The problem with Electric Vehicles

From Canadians for Affordable Energy

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.

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Canada’s EV subsidies are wracking up billions in losses for taxpayers, and not just in the auto industry

Published on October 2, 2025

Dan McTeague

By Dan McTeague

To anyone who thought that the Liberals’ decision to postpone enforcement of their Electric Vehicle (EV) mandate by one year was part of a well-thought-out plan to get that disastrous program back on track, well, every day brings with it news that you were wrong. In fact, the whole project seems to be coming apart at the seams.

Here’s the latest crisis Mark Carney and his carnival of ideologues are having to deal with. Late last year, the Liberal party instituted a 100% tariff on Chinese-made EVs. The idea was to protect the Canadian EV industry from China dumping their vehicles into our country, at prices far lower than Canadian companies can afford due to their massive state subsidies. This has been a major problem in the EU, which is also attempting to force a transition to EVs.

But Beijing wasn’t going to take that lying down. Taking advantage of Western environmentalist sentiment is an important part of their economic plans — see, for instance, how they’ve cornered the global solar panel market, though the factories making them are powered by massive amounts of coal. So they retaliated with a 75% duty on Canadian canola seed and a 100% tariff on canola oil and canola meal.

This was big enough to really hurt Canadian farmers, and Ottawa was forced to respond with more than $300 million in new relief programs for canola producers. Even so, our farmers have warned that short-term relief from the government will do little if the tariffs are here for the long-term.

With pressure on Carney mounting, his Industry Minister Melanie Joly announced that the government was “looking at” dropping tariffs on Chinese EVs in the hope that China would ease off on their canola tariffs.

That may be good news for canola producers, but how about the automotive companies? They’ve grown increasingly unhappy with the EV mandate, as Canadian consumers have been slow to embrace them, and they’ve been confronted with the prospect of paying significant fines unless they raise prices on the gas-and-diesel driven vehicles which consumers actually want to make the EVs that they don’t really want more attractive.

That’s the context for Brian Kingston, CEO of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association, saying that dropping these tariffs “would be a disaster.”

“China has engaged in state-supported industrial policy to create massive overcapacity in EV production, and that plan is coming to fruition now,” Kingston said. “When you combine that with weak labour and environmental standards, Chinese manufacturers are not competing with Canadian, American, or Mexican manufacturers on a level playing field. We simply cannot allow those vehicles to be dumped into the Canadian market.”

The auto manufacturers Kingston represents are understandably upset about suddenly having to compete with underpriced Chinese EVs. After all, with the government forcing everyone to buy a product they really don’t want, are most people going to patriotically pay more for that product, or will they just grab whichever one is cheaper? I know which one I think is more likely.

And then there’s a related problem — the federal and provincial governments have “invested” somewhere in the neighborhood of $52.5 billion to make Canada a cog in the global EV supply chain. In response to Joly’s announcement, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has gone “all in” on EVs, wrote an open letter to the prime minister saying that canceling the tariffs would mean losing out on that “investment,” and put 157,000 Canadian automotive jobs at risk.

Now, it’s worth noting that automakers all over Ontario have already been cutting jobs while scaling back their EV pledges. So even with the tariffs, this “investment” hasn’t been paying out particularly well. Keeping them in place just to save Doug Ford’s bacon seems like the worst of all options.

But it seems to me that the key to untangling this whole mess has been the option I’ve been advocating from the beginning: repeal the EV mandate. That makes Canada less of a mark for China. It benefits the taxpayers by not incentivizing our provincial and federal governments to throw good money after bad, attempting to subsidize companies to protect a shrinking number of EV manufacturing jobs.

The heart of this trade war is an entirely artificial demand for EVs. Removing the mandate from the equation would lower the stakes.

In the end, the best policy is to trust Canadians to make their own decisions. Let the market decide.

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Dan McTeague

’Net-Zero’ Carney’s going to build new pipelines? I’ll believe it when I see it!

Published on August 24, 2025

Dan McTeague

By Dan McTeague

Ever since Mark Carney’s rise to power, people have been trying to sell me on the idea that he’s just what this country needs — a (supposedly) practical, no-nonsense businessman who can clean up the mess his highly-ideological predecessor, Justin Trudeau, left us in. To reinforce this claim, they point to the constant rumblings about Carney’s commitment to building new oil and gas pipelines in Canada.

I’m sorry, folks, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Now, building new pipelines is an understandably popular idea. Construction alone would be a serious job creator. New pipelines would enable us to further capitalize on our abundant natural resources. They would pump up the domestic oil and gas supply, bringing down the cost of energy for families and businesses alike, thereby invigorating our economy and fortifying the Loonie.

They would also reinforce national unity at a time when that is being sorely tested.

Green propaganda has created and increasingly widened ideological divides over the resource sector, still the backbone of our economy. Our thriving activist class are happy to exploit these divisions and to do whatever they can to kill new resource projects before they get off the ground. Over time, this has made it just plain easier to sell Canadian fossil fuels to the US, which has been happy to take them off our hands.

Make no mistake, if we made good use of this period of unfortunately high tensions with our cousins to the south, by beefing up our energy infrastructure and fortifying our economy, which would ultimately make us a more attractive trading partner, I’d be all for it.

That said, anyone who believes that Carney is fully committed to new pipelines should revisit what he’s actually said on the matter. They would discover that he has been talking out of both sides of his mouth on pipelines since the moment he stepped out from behind the curtain and publicly took the reins of the Liberal Party. He’s been purposely vague when talking to pipeline-sympathetic crowds out west, and explicitly reassuring when speaking to anti-pipeline crowds elsewhere, saying things like “I would never impose [a pipeline] on Quebec.”

Which should surprise no one! Mark Carney is still Mark Carney. From his banking career to his time at the megafirm Brookfield, from his role as the UN Special Envoy for Climate Leadership and Finance to founding the (now collapsed) Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), he has spent his entire career working towards a net-zero global economy, no matter how disastrous this would be for the world generally and Canada specifically.

Carney himself described his magnum opus, GFANZ, as being “relentlessly, ruthlessly, absolutely focused on the transition to net-zero.” The same could be said about Carney himself.

Which is to say, though he is more sophisticated, Carney is no less of a “Green” ideologue than Justin Trudeau.

“But, but, but!” I can hear people saying, “He saved us from the carbon tax!”

To which I answer: No, he did not. A longtime apostle of carbon taxation generally, and of Trudeau’s carbon tax specifically, Carney’s main issue with the carbon tax was that it had become “too divisive” — meaning we had noticed its effect on our lives and started complaining about it. To fix that, he used what amounted to an accounting trick to hide it from our view.

Meanwhile, he remains committed to all of his party’s environmentalist legislation and regulations, including the Clean Fuel Standard, which jacks up the ethanol content of our gasoline, while progressively raising the price per litre; Bill C-48, the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, which significantly reduces our ability to export our natural resources; Bill C-59, which bans businesses from touting the environmental positives of their work if it doesn’t meet a government-approved standard; and the egregious Electric Vehicle mandate, which forces us to buy, starting next year, cars which are poorly suited for our climate, geography, and lifestyle, and for which we simply do not have the infrastructure.

And, most pertinent to this discussion, Mark Carney remains committed to Bill C-69, the “No More Pipelines Act,” which even the Supreme Court said overstepped the federal government’s constitutional authority.

So despite all of their advantages, Mark Carney’s decades of net-zero commitments make the chances of us actually getting a single new pipeline out of this government extremely remote, probably nonexistent.

I’d love to be wrong. I don’t think I am.