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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Source: https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2024/07/the_b...
This is one of the major design problems of SMRs (along with the abandonment of economies of scale).
Why can't they sell nuclear plants abroad? Sure Western countries won't buy them but the rest of the world probably would if the price were right.
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.
This is not a discussion worth having.
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.