During Canada’s recent Investment Summit The Better Ideas Show from the Energy Mix recently asked one of Fort Capital’s Senior Advisors, Peter McArthur, to share his perspective on the future of cleantech and growth investment opportunities in Canada.
Peter shared valuable insights into the size of opportunity for cleantech investment in Canada (including that the sector generated $43.3 billion in GDP and $10.8 billion in exports in 2024!). Here are some of the key highlights from the conversation:
What is Canadian CleanTech?
Let’s begin by defining what is cleantech. A definition Peter likes to use is “proprietary innovative technology with meaningful environmental impact and a clear path to profitability”.
In this definition, proprietary innovative technology means intellectual property that has been developed in Canada. Its owned here. It’s not a licence of someone else’s technology. Its innovative, meaning it uses new methods or ideas. Meaningful environmental benefit means its key benefit is material and core to its operations. The technology is not just a nice-to-have or simple green washing. And why does it need a path to profitability? If it’s not going to operate at a profit and be commercially competitive, it’s not going to succeed at being adopted so it won’t have much impact to the bottom line or operation efficiencies. Cleantech is not a science project, it’s a business. Cleantech solutions include novel energy storage solutions, circular economy solutions repurposing waste energy and waste materials, better water treatment and management solutions, grid & energy management, building efficiency, innovative green chemistry solutions and others.
What is the opportunity for Canadian cleantech in contribution and future potential to build a clean climate economy?
Cleantech is a major contributor to the Canadian economy with 2,470 pureplay cleantech companies operating in Canada coast to coast, generating $43.3 Billion in GDP, providing 224,000 high-quality jobs and generating $10.8 Billion in exports as at 2024. People often think about Canada in terms of its oil and gas sector but employment there is 20% less at 186,000. We often read a lot about the automotive and parts sectors but this sector employs 148,000 people, again dramatically less than the cleantech sector. In fact, the cleantech sector employs more people than each of the forestry, defense, steel and aluminum sectors! Because it’s a diverse sector and distributed across the country it doesn’t attract as much attention. Individually, it’s small but cumulatively it’s HUGE. There aren’t just a handful of large corporations behind these numbers – the sector is diverse with 2,470 companies many of whom are small and medium sized enterprises with innovative technologies.
Employment in cleantech grew from 201m to 224m from 2021 to 2024 or 9% in 3 years. That’s a huge increase in a growing sector. Cleantech is innovative, employing smart Canadian scientists bringing new technologies to the world but it’s also usually hardware related often requiring highly technical and skill labour. Canada’s clean technology products sector accounted for 224,062 employee jobs in 2024, with average annual compensation of approximately $98,000 per job, including benefits (source: Statistics Canada). These are jobs creating technologies that can make other industries more competitive. We’ve got incredible potential to do more but, frankly, we need to recognize this potential, pay attention. We are going to continue to need housing, food, energy, water – cleantech can help support the sustainability of these necessities more efficiently and on a less costly basis. This is the incredible potential of cleantech. Cleantech is the future.
How does investing in cleantech support the Canadian economy?
Cleantech is incredibly diverse. It is a key contributor to the Canadian Economy coast-to-coast in Canada, offering high-quality skilled jobs, exporting goods and services, making Canadian industry more competitive using less energy, generating less waste, repurposing waste materials. It’s not just located in one or two regions of the country. It’s everywhere.
The world needs Canadian cleantech technologies with approximately 25% of our clean technology GDP coming from exports. Everyone is under pressure to do more with less. If you can reduce your energy consumption, reduce your waste, process more efficiently using clean technology you will be more competitive.
Canada is looking to build a vibrant and diverse value-added economy. Cleantech has this diversity and represents innovative technologies that aren’t commodities that can’t be as easily interrupted by global developments. We have a once in a lifetime opportunity to build better with renewable energy resources like wind, geothermal and solar and storing power in innovative energy storage solutions.
Given Canada’s strength in cleantech it’s a competitive advantage to be leveraged. The recent Canada Investment Summit prospectus looked at 8 key sectors: traditional energy, clean energy, metals and minerals, marine & port infrastructure, power & utilities, digital technology, advanced manufacturing and transportation. Some of the companies listed in this prospectus are cleantech but ALL of these companies could benefit from adopting cleantech innovations to help them operate more efficiently and competitively. What if the many mining projects identified were to use renewable power and battery energy storage to power their operations or to process more efficiently and have less waste?
How can investors fund more cleantech solutions?
Canada’s cleantech investment tax credit is a great place to start and uptake of this program can reduce capital costs by up to 30%. To really have impact we need a wholesale conversion with decentralized power and independent power producers. There is tons of grid pushback with an inability to absorb new power due to system and infrastructure constraints – despite power demand growing exponentially with increased technology and AI demands. The price competitiveness of renewables and battery energy storage is fundamentally proven but the ability to execute quickly is the key barrier to us having even more renewables deployed and this will take policy and concerted effort to overcome from leadership at all levels of government and private investment.
Watch the complete The Better Ideas Show from the Energy Mix featuring Peter McArthur, Senior Advisor with Fort Capital Partners here:
The opinions and expert insights in this post are those of Peter McArthur, a partner of Fort Capital Partners, and not specifically those of the firm or necessarily all partners of FCP. All statistics referenced in this post are sourced from “Canada’s Cleantech Economy Final Data August 2026”, Canada Cleantech Alliance (2026) unless otherwise noted.