Automotive
Electric vehicles facing uphill climb

From Resource Works
Ford shifts from EVs to gasoline trucks in Oakville due to declining demand and financial losses, challenging government EV targets.
In October 2020, the federal and Ontario governments announced with fanfare that they would each pour $295 million into helping Ford upgrade its assembly plant in Oakville to start making electric vehicles.
“The upgrade of the Ford plant will make Oakville into the company’s No 1. electric vehicle factory in North America,” we were told.
And Prime Minister Trudeau declared: “This is a win-win. . . . helping accelerate our transition to a low-carbon, clean-growth economy, which will help protect our environment, drive innovation, and create many good middle-class jobs.”
In April 2023, Ford announced it will spend $1.8 billion to retool its Oakville Assembly Complex, beginning in mid-2024, to build next-generation passenger electric vehicles in 2025.
Then the target date of 2025 becomes 2027.
And now, in July 2024, reality strikes: Ford confirmed that the Oakville plant would no longer produce electric three-row SUVs but would instead turn out larger, gasoline-powered versions of its flagship F-Series pickup truck.
The reason: a global slowdown in electric vehicle demand, with hesitant customers delaying plans to buy EVs, and many opting instead for hybrid-electric vehicles.
Ford, for one, said it will step up hybrid offerings and that by 2030 it expects to offer hybrid powertrains across its lineup of gas-powered vehicles. Ford has also delayed production of electric pickup trucks in Tennessee.
Ford now says its electric vehicle unit lost $1.3 billion USD in the first quarter alone. It sold 10,000 vehicles in that period, and thus lost about $132,000 US for every EV it sold.
General Motors also announced it would cut production of EVs, citing slowing demand.
As far as we know, Honda Canada is proceeding with a $15 billion plan to create Canada’s first comprehensive electric-vehicle supply chain, comprising four plants in Ontario. It includes Honda’s first EV assembly plant in Alliston, ON, which Honda said will produce up to 240,000 vehicles per year.
Flavio Volpe, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association, said the Ford decision is “not good news,” and he fears there will be similar announcements from other car companies.
And automotive industry analyst Robert Karwel says: “I would definitely not be surprised to see announcements from other companies.”
“People are getting payment fatigue right now generally, and EVs are more expensive,” said Karwel, a senior manager of J.D. Power’s Power Information Network. “The average car payment hit $900 a month in January.”
In the first quarter of this year, 46,744 light and medium-duty EVs were registered across Canada, 11.2% of the market share.
B.C. has long led Canada in the uptake of electric vehicles, and in May they made up 10.7% of light-duty vehicle sales.
But another factor weighing on consumers is B.C.’s recent reduction in rebates for electric vehicles.
B.C. reduced rebates to $3,000 for battery, fuel-cell and longer-range plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and $1,500 for shorter-range plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. The previous incentives ranged from $2,500 to $6,000, depending on the kind of car.
And now, only vehicles sold for under $55,000 qualify for the rebates. Previously, the maximum price was $77,000 to qualify. The federal rebate of $5,000 for qualifying vehicles, introduced on May 1, is still available.
If the slowdown in demand continues, it will only help power producers such as B.C. Hydro, which face staggering demand for power, for EVs and for industrial and clean-energy use.
The federal government requires at least 20% of new vehicles sold in Canada to be zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) by 2026, at least 60% by 2030, and 100% by 2035. (ZEVs include battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.)
Prime Minister Trudeau: “As a great Canadian once said, that is where the puck is going and that is where we’re going to be.”
B.C. is even more ambitious: It has set targets requiring 90% of all light-duty new vehicle sales to be zero-emission by 2030 and 100% by 2035.
That means B.C. needs substantially more power to cope with EVs — and will require even more than that to handle expected population growth and the province’s plans to electrify BC’s economy and push clean energy.
Now the Energy Futures Institute (EFI) calls in a new report for “a dramatic increase in domestic electricity production” in B.C., and cancellation of current plans to wind down some existing power-generation facilities.
EFI chair Barry Penner: “After years without new generation coming online, the long-awaited Site C dam is expected to start producing power by next year. Even if Site C was available last year or this year, it wouldn’t be enough to avoid having to import electricity from the United States and Alberta to keep our lights on.”
As for the federal target, the Public Policy Forum says Canada must build more electricity generation in the next 25 years than it has over the last century in order to support a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.
All in all, Canada’s electric vehicle transition could cost more than $300 billion by 2040 as the installation of charging infrastructure expands, upgrades to the electrical grid are made, and other changes take place, according to a report released by Natural Resources Canada.
Among other things, it says Canada needs to add 40,000 public charging ports per year on average between now and 2040. There now are around 32,000 public ports across the country, and roughly 11,000 were installed in 2023.
The Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association says lack of charging infrastructure is already deterring some would-be EV buyers. A lack of charging station availability was cited as a top concern by 72% of consumers, according to an Autotrader Canada survey conducted in March.
- Cornelius van Kooten, an economics professor and Canada Research Chair in Environmental Studies and Climate Change at the University of Victoria, said the federal timeline for electric vehicles “isn’t realistic or feasible.”
In a study for the free-enterprise Fraser Institute, he said that to meet the goal, Canada would need the equivalent of 10 big new hydro dams (or 13 large natural-gas power plants).
Quebec, for one, has already had to start limiting industrial expansion because it can’t fill all the power needs.
So you can but sigh when you hear of Quebec’s latest plan for electric vehicles: it is moving ahead with regulations that not only mandate EV sales but actually prohibit sales of any internal combustion engines — including plug-in hybrids, from January 1, 2035.
2025 Federal Election
Don’t let the Liberals fool you on electric cars

Dan McTeague
“The Liberals, hoodwinked by the ideological (and false) narrative that EVs are better for the environment, want to force you to replace the car or truck you love with one you can’t afford which doesn’t do what you need it to do.”
The Liberals’ carbon tax ploy is utterly shameless. For years they’ve been telling us that the Carbon Tax was a hallmark of Canadian patriotism, that it was the best way to save the planet, that it was really a “price on pollution,” which would ultimately benefit the little guy, in the form of a rebate in which Canadians would get back all the money they paid in, and more!
Meanwhile big, faceless Captain Planet villain corporations — who are out there wrecking the planet for the sheer fun of it! — will shoulder the whole burden.
But then, as people started to feel the hit to their wallets and polling on the topic fell off a cliff, the Liberals’ newly anointed leader — the environmentalist fanatic Mark Carney — threw himself a Trumpian signing ceremony, at which he and the party (at least rhetorically) kicked the carbon tax to the curb and started patting themselves on the back for saving Canada from the foul beast. “Don’t ask where it came from,” they seem to be saying. “The point is, it’s gone.”
Of course, it’s not. The Consumer Carbon Tax has been zeroed out, at least for the moment, not repealed. Meanwhile, the Industrial Carbon Tax, on business and industry, is not only being left in place, it’s being talked up in exactly the same terms as the Consumer Tax was.
No matter that it will continue to go up at the same rate as the Consumer Tax would have, such that it will be indistinguishable from the Consumer Tax by 2030. And no matter that the burden of that tax will ultimately be passed down to working Canadians in the form of higher prices.
Of course, when that happens, Carney & Co will probably blame Donald Trump, rather than their own crooked tax regime.
Yes, it is shameless. But it also puts Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives in a bind. They’ve been proclaiming their intention to “Axe the Tax” for quite some time now. On the energy file, it was pretty much all you could get them to talk about. So much so that I was worried that upon entering government, they might just go after the low hanging fruit, repeal the Carbon Tax, and move on to other things, leaving the rest of the rotten Net-Zero superstructure in place.
But now, since the Liberals beat them to it (or claim they did,) the Conservatives are left grasping for a straightforward, signature policy which they can use to differentiate themselves from their opponents.
Poilievre’s recently announced intention to kill the Industrial Carbon Tax is welcome, especially at a time when Canadian business is under a tariff threat from both the U.S. and China. But that requires some explanation, and as the old political saying goes, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
There is one policy change however, which comes to mind as a potential replacement. It’s bold, it would make the lives of Canadians materially better, and it’s so deeply interwoven with the “Green” grift of the environmentalist movement of which Mark Carney is so much a part that his party couldn’t possibly bring themselves to steal it.
Pierre Poilievre should pledge to repeal the Liberals’ Electric Vehicle mandate.
The EV mandate is bad policy. It forces Canadians to buy an expensive product — EVs cost more than Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles even when the federal government was subsidizing their purchase with a taxpayer-funded rebate of $5,000 per vehicle, but that program ran out of money in January and was discontinued. Without that rebate, EVs haven’t a prayer of competing with ICE vehicles.
EVs are particularly ill-suited for Canada. Their batteries are bad at holding a charge in the cold. Even in mild weather, EVs aren’t known for their reliability, a major downside in a country as spread out as ours. Maybe it’ll work out if you live in a big city, but what if you’re in the country? Heaven help you if your EV battery dies when you’re an hour away from everywhere.
Moreover, Canada doesn’t have the infrastructure to support a total replacement of gas-and-diesel driven vehicles with EVs. Our already-strained electrical grid just doesn’t have the capacity to support millions of EVs being plugged in every night. Natural Resources Canada estimates that we will need somewhere in the neighborhood of 450,000 public charging stations to support an entirely electric fleet. At the moment, we have roughly 30,000. That’s a pretty big gap to fill in ten years.
And that’s another fact which doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it should. The law mandates that every new vehicle sold in Canada must be electric by 2035. Maybe that sounded incredibly far in the future when it was passed, but now it’s only ten years away! That’s not a lot of time for these technological problems or cost issues to be resolved.
So the pitch from Poilievre here is simple.
“The Liberals, hoodwinked by the ideological (and false) narrative that EVs are better for the environment, want to force you to replace the car or truck you love with one you can’t afford which doesn’t do what you need it to do. If you vote Conservative, we will fix that, so you will be free to buy the vehicle that meets your needs, whether it’s battery or gas powered, because we trust you to make decisions for yourself. Mark Carney, on the other hand, does not. We won’t just Axe the Tax, we will End the EV Mandate!”
A decade (and counting) of Liberal misrule has saddled this country with a raft of onerous and expensive Net-Zero legislation I’d like to see the Conservative Party campaign against.
These include so-called “Clean Fuel” Regulations, Emissions Caps, their war on pipelines and Natural Gas terminals, not to mention Bill C-59, which bans businesses from touting the environmental benefits of their work if it doesn’t meet a government-approved standard.
But the EV mandate is bad for Canada, and terrible for Canadians. A pledge to repeal it would be an excellent start.
Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.
Automotive
Trump Must Act to Halt the Tesla Terror Campaign

Christopher F. Rufo
The Left’s splintering violence threatens a veto over democratic power.
Elon Musk finds himself at the fulcrum of American life. His companies are leading the field across the automotive, space, robotics, and AI industries. His ownership of the social platform X gives him significant influence over political discourse. And his DOGE initiative represents the single greatest threat to the permanent administrative state. Musk is arguably the most powerful man in the United States, including President Trump.
The Left has taken notice. Left-wing activists have long practiced a tactic called “power mapping,” which entails diagramming the opposing political movement and identifying “chokepoints.” They have designated Musk as one such chokepoint. This month, activists claimed to have organized 500 protests against Elon Musk’s Tesla—dubbed the “Tesla Takedown”—with demonstrations outside sales lots and a series of incidents of vandalism, property destruction, and fire bombings. A pattern has also emerged of individuals scratching or spray-painting parked Teslas, looking to intimidate owners and potential owners or just to express hatred of Musk.
Precedents exist for this kind of escalation. In the 1970s, following the frustrations of the civil rights era, left-wing splinter groups launched targeted terror campaigns and symbolic acts of violence. They bombed the U.S. Capitol, assassinated police officers, and even self-immolated in imitation of Buddhist monks. We may be entering a similar phase today, as the collapse of the Black Lives Matter movement gives rise to radicalized left-wing factions willing to embrace violence. If so, Musk’s Tesla may be the Number One target.
What, exactly, motivates this campaign? At its core, the Left appears to be shifting from an “antiracist” narrative to an anti-wealth one—from a racial frame to an economic one. The sentiment driving the Tesla Takedown is rooted in economic resentment and a desire for leveling. Musk has become a symbol of everything progressives oppose: oligarchy, capitalism, wealth, and innovation. These, in their view, are marks of the oppressor. They scorn the futuristic Cybertruck, SpaceX rockets, and Optimus robots, believing that such creations should be dismantled and repurposed into chassis for public buses or I-beams for public housing.
A certain element of left-wing Luddism is at work here, but the greater part of these activists’ motives is resentment. Musk represents the triumph of the great man of industry, something the Left believes should not exist.
Unfortunately, the Tesla Takedown may succeed. The Left has likely identified Tesla as a chokepoint because it’s easier to dissuade consumers from buying a car they associate with a malevolent political cause—or fear might be vandalized—than it is to persuade them to buy one in support of Musk and DOGE. When it comes to purchasing a Tesla, fear among the average American is a more powerful motivator than enthusiasm among the MAGA base.
Some evidence suggests that the campaign has made an economic impact. Tesla stock peaked around the time of President Trump’s inauguration and since then has lost approximately 40 percent of its value. Musk has accumulated more power than any other American, but that means that he has more points of vulnerability. His wealth and power are tied to his companies—most importantly, his consumer car company, which depends on individual purchases rather than institutional contracts (like SpaceX).
Trump has signaled that he understands this dilemma. He appeared at the White House in a Tesla and has voiced support for Musk’s firms. Justice Department prosecutors—and their allies in state government—must translate this support into policy by identifying and punishing those who destroy property as a means of political intimidation.
The administration needs to make clear that radical left-wing factions cannot use violence to wield a veto over democratic governance. If the partnership between Trump and Musk is to produce meaningful results, it must be backed by the full protection of the law.
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