There’s talk of following America’s lead and doing away with Canada’s electric vehicle mandate. That feels like a mistake.
The goal of Canada’s Electric Vehicle Availability Standard is (was?) to ensure all new light-duty vehicles sold are zero-emission by 2035. Some 20 per cent of new vehicle sales by the end of 2026 are supposed to be hybrids and EVs, with that number increasing to 60 per cent by 2030.
It seemed doable, if a little bit aggressive, when it was announced three years ago, but there’s no getting around the fact we’re almost definitely going to miss that first milestone.
And now our auto-manufacturing industry—already hanging on by its fingertips with Trump throwing out random tariffs based on how much world leaders are willing to debase themselves by kissing his ass—is asking the federal government to pull back completely.
I’m not unsympathetic. It’s an important industry that employs a lot of people and right now almost all of it revolves around internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. Attempts to build EVs here by funding battery plants have also been sidetracked by tariffs and global wars.
I do get that the 20-per-cent target by the end of 2026 is an extreme longshot at this point, but we’re also doing better than some critics expected—EV sales in Canada in 2024 were around 13.8 per cent, with B.C. leading the country with almost 25 per cent EV sales. That’s well short of what Norway has achieved with its 88 per cent EV adoption rate, or even the 22 per cent rate achieved by China, but it’s still momentum in the right direction.
Those numbers are expected to drop slightly in 2025 with Tesla’s brand cratering along with trust in its erratic CEO and Canada dipping into recession territory, but it’s far from failure.
There are good reasons we’re going to miss targets. The price of gas isn’t what it was a few years ago and consumer confidence in the economy is also down—people are taking a wait-and-see approach before spending money and holding onto their ICE vehicles a little while longer.
There are also some significant roadblocks when it comes to charging infrastructure that are going to take time to resolve. For example, about a million people in B.C. live in strata properties that can’t easily charge their vehicles without making some significant upgrades to their building’s electrical systems—which won’t come cheap. Installing load-management systems on older electrical panels to avoid using more power than is available also costs thousands. It could be a decade or more before older buildings can reliably provide fast-charging capability to every owner and tenant.
As well, Canada is a large country with lots of empty spaces between cities and towns, and range anxiety is real. You can drive hours between towns to get to public charging stations, only to find yourself in a line of other EV drivers who all need to charge their cars and trucks at once—and it takes time. There will need to be a lot more and faster chargers for EVs to be practical, even if it means setting up charging waypoints in the middle of nowhere.
There also aren’t a lot of affordable EVs out there compared to ICE vehicles. Even the micro-sized Fiat 500e starts at $42,000, while you can get an entry-level ICE vehicle for just over half of that.
I know you’re supposed to calculate how much money you’ll save on gas and maintenance over the life of the vehicle, but those kinds of savings really only benefit the kind of people that can afford to pay cash up front. The irony of EVs is the people who could benefit the most from cars that are inexpensive to operate are the same people who can’t afford to buy them.
It’s expensive to be poor. Humorist Terry Pratchett came up with a theory of socioeconomic unfairness in his book Men at Arms that economists now call “Boot Theory.” As Pratchett put it, poor people can only afford to buy cheap boots that give out after a year or two while rich people can invest in good boots that will last more than a decade. In the end, the poor boot-buyer will spend up to 10 times as much as a rich one to keep their feet out of the snow.
There was an option to get cheaper EVs on the market, but Canada followed the U.S. lead in applying 100-per-cent tariffs on Chinese EV manufacturers like BYD. The cheapest BYD vehicles could be under $20,000 in Canadian dollars if available here. However, while that might have helped us meet our climate goals, it wouldn’t have helped our automotive industry while helping a country we’re not overly friendly with these days. There are all kinds of interests to balance on the road to sustainability.
But while there are good reasons why EVs haven’t taken off as fast as we’d like, there are also good reasons why we can’t give up.
On a hike in the alpine the other day, I looked south to see a brownish haze winding down the Sea to Sky highway—air pollution from all the ICE vehicles heading to Whistler on a Saturday morning. EVs will eliminate that toxic haze and clear our air.
You also can’t help but notice all the red trees lining the valley on both sides, courtesy of an outbreak of spruce budworm that could kill a significant number of trees if the outbreak persists. They are a naturally occurring pest in the dry Interior of the province, and it’s not a stretch to imagine their rapid spread into Whistler was made possible by recent years of hotter, drier summers linked to our changing climate.
There’s also a need to at least try to meet our climate-change commitments, reducing emissions by 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. If we want to replace America as a trading partner, we’ll need to trade more with Europe—and they take climate change a lot more seriously than we do. They might not tariff our exports like some countries I could mention but the EU’s carbon duties are basically the same thing.
I wrote a column about 11 years ago hoping the car I bought then—a very affordable and fuel-efficient Honda Fit—would be the last ICE vehicle I would own. I still hope that’s the truth because time is running out and EVs are still a bridge too far when it comes to cost and utility. The Boot Theory thing, the power thing, the utility thing—all are considerations I’m going to have to weigh in the next year or three.
But not if Canada gives up on its EV strategy, writes off its losses, freezes its grants, stops investing in the transitions, freezes out competitors, and follows the lead of the United States and its capricious Madman in Chief while we abandon one of the lowest-hanging fruits in reaching our climate-change commitments…
Like I said in the beginning, it just feels like a mistake.
