Canada moves to mandate electric vehicle sales starting in 2025

The Canadian Press

Published

2 years ago

3 minute read

By Mia Rabson in Ottawa

One-fifth of all passenger cars, SUVs and trucks sold in Canada in 2026 will need to run on electricity under new regulations Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault is proposing Wednesday.

By 2030, the mandate will hit 60 per cent of all sales and by 2035, every passenger vehicle sold in Canada will need to be electric.

Manufacturers or importers who don’t meet the sales targets could face penalties under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.

Canada still has a long way to go before approaching the first target in 2025.

In the first six months of this year, electric vehicle sales, including fully-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, made up just 7.2 per cent of new car registrations. For all of 2021, the proportion was 5.2 per cent.

Under the draft regulations, to be formally published Dec. 30, the government proposes tracking the sales by issuing credits for vehicle sales.

Fully electric cars and trucks would be worth a bigger credit than plug-in hybrid versions, though the government acknowledges that plug-in hybrids will likely remain in demand in rural and northern areas.

The mandate fulfils a 2021 Liberal election promise. It’s the first major set of regulations to come out of an emissions reduction plan the government published in April.

That plan is Canada’s broad road map toward hitting its goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors to a level in 2030 that is 40 to 45 per cent below what it was in 2005.

Passenger vehicles account for half of all road transportation emissions and about one-tenth of Canada’s total emissions across all sectors.

Before Wednesday’s move, Canada already had targets for electric vehicle sales. But they were not enforceable, and the government wasn’t successfully compelling car companies to ramp up the number of electric vehicles available for sale.

The new targets will be nationwide, though some provinces are already ahead of others.

Quebec and British Columbia already have provincial sales mandates. An analysis released last week by the Canadian Climate Institute concluded that the mandates helped both provinces move well out ahead of the rest of the country on electric-vehicle use.

Anna Kanduth, a senior research associate at the institute, said global supply of zero-emission vehicles is still limited, though it is growing quickly.

“Auto manufacturers are largely prioritizing jurisdictions with some type of sales mandate,” she wrote, adding that places with mandates have much higher rates of zero-emission vehicle adoption and more model choice.

B.C. is leading the field in electric-vehicle sales, which account for almost 15 per cent of all new vehicles registered between January and June. Quebec is in second, at 11.4 per cent of registrations.

There is a steep drop off to third-place Ontario, where only 5.5 per cent of new registrations are for electric vehicles. The number is below four per cent in all other provinces.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 21, 2022.

Related Topics:#ElectricVehicleSales feature

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Trudeau’s new tax package gets almost everything wrong

Published on November 22, 2024

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Ben Eisen and Jake Fuss

Recently, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced several short-term initiatives related to tax policy. Most notably, the package includes a two-month GST holiday on certain items and a one-time $250 cheque that will be sent to all Canadians with incomes under $150,000.

Unfortunately, the Trudeau government’s package is a grab bag of bad ideas that will not do anything to get Canada out of the long-term growth rut in which our economy is mired. There are too many to list all in one place, but here are four of the biggest problems with Prime Minister Trudeau’s tax plan.

It reduces the wrong taxes. When it comes to economic growth, not all taxes are created equal. Some cause far more economic harm per dollar of government revenue raised than others. The government’s package creates a holiday on the GST for some items (only for two months) which is a mistake given that the GST is one of the least economically harmful components of the tax mix. Canada’s recent growth record is abysmal, and boosting growth should be a primary goal of any changes to tax policy. A GST cut of any duration fails this test relative to other tax cuts.
Temporary tax holidays shift consumption in time, they don’t boost growth. The government’s GST reduction is actually a short-term tax holiday on certain items that will last two months. There are decades worth of economic research showing that when governments create short-term tax breaks, they may change the timing of consumption, but they won’t contribute to actual economic growth. Shifting consumption from the future to the present won’t help get Canada out of the economic doldrums. This is particularly true of the Trudeau tax holiday since purchases that Canadians may have made after the two-month holiday period will simply be shifted forward to take advantage of the absence of the GST. As noted above, there are better taxes to cut than the GST, but no matter what taxes we are talking about permanent reductions are vastly superior to temporary tax cuts like short-term holidays.
One-time tax rebates don’t improve economic incentives. Perhaps the worst element of the Trudeau government’s announcement was a plan to send $250 cheques to all Canadians earning under $150,000. One-time tax rebates are a terrible way to provide tax relief. When you cut income tax rates, you improve incentives for people to work and invest because they get to keep a larger share of their earnings. This helps the economy grow. One-time rebates that you get regardless of the economic choices you make has no similar effect. This means that the rebate with its $4.7 billion price tag won’t help Canada’s poor growth performance.
It borrows from the future to give to the present. The federal government is currently running a large deficit. This raises the question of who will have to pay the $4.7 billion bill for the one-time payments announced today. The answer is that the government will have to borrow the money and therefore future taxpayers will have to either pay it off or service the extra debt indefinitely. The money the Trudeau government will send out won’t come out of thin air, it’ll have to be borrowed with the burden falling on future taxpayers.

The Trudeau government got one thing conceptually right, which is that there are advantages to reducing the tax burden on Canadians. Unfortunately, the policy package it has put forward to provide tax relief gets everything wrong. It reduces the wrong taxes, shifts taxes temporally rather than cutting them, does nothing to improve economic incentives, and burdens future taxpayers. With the holiday season around the corner, this attempt at a gift to Canadian taxpayers is the economic equivalent of a lump of coal in the stocking.

Authors:

Ben Eisen and Jake Fuss

Business

DEI gone?: GOP lawmakers prep to clean house in federal government

Published on November 22, 2024

Todayville

From The Center Square

By Casey Harper

Many of Trump’s cabinet picks so far have also pledged to remove DEI programs from the federal government. These policies can range from training federal employees on “white privilege” to using medical research funds to study racism to awarding federal funds to recipients only as long as they toe the line on DEI orthodoxy.

President-elect Donald Trump’s win and his subsequent creation of a Department of Government Efficiency have galvanized lawmakers to pave the way for legislation to clean out diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, staff and programs that have ballooned under the Biden-Harris administration.

The Center Square was given advance copy of two bills filed Thursday by U.S. Rep. Bob Good, R-La., to end DEI practices at the Department of Housing and Urban Development

The first bill, the Flexibility in Housing Act of 2024, would block a Biden-Harris administration rule at HUD. That rule is about to be finalized and would require HUD grant recipients to implement “equity-driven housing plans.”

The newly introduced bill, however, would block that rule and give power to states and local governments to decide how best to spend the funds.

The second bill, the “No Discrimination in Housing Act,” would prevent large corporations from using DEI programs to get federal tax credits in buying up single family American homes, something many economists say is driving up the cost of homeownership for Americans.

The new bill “would prohibit any entity with a DEI initiative from receiving the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit – thereby ensuring the tax credit is distributed based on merit – not for the advancement of the radical DEI ideology.”

“The Biden-Harris Administration’s radicalization of housing policy prioritizes woke DEI corporations, yet does nothing that will actually drive down the cost of a home in an economy destroyed by Bidenflation,” Good told The Center Square. “My bills aim to restore Trump-era housing flexibility and eliminate the DEI housing policies that prohibit families from pursuing the American dream.”

These two bills, first obtained by The Center Square, are in line with Republicans’ renewed push to eliminate the hard left turn toward DEI policies taken in the last few years of the Biden-Harris administration.

Those policies have been under the microscope for years, but Trump’s win gives Republicans hope they can be undone.

Many of Trump’s cabinet picks so far have also pledged to remove DEI programs from the federal government. These policies can range from training federal employees on “white privilege” to using medical research funds to study racism to awarding federal funds to recipients only as long as they toe the line on DEI orthodoxy.

The latest high-profile examples of controversial DEI spending involves the Federal Emergency Management Administration. Amid the scandal of its handling of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, reporting has shown that FEMA lists DEI and equity as it number one priority.

U.S. Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, introduced the Dismantle DEI Act, which advanced out of the House Oversight Committee, which would eliminate DEI programs in the federal government and return to a “colorblind” approach.

“Diversity, equity, and inclusion – these are words that, on the surface, seem to represent ideals we can all support,” Cloud said. But when these principles are redefined and implemented as an ideology within our federal government, they take on a meaning that diverges from their original intent.”

A recent report from Do No Harm documented about 500 examples of DEI programs across many agencies choosing to reward some Americans over others.

“Under the guise of progress, this ideology seeks to categorize individuals based on immutable characteristics rather than valuing the content of their character or their individual achievements,” Cloud continued.