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
Another day, another electric vehicle (EV) fantasy failure. The Quebec government is “pulling the plug” on its relationship with the Northvolt EV battery company (which is now bankrupt), and will try to recoup some of its $270 million loss on the project. Quebec’s “investment” was in support of a planned $7 billion “megaproject” battery manufacturing facility on Montreal’s South Shore. (As an aside, what normal people would call gambling with taxpayer money, governments call “investments.” But that’s another story.)
Anyway, for those who have not followed this latest EV-burn out, back in September 2023, the Legault government announced plans to “invest” $510 million in the project, which was to be located in Saint-Basile-le-Grand and McMasterville. The government subsequently granted Northvolt a $240 million loan guarantee to buy the land for the plant, then injected another $270 million directly into Northvolt. According to the Financial Post, “Quebec has lost $270 million on its equity investment… but still had a senior secured loan tied to the land acquired to build the plant, which totals nearly $260 million with interest and fees.” In other words, Quebec taxpayers lost big.
But Northvolt is just the latest in a litany of failure by Canadian governments and their dreams of an EV future free of dreaded fossil fuels. I know, politicians say that it’s a battle against climate change, but that’s silly. Canada is such a small emitter of greenhouse gases that nothing it could do, including shutting down the entire national economy, would significantly alter the trajectory of the climate. Anything Canada might achieve would be cancelled out by economic growth in China in a matter of weeks.
So back to the litany of failed or failing EV-dream projects. To date (from about 2020) it goes like this: Ford (2024), Umicore battery (2024), Honda (2025),General Motors CAMI (2025), Lion Electric (2025), Northvolt (2025). And this does not count projects still limping along after major setbacks such as Stellantis and Volkswagen.
One has to wonder how many tombstones of dead EV fantasy projects will be needed before Canada’s climate-obsessed governments get a clue: people are not playing. Car buyers are not snapping up these vehicles as government predicted; the technologies and manufacturing ability are not showing up as government predicted; declining cost curves are not showing up as government predicted; taxpayer-subsidized projects keep dying; the U.S. market for Canada’s EV tech that government predicted has been Trumped out of existence (e.g. the Trump administration has scrapped EV mandates and federal subsidies for EV purchases); and government is taking the money for all these failed predictions from Canadian workers who can’t afford EVs. It really is a policy travesty.
And yet, like a bad dream, Canada’s governments (including the Carney government) are still backing an irrational policy to force EVs into the marketplace. For example, Ottawa stills mandates that all new light-duty vehicle sales be EVs by 2035. This despite Canadian automakers earnest pleas for the government to scrap the mandate.
Canada’s EV policy is quickly coming to resemble something out of dysfunctional-heroic fiction. We are the Don Quixotes, tilting futilely at EV windmills, and Captain Ahabs, trying to slay the dreaded white whale of fossil-fuelled transportation with our EV harpoons. Really, isn’t it time governments took a look at reality and cut their losses? Canada’s taxpayers would surely appreciate the break.
Kenneth P. Green
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Congress is not going to allow Big Auto to sideline consumer privacy and safety while getting subsidized massively by the federal government.
That is because, in late September, by an overwhelming vote of 50 to 1, Chairman Brett Guthrie’s (R-KY) House Energy & Commerce Committee joined the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee in passing the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act.
This legislation is in response to some automakers removing AM radios from new model vehicles despite pleas from America’s public safety community not to do so.
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“They’d rather force consumers to use their infotainment devices — which collect and sell their third-party data — than protect American lives,” Corey Lewandowski, President Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and senior adviser to his 2020 and 2024 campaigns, stated.
The entirety of America’s public safety community spanning the federal, state, and local levels, insists AM radio remaining in cars is critical for protecting the nation’s emergency alerting systems. These systems rely heavily upon AM radio, the only communication method that has stayed reliably accessible during many disasters such as the Sept.11 terrorist attack and major disasters like Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and most recently, Helene.
Brendan Carr, the current chairman of President Trump’s FCC, nominated by President Trump, has also endorsed the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act. In a statement, Carr said that “millions of Americans depend on the value of AM radio and the local news that AM broadcasters offer in communities across the country.” He also recounted hearing firsthand stories of Hurricane Helene victims who “could only access lifesaving information in the days following the storm by tuning into their AM radios.”
AM radio also serves another purpose that the elites in Silicon Valley and Detroit often forget: it keeps rural and working-class America connected. Millions of people outside the big cities rely on AM for local news, farm reports, weather alerts, and even community events. For many small towns, AM stations are a lifeline—far more reliable than expensive streaming services or spotty cell coverage. Pulling it out of cars is yet another way of telling Middle America: “you don’t matter.”
Of course, no good idea in Washington is safe from special interests.
Despite the broad support within Congress, the administration, and throughout the public safety and first responder communities, the bill has faced a full-court press by the musicFIRST Coalition — a group backed by the Recording Industry of America — to tank the legislation unless it is tied to unrelated music royalty reform legislation. That’s cronyism politics at its worst—holding public safety hostage to squeeze out another payday.
However, now that the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act has passed both committees by overwhelming margins, the only stop left for the legislation is the House and Senate Floor — meaning Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and House Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) must call it up for a roll call vote.
At the heart of this fight is more than just whether a radio dial stays in your dashboard. It’s about whether Americans can trust that their safety won’t be sacrificed for corporate profit.
It’s also about data privacy. Automakers and Big Tech are eager to funnel drivers into infotainment systems that monitor every move, harvest personal information, and sell it to the highest bidder. AM radio doesn’t spy on you. It doesn’t crash when the grid goes down. It doesn’t put profit ahead of people. It just works.
For the sake of both public safety and personal freedom, Congress should make sure it stays that way.
Ken Blackwell (@KenBlackwell) is an adviser to the Family Research Council and a chair at the America First Policy Institute. He is a former Mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio, Ohio Treasurer and Secretary of State, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. He is also a former member of the Trump transition team.
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