has tradeoffs - those panels themselves take energy and rare earth minerals to create, and getting both of those requires pollution, primarily in China where they have lower standards than western nations.
So filling Canada with panels because they're cheap isn't likely the best environmental choice, on net. Though I admit I haven't done the math here, it's just an intuition that "just build 4x panels" isn't the solution.
Your intuition is flat out wrong. Building new nuclear takes too long. "Just fix the nuclear regulations" is a vibes-based statement. Even China built 100x as much solar as nuclear in 2025. Wouldn't they "lower standards" to build more nuclear if it made any economic sense?
As for
> those panels themselves take energy and rare earth minerals to create
You've swallowed Big Oil propaganda and are choosing to parrot it without thinking. The actual truth?
"Every year, [ICE vehicles] consume over 17 times more tons of oil (2,150 million tons per year) than the amount of battery minerals we’d need to extract just once to run transportation forever. Even when including the weight of other raw materials in ore and brine, one-off mineral demand would still end up over 30% lighter than annual oil extraction for road transport. And unlike minerals, oil products are promptly burned in internal
combustion engines and must be replaced each year, forever
Admittedly this is about minerals for batteries. But solar panels are also recyclable.
The reason Nuclear takes so long is that people are neurotic about it and so the regulations are totally excessive. If we had a standardised reactor, it wouldn't be that difficult to churn them out.
The nuclear industry rightly fears excessive standardization because the more units of a given reactor model are built, the more drastically production is reduced by the discovery of a serious bug that leads to their immediate shutdown.
This is one of the major design problems of SMRs (along with the abandonment of economies of scale).
Since you clearly didn't read past the second sentence in my post I'm going to repeat myself. Why doesn't China repeal "excessive" and "neurotic" regulations and build more nuclear instead of solar? Rather than the other way around?
