Dan McTeague
The problem with Electric Vehicles
From Canadians for Affordable Energy
Written By Dan McTeague
For years now we’ve been hearing about the wonders of electric vehicles (EVs). Enormous amounts of money have been spent by governments to entice people to buy them, from subsidies to free charging stations.
Here in Canada, the Trudeau Liberals have already subsidised EVs at a cost of $1 billion. Another $680 million in the next five years will go toward the Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program (ZEVIP) to build an entire new infrastructure of charging stations.
In Ontario, Doug Ford’s government are ready “to become a North American hub for the next generation of electric vehicles,” and Ford’s PCs have recently committed to matching a $295 million investment from the Trudeau’s Liberals to retool the Ford Oakville Assembly Complex to become a global hub for battery electric vehicle production.
Electric vehicles are held up as the great green alternative to gas-powered vehicles. In fact, the federal government has set a mandatory target for all new light-duty cars and passenger trucks to be zero-emission by 2035 [read: electric and not gas-powered]. This is even more ambitious than their previous goal of 100% sales by 2040.
And, it seems, virtually the entire Canadian political class has either embraced or surrendered to the seemingly unstoppable momentum of EVs.
Well, here’s an interesting twist. Just the other week it was revealed that the Swiss government is considering legislation that would make it illegal for people to drive EVs over the winter except when it’s “absolutely necessary”.
Yes, you read that correctly. The Swiss government is discouraging people – to the point of making it illegal! – from driving their electric cars.
Why? Simple: there is not enough energy supply in Switzerland to power them.
Confused? How can this be?
Let me explain.
During the summer months, Switzerland gets around 60 percent of its energy from hydropower. But in the winter, hydro can’t produce enough energy, so the country imports a lot of electricity from France and Germany – both of which have long been dependent on Russian oil and gas imports.
Now that those “fossil fuels” have largely been cut off, these various European countries – not just Switzerland – are facing severe energy shortages this winter. This means that there won’t be enough electricity for people to charge their EVs. This move highlights the obvious flaw in this push towards electrification, especially EVs. While EVs don’t burn fuel, you need to charge the battery which, of course, requires energy.
Still confused? Right – perhaps you have never stopped to consider where the “energy” comes from that powers the EV charging stations?
Or did you just think that it was “magic” that powered the EVs?
Almost everywhere in the world, the charging stations are getting a lot of their power from oil and gas – the very same “fossil fuel” energy that EVs were supposed to replace. In many places, the power is coming from coal.
So to be clear, most countries typically need coal or oil or gas as a source of energy to power the charging stations, the very charging stations upon which many EV owners “power” their smug virtue signalling.
Some EV owners think, and even say out loud, that they are more concerned about the environment than you are. How can they say this? Well, this is because they have an electric vehicle, while you drive a gas-guzzling vehicle that is destroying the planet.
All the while, their very same electric vehicle most likely gets its energy, ultimately, from the same sort of greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuel that you do.
Ahem. (There are many other issues with EVs including the very expensive batteries with materials mined out of the earth, which is hardly a “zero emission” activity, or the reliability of the vehicles in our northern climate. More on that in another post.)
Consider too that here in Canada, the Trudeau government is pushing hard for us to move away from fossil fuels which provide reliable base power to our grid, towards renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, which are unreliable and intermittent.
Now imagine how this could play out over the next decades. If governments follow through on their plans to ban traditional gas-powered vehicles, it is their stated hope that everyone will have to drive an EV.
But, at the same time, governments want to shut down the traditional energy sector which – for the foreseeable future –provides most of the energy supply that powers EVs. If we’re forced to get all our power from wind and solar, that just means most people will never be able to drive anywhere.
We should consider what is happening in Switzerland as a warning shot. Our energy grids simply cannot provide enough power for electric vehicles, and this move towards EVs for everyone will fail. The Trudeau government is promoting a short-sighted, virtue-signalling policy that will cause significant societal harm along the way.
Maybe the disastrous situation in Europe this winter will lead to some long-overdue second thoughts about EVs, and the whole climate change agenda.
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.
Dan McTeague
Remember that he is the founder and co-chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ,) and its subgroup, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), which seek to harness the might of global finance to force Net-Zero on people who would never vote for it, and stop banks from investing in oil and gas projects, to the detriment of both their shareholders and the wider Canadian economy.
Well, the coronation is over, and it was exactly as anti-climactic as I expected it would be. The Liberals pulled out all the stops to get Mark Carney over the finish line, preventing real challengers from running, and carefully stage-managing the whole farce so that (with the notable exception of Frank Baylis) no one even attempted to discuss anything of substance.
And, after all of the water-carrying and kool-aid slinging, 150,000 people — in a nation of 40 million — got to choose our newest prime minister, a man who has never submitted himself to the voters, who doesn’t even have a seat in parliament.
It is a national scandal.
To me this is all a perfect encapsulation of what the Liberal Party of Canada has become since Justin Trudeau took the reins in 2013. As a decades-long member of that party, and having had the honour of serving as a Liberal Member of Parliament for 18 years, I can attest to the fact that it was once a party of practicality and diverse viewpoints — the most important kind of diversity there is — all ordered toward the good of our beloved nation.
But once Justin took over, on the strength of the Trudeau name, it quickly devolved into a cult of personality, built on hair and socks, and animated by fluffy, far-left magical thinking from which good Liberals were forbidden from dissenting. Out went practicality and any concern for good governance. In came the world’s “first post-national state,” and Net-Zero carbon emissions. Why? Because it is the current year.
Well, predictably, it all fell apart, though it took some time for Team Trudeau to spend down the capital we built up over the years, when better men and women were in power. And now that we Canadians find ourselves in a tough spot of his creation, Justin has handed the keys over to his hand-picked successor and co-conspirator, Mark Carney.
But aside from the man at the helm, what is actually going to change?
Nothing of substance.
Sure, Carney has offered some criticism of Trudeau’s Carbon Tax, but only once the public had soured on it. Even then, he began walking back his support by saying the Carbon Tax had “served a purpose up until now,” and he’s now pledging that his government will “immediately eliminate the consumer Carbon Tax,” which is to say, the portion of the tax which is most visible to voters.
That really is his problem with it — not that it makes it harder for working Canadians to gas up their cars, heat their homes, or afford groceries. No, it’s because the tax is paid by consumers directly, and so it’s too easy to see how it’s making our lives more expensive. Meanwhile, the industrial Carbon Tax, which is paid by businesses, will remain untouched, or perhaps raised, despite the fact that those costs will ultimately be passed on to the consumers.
This “sneaky” move is characteristic of Carney’s career thus far. Remember that he is the founder and co-chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ,) and its subgroup, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), which seek to harness the might of global finance to force Net-Zero on people who would never vote for it, and stop banks from investing in oil and gas projects, to the detriment of both their shareholders and the wider Canadian economy.
This scheme came apart pretty quickly earlier this year, as banks in both the U.S. and Canada withdrew from Carney’s pet projects in response to accusations that they were engaged in collusion. But even so, this story tells us quite a lot about Carney’s “Green” elitist instincts.
These could be summed up as follows: Never trust regular people to make decisions about their own lives. Make those decisions for them, and at such a high altitude that they’ll have no one to complain to once they realize that something has gone wrong.
This is not the way to prosperity, especially with the perilous economic threats we’re currently facing. Trump’s tariffs have bite because Trudeau and Carney have left our economy in such a precarious state.
And now Carney is proposing that we go toe-to-toe with the world’s largest economy while continuing to smother our own economic vibrancy with essentially the entire Net-Zero superstructure intact — excluding, apparently, the Consumer Carbon Tax, but including the Industrial Carbon Tax, “Clean Fuel” regulations; Electric Vehicle mandates; and the heaps of legislation and regulations which impede our building new pipelines and selling our oil and gas overseas. It’s madness!
Unfortunately, Donald Trump is doing his darndest to help them attempt it. I’m skeptical of the current polling numbers which show the Liberal Party soaring. I know enough of these pollsters to know where their sympathies lie, and whom they owe favours to. But the Rally ‘Round the Flag sentiment is real. And the people who put Carney in power are hoping it will last long enough to keep them competitive in an election. Maybe it will.
Hopefully Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives can stop that from happening. And their best bet would be to acknowledge what I’ve been saying for quite some time — that “Axe the Tax” is not enough. That the more they rely on piecemeal policies, bandaids for the gaping wounds in our economy, the easier it is for Carney and the Trudeaupians to just adopt their own twisted versions of them while ultimately changing nothing at all.
So Mr. Poilievre should pledge to not just Axe the Tax, but to Nix Net-Zero. The good of all Canadians, no matter their party, depends on it.
Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy
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