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TOP STORY
Although the Carney government may have dispensed with the wildly unpopular consumer carbon tax, Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin confirmed this week that they’re staying the course on an environmental policy that’s almost as controversial.
In the House of Commons on Monday, Dabrusin said there would be no changes to a Trudeau-era plan to ban the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035.
In late 2023, the Liberal government announced a system of mandated sales quotas on new vehicles under which any sales of new gas or diesel-powered vehicles would become prohibited by 2035.
The proposal has not polled well. In October, an
found that 66 per cent of Canadians thought the 2035 timeline was “unrealistic.”
A
from May 2024 found that just 30 per cent of respondents endorsed a “total ban on the use of gas-powered cars and SUVs,” as compared to 66 per cent who opposed it.
The federal government’s own research has warned that Ottawa is falling well short of the charging infrastructure and electricity generation that would be required to meet the EV mandate.
A report published last July by Natural Resources Canada estimated that it
could cost as much as $300 billion
to prepare the country for a future in which the sale of new gas-powered cars becomes illegal.
For context, there are
registered motor vehicles in Canada. An expenditure of $300 billion would be equivalent to spending $11,500 for every single vehicle currently on the road.
At the time of the report’s publication, there were about 30,000 EV charging ports across Canada. It’s estimated that to keep up with the EV mandate, Canada would need to boost this to 679,000 by 2040. In other words, Canada would need to double its total number of charging ports in a single year, and then maintain that pace for at least 15 additional years.
If infrastructure didn’t keep pace, the report warned that the worst impacts would be felt in “rural, remote, and Indigenous communities and lower-income areas.”
Canadian automakers have long warned that the mandates did not track with consumer preferences. “The government can only do so much to entice consumers to purchase vehicles that they would like to see implemented.
Consumers will choose what they need,” Frank Voss, president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, told Bloomberg News last year.
Of late, automakers have also warned that the mandate risks doing damage to an industry that is already under fire by tariffs imposed by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
This week, Ford Canada CEO Bev Goodman told the Canadian Automotive Summit that Canadians
simply weren’t buying EVs at the rates mandated by Ottawa
.
“Ultimately, it will have a negative impact, if these mandates stick, on the industry. It will have downward pressure on vehicle sales, it will have upward pressure on pricing, and those are real concerns for consumers and the industry as a whole,” she said.
As of last year, EVs
per cent of sales of new “light duty vehicles” — a category that includes cars, pickup trucks and SUVs. Notably, these sales are disproportionately concentrated in a single province which until recently had the country’s
of EV subsidies.
Of the 81,205 zero-emission vehicles sold in Canada in the last quarter of 2024, 49,357 were sold in Quebec.
To stick with the Liberal government’s mandated quotas, EV sales would somehow need to rise to 20 per cent by 2026.
All the while, surveys show that Canadians’ interest in buying EVs is going down, not up.
The publication AutoTrader
of Canadian’s interest in buying an electric vehicle. Last month, they reported that consumer interest in EVs had dropped for the third consecutive year.
In 2024, 40 per cent of respondents said that their next car would be an EV. By 2025, this number had plummeted to 29 per cent.
In February, Statistics Canada tracked a 41.3 per cent drop in EV sales as compared to the same month in 2024. The drop was likely due to the sudden end of EV subsidy programs both in Quebec and at the federal level.
This included the end to the federally run Incentives for Zero-Emission Vehicle program, which offered subsidies of up to $5,000 for qualifying vehicles.
Canada’s 2035 EV mandate was imposed after similar policies had been adopted in Europe and the United States. But both jurisdictions are already having second thoughts.
The U.S. mandates were cancelled in January by Trump. Just last week, the U.S. Senate also voted to
passed by the State of California.
And even in Europe, where EV uptake has been much faster than in North America, there is a growing movement to roll back the European Union’s hard ban on new gas-powered cars by 2035.
“We need flexibility on the 2035 target … we don’t want to kill off the industry,” Jens Gieseke, a German member of the main centre-right group in the European Parliament, told a recent profile by the Washington Post.
On Monday, Dabrusin did not explicitly confirm that sales of gas-powered cars would be illegal by 2035, only that the “regulation remains in place.”
Fourteen consecutive times on Monday night, Conservative MP Dan Mazier asked the environment minister some version of whether the Carney government was planning to stick to its promise of prohibiting new gas-powered vehicle sales by 2035.
The most direct answer he received was Dabrusin saying, “We do have in place a regulation that sets consistently increasing targets for EV sales, going to 100 per cent, and there are flexibilities built within that regulation that, if we wanted to have a larger conversation about, we could speak about.”
IN OTHER NEWS
There’s been a new development in the unending saga of the ArriveCan scandal. ArriveCan was a smartphone app that was briefly mandatory for travellers entering Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. But it became most notorious for its inexplicably
, about one third of which was awarded to GC Strategies, a two-person consultant company registered to an Ontario home that acted as a middleman on the project (which is to say, it didn’t actually design the app).
This week, Auditor General Karen Hogan determined that GC Strategies had been awarded
$100 million in various contracts
over the tenure of the current Liberal government —
despite most of those contracts failing to meet the government’s own procurement standards.
This is an incredibly large sum of money to be approved under hinky circumstances. The 1990s-era Sponsorship Scandal, for context, only ever involved misallocated funds totalling $2 million.
Worst of all, Hogan
that
hinky contracts seem to be pretty typical now.
Hogan referenced two major audits her office has undertaken in recent years: ArriveCan and a probe into federal contracts awarded to McKinsey & Company. In both instances, “we found issues in almost every contract that we looked at,” she said.
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