I would agree that the government has realized that it can't get away with giving subsidies to the sector the way it has for decades. Now it is using the promise of either job creation or environmental outcomes to disguise the same subsidies as something new. If job creation were the goal, then it would have been a critical criterion for receiving the funding. That wasn't the case, and the oil and gas companies.... The price of oil fell for a month and then quickly picked up, way before any funds were distributed from this program.
The reason this fund is so problematic is that pattern of oil and gas lobbying for weak regulations, and then getting the government to pay the difference. The bottom line for them is more profit and fewer costs.
I have a last, quick point. It is critical that we tackle the oil and gas sector. It is Canada's largest and fastest-growing source of emissions, both in methane and other greenhouse gas emissions. It's not just about reducing the consumption side, because we know that Canada is one of the world's largest export nations in terms of fossil fuels, and those emissions, which we don't count in our domestic accounting systems, are even larger than our domestic emissions. In 2019, our exported fossil fuels created 954 megatonnes of greenhouse gases, which is way more than our domestic emissions. That's why tackling this is so critical.