Automotive
The Pawns Push Back against the Trudeau Government’s Electric Vehicle Diktats
From the C2C Journal
By Gwyn Morgan
Perhaps there is a certain twisted logic to the woke left’s attempt to convince schoolchildren that math is racist and that 2 plus 2 might well equal 5. For this may be the only way to get the “math” surrounding the Justin Trudeau government’s push to force Canadians into buying only electric vehicles as of 2035 to work in any way at all. Gwyn Morgan reviews the actual math of key elements of the EV transition scheme – the electric power needs, the subsidized purchases, the tax credits, the vast number of required charging stations, the maintenance of roads – and finds both the costs and the implementation obstacles to be a mixture of steep, dubious and prohibitive. So much so, Morgan concludes, as to cast the entire EV transition in doubt.
The federal government has mandated that all new passenger vehicles and light-duty trucks sold in Canada be electrically powered by 2035. Two of the many serious obstacles to achieving that goal will be the requirement for vastly more electrical generating capacity along with hundreds of thousands of additional charging stations.
A study by the Fraser Institute released in March, Electric Vehicles and the Demand for Electricity, found that the addition of millions of EVs to Canada’s roads would push nationwide demand for electricity up by more than 15 percent, requiring the equivalent of either 10 new large hydroelectric dams the size of B.C.’s nearly completed Site C Dam on the Peace River, or 13 large new natural gas-fuelled facilities. The Site C dam needed 10 years to gain environmental approval, took an additional decade to build and has cost $16 billion. All to generate approximately 1,100 megawatts of electricity. Most of Canada’s viable large-scale sites have already been dammed, and opposition to any new dam would be bound to be even more stubborn than against Site C. Planning, funding, building and commissioning 10 new dams the size of Site C or larger in the next 11 years is clearly unrealistic.
The cost of a charge: Research suggests that adding millions of EVs to Canadian roads would require an over 15 percent increase in nationwide electricity supply – equivalent to 10 large hydroelectric dams the size of B.C.’s $16 billion Site C Dam on the Peace River (bottom). (Source of bottom photo: BC Hydro)
That leaves the natural gas-fired plants. Technically, these could be built in such a time-frame, and western Canada is producing sufficient natural gas to fuel them. But not only is the Justin Trudeau government vehemently opposed to building any new fossil fuel-powered electricity plants, doing so would kibosh those EV’s zero emissions; they would become fossil-fuel-powered vehicles, just indirectly.
Powering up all the anticipated new EVs will require a major push to install charging stations all over Canada. Here again, taxpayers are being forced to ride to the rescue with Ottawa’s $680 million ‘Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program’. Meaning, subsidized charging stations.
In addition, the cost of building and operating those gas plants would be enormous. And who would pay? Since it’s virtually impossible to separate power billing by source, their costs would need to be rolled into existing electricity rates. That would increase the burden on Canadian ratepayers and businesses, many of which are already struggling. And it might even lead inflation-weary, economically hard-pressed citizens sick of all the costly political games to riot in the streets. The only alternative, then, would be huge nationwide power subsidies in a country with an already massive national debt.
The whole campaign to “transition” Canadians into EVs is already prodigiously expensive. Consider just the direct EV subsidies, aimed at narrowing the price advantage that internal combustion engine vehicles have over EVs. The federal government currently kicks in a $5,000 subsidy for every EV purchased in Canada. Another 24 million or so EVs will need to be sold to switch over Canada’s entire light-duty vehicle fleet. The overall subsidy math is pretty simple.
Then, powering up all the anticipated new EVs will require a major push to install charging stations all over Canada. Here again, taxpayers are being forced to ride to the rescue with Ottawa’s $680 million Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program (ZEVIP). Meaning, subsidized charging stations. ZEVIP comes after the federal government has already spent more than $1 billion “to make EV’s more affordable and chargers more accessible for Canadians.” How has that worked out? As of late 2021 the entire country had just 6,000 publicly available EV charging stations. ZEVIP has the grandiose goal of adding another 84,500. But Canada requires some 160,000 gasoline and diesel pumps to keep its vehicle fleet running and make refuelling reasonably convenient nearly anywhere. Recharging an EV takes at least 10 times as long as gassing up a regular car, implying the need for a couple of million EV charging stations.
Good luck with that: The Government of Canada claims its $680 million Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program will help get nearly 85,000 charging stations built. But in the U.S., President Joe Biden’s US$7.5 billion charging station construction program has produced just eight charging stations in two-and-a-half years. (Sources of photos: (top) Marc Bruxelle/Shutterstock; (bottom) EV Central)
The program will also be burdened with the maddening reality – as I detailed in this recent column – that nothing government touches comes in on time or on budget any longer. So what will ZEVIP’s $680 million really buy? Recent U.S. experience may be sadly instructive. The enormous Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed at the behest of the Joe Biden Administration in late 2021 allotted US$7.5 billion to build a promised 500,000 EV charging stations by 2030. As of last month, the U.S. government had succeeded in building a grand total of – wait for it – eight. No, there aren’t any zeros missing. So I’m not hopeful that EV charging stations will magically mushroom all across our nation, either.
Adding to the taxpayer-committed largesse here in Canada, a recent report by the Osler law firm carries news of a new EV supply-chain incentive included in the Liberals’ gargantuan Budget 2024 that provides a further 10 percent tax credit, this one for buildings used to manufacture EVs, batteries, and related materials. It comes on top of the existing, massive 15-30 percent tax credits on investment in or manufacture of “clean” technology and EVs. The latest corporate giveaway was designed for Honda’s recently announced $15 billion plant, but also applies to other new projects.
If your head isn’t already spinning in trying to comprehend the massive scale of consumer and taxpayer largesse being shovelled towards the EV industry – all in an effort to convince Canadians to switch en masse to these expensive, unreliable and inconvenient cars – there’s another huge subsidy: free road use. We reprehensible drivers of gasoline and diesel vehicles pay a lot in fuel taxes.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s 24th Annual Gas Tax Honesty Report shows that Canadian drivers in 2022 paid an average of 55 cents per litre in gasoline taxes (based on a retail price of $1.76 per litre; exact tax rates vary by province, of course). Combining that information with Statistics Canada data estimating total gasoline consumption of 42.5 billion litres in 2022 means that Canadian drivers collectively pay over $23 billion in road use taxes annually to all levels of government.
Meanwhile, EV drivers continue to pay nothing. Besides the grievous disparity of this situation, Trudeau’s EV mandate would gradually remove gasoline and diesel-fuelled vehicles from the road. Then who will pay to maintain the roads for all those EVs to travel on? Clearly, EVs will need to be taxed in some way, and some provinces are just starting to do so, like Saskatchewan’s $150 extra annual registration fee on EVs, introduced in late 2021. But such baby steps will need to get a lot larger if gasoline-powered vehicles really do start vanishing from daily traffic. But having to start paying their share to maintain roads will make EVs even less attractive to car buyers.
Clearly, the answer to the question ‘Will the shift to EVs have any net environmental benefit?’ is ‘No.’ Moreover, the human cost of trying to meet the EV targets will be profoundly negative.
Now for the most important question. Will this big shift to EVs have any environmental benefit? Manufacturing EV batteries requires huge quantities of “rare earth” minerals as well as conventional metals. A Fraser Institute report published in November, Can Metal Mining Match the Speed of the Planned Electric Vehicle Transition? references an International Energy Agency study showing that to meet international EV pledges a gargantuan 388 new lithium, nickel, cobalt and other related metal mines will be needed worldwide. But the typical timeline from regulatory application to first production varies from six-nine years for lithium to 13-18 years for nickel. Rare-earth mineral production can’t possibly ramp up fast enough to meet the Trudeau government’s 2035 all-EV “mandate”.
What about the human cost of all those mines? Most of the world’s known large rare-earth mineral deposits are in developing countries. A report from a team of researchers led by Northwestern University, entitled Understanding cobalt’s human cost, examined the impact of cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It found that such mining had “dire effects on human well-being,” including “increases in violence, substance abuse, food and water insecurity, and physical and mental health challenges,” as well as uprooting farmers from their lands and in some cases kicking them out of their houses. Half of the world’s rare-earth minerals lie in Africa, where reports of child labour and other human rights abuses are all too common.
The human cost of a “green” future: Depicted is the main cobalt mining site in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where 75 percent of this critical input to EV batteries is mined; as one recent academic report notes, this hazardous industry has “dire effects on human well-being”, including on physical and mental health, and often involves child-labour and human rights abuses. (Source of photos: Siddharth Kara, retrieved from The Independent)
Clearly, the answer to the question “Will the shift to EVs have any net environmental benefit?” is “No.” Moreover, the human cost of trying to meet the EV targets will be profoundly negative.
These formidable direct obstacles to a smooth EV transition make it highly unlikely that Trudeau’s ban on gasoline vehicles will happen. But the most profound underlying reason the entire scheme is probably doomed comes from the man who first articulated the principles of personal and economic freedom. In his 1759 book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, economist and philosopher Adam Smith stated, “The man of the system seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges different pieces upon a chessboard. But people are not chess pieces to be moved around by a hand from above.”
Like philosopher Adam Smith’s (top left) “man of the system”, Justin Trudeau (top right) tries to arrange people as if they are “pieces upon a chessboard”; but the thousands of unsold EVs filling vast parking lots in China, the U.S. and seaports around the world suggest car-buying consumers are still capable of independent decision-making. (Sources of photos: (top right) The Canadian Press/Chad Hipolito; (bottom) Golden Shrimp/Shutterstock)
Justin Trudeau is the very embodiment of Adam Smith’s “man of the system”, attempting to push Canadians around like pawns on an ideological chessboard. But even as I write this column come reports of EV sales collapsing – and of vast parking lots of unsold and perhaps unsaleable EVs in China, Australia and dockside at various seaports – despite aggressive price slashing and all those ever-increasing taxpayer subsidies. The “hand from above” is losing to the independent thinking of regular people.
Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who was a director of five global corporations.
From the Fraser Institute
Asian countries such as China and Japan were not particular threats to prior automotive markets because North America’s massive and diverse internal combustion vehicle markets were capable of relatively lower-cost production of superior quality vehicles. That’s not shaping up to be the case for EVs, which are vastly more expensive coming off North American assembly lines than in China and other Asian countries.
Seemingly every week, Canada’s electric vehicle (EV) transition policy framework grows more incoherent. The goal of Canada’s EV policy is to ensure all new light-duty vehicle sales in Canada are zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs), with a strong emphasis on battery-electric vehicles, by 2035.
The latest incoherence is Prime Minister Trudeau’s announcement of 100 per cent tariffs on Chinese EV imports and 25 per cent tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum imports (the Canada needs to build EVs). This will directly undercut the government’s EV transition targets by denying Canadians access to affordable electric cars.
The stated rationale for the tariffs is, according to Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, that the “Chinese are trying to corner the North American EV market by dumping subsidized vehicles into it” and that “China has an intentional, state-directed policy of overcapacity and oversupply designed to cripple our own industry” so “we simply will not allow that to happen to our EV sector.” And arguably, some of that is probably reasonable.
Tariffs are generally understood as protectionist mechanisms, designed to shield domestic industries from lower-cost foreign competition by making imported goods more expensive. Additionally, they can serve as punitive measures to penalize countries for hostile economic or political actions. By limiting access to one’s markets, tariffs can reduce the profits of the targeted country, thereby pressuring it to alter behaviours or policies. When imposed against countries intentionally sabotaging markets, tariffs may be considered a legitimate response.
But tariffs on China will also hurt Canadians by keeping lower-cost goods out of our market, leaving them with only higher-priced goods and services provided by protected domestic industries that need not fear price competition and thus feel little pressure to lower the prices for their goods and services.
And this is part of the incoherence of the new Trudeau tariff policy. The Trudeau EV mandates are set to create, in essence, a monopoly on the types of automotive technologies (again, EVs) allowed to be used in Canada, which other countries can manufacture more cheaply than domestic manufacturers. Asian countries such as China and Japan were not particular threats to prior automotive markets because North America’s massive and diverse internal combustion vehicle markets were capable of relatively lower-cost production of superior quality vehicles. That’s not shaping up to be the case for EVs, which are vastly more expensive coming off North American assembly lines than in China and other Asian countries.
By driving up the costs of buying EVs in Canada, the Trudeau government will directly undercut its EVs-by-2035 mandate. If people can’t afford EVs, as most currently cannot, the EV mandate targets are doomed. People will simply hold their old internal-combustion vehicles for longer. This trend is already observable in the United States where new vehicles have become more expensive. Americans are holding on to their vehicles longer than ever, with the average vehicle age reaching 13.6 years.
The Trudeau government’s highest priority has been the war on climate change, which various government leaders in Canada and around the world have proclaimed the greatest threat to people and the planet in human history. But if the government is sincere about this, then the priority should be to maximize Canadians’ access to cheaper EVs, and the prime minister should be largely indifferent to where Canadians choose to source those EVs. Indeed, he should urgently want low-cost EVs available to Canadians for there to be any hope of achieving his all-EV by 2035 goal.
Author:
From Canadians For Affordable Energy
More good money is being thrown after bad, but that seems to be the theme of Trudeau’s government.
On Monday Goodyear Tire announced a $575 million expansion of their Eastern Ontario manufacturing plant to produce electric vehicles, and to make their plant more energy efficient.
And Doug Ford and Justin Trudeau were there for the photo opportunity. Why? Because — shocker — this move comes with serious money from taxpayers in Ontario and throughout Canada. Goodyear is set to receive up to $44.3 million from the federal government through the Strategic Innovation Fund and $20 million from Ontario through the provincial Invest Ontario.
In case you’ve lost track of the money — your money — which has been thrown down this blackhole to date, here’s only some of the close to $46 billion that has been committed:
- Northvolt, electric vehicle battery manufacturing facility, up to $1.34 billion
- Stellantis—LGES (NextStar), EV battery manufacturing facility — $5 billion
- Volkswagen (PowerCo), Federal ($700 million) and Ontario governments ($500 million)
- Ford EcoPro, $322 million
- Stellantis, Federal ($529 million) and Ontario government ($513 million)
- Umicore, Federal ($551.3 million) and Ontario government ($424.6 million)
- Ford Motor Company of Canada, $295 million from both the Federal and Ontario governments
- GM Ingersoll, $259 million from both the Federal and Ontario governments
More taxpayer dollars for cars that no one wants to buy, and are only affordable with heavy government subsidies.
In fact, last month Ford Canada announced that they would be abandoning their plans to retool their plant in Oakville, ON to focus on EV production. Instead, the plant will begin to produce their popular F-Series gasoline-powered heavy duty pickup truck. Ford plants in Ohio and Kentucky are at full capacity and can’t keep up with the demand for the F-Series, so they are shifting some of the load to Oakville. (Trudeau might learn a lesson here about supply and demand, which is what makes a healthy economy work.)
Plant workers were no doubt relieved to hear this, as Ford had already delayed the date when the plant would begin producing EVs from 2025 to 2027, due no doubt to their multi-billion dollar annual losses on EVs. (They lost $4.7 billion on EVs in 2023 and they’re projected to lose nearly $5.5 billion this year.) Many workers had already been laid off, and many more layoffs were expected. But now they’ll be hard at work producing a reliable Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) pickup.
This should come as no surprise. We need only look around the world for examples of dwindling EV sales. In Germany, EV sales fell by 37%. This slump is directly related to the premature ending of the purchase subsidies program. Budget issues forced Germany to end the program a year sooner than anticipated.
In fact, whenever a country reports an increase in EV sales, be sure to look at the subsidies being offered. “In France, a social leasing scheme which helps to provide cheap EVs to low-income households helped see BEV sales increase by 14.9 per cent in the first half of 2024”. And in Italy EV incentives helped push EV sales “up by 7 per cent across the first six months of the year.”
The lavish subsidy programs for EVs have created a false economy whereby they are only attractive and affordable with taxpayer handouts. Canada should expect the same slump in sales when our own subsidy programs come to an end.
In fact, the only nation which shows no sign of slowing down on electric vehicles is China, where they’re pumping them out at breakneck speed. This is, of course, so that they can take advantage of the EV mandates which Canada and other nations have enacted. China’s EV manufacturers are able to undercut Western producers since they control the lion’s share of Lithium battery production.
Their government also heavily subsidizes the industry. But chances are, once they control most of the EV market share, bankrupting smaller producers, they’ll jack up the price. And because of the mandates, drivers will either have to pay what they’re asking, or else invest in a horse and buggy.
This has led to calls for the Trudeau government to impose punitive tariffs on Chinese EVs, to prevent them from inundating the Canadian market to the detriment of Canada’s economy and Canadian workers. Trudeau and co have dragged their feet, likely because they don’t want to offend Chairman Xi.
We certainly should impose those tariffs. But what would be even better for regular, everyday Canadian taxpayers — not that that ever seems to be top-of-mind for Trudeau or Doug Ford — would be to scrap the EV mandates altogether. Forcing Canadians to buy EVs by 2035 is a terrible policy that will make us poorer as individuals and poorer as a nation. And it will ultimately fail.
Better to admit that now, while we still have some money we haven’t paid out by the truckload to green corporate grifters.
Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.
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