By Ray Rivers
July 5th, 2025
BURLINGTON, ON
After forcing the Canadian government to cancel its digital services tax (DST) everyone is expecting Trump to go after our supply management system. That’ll be a tough sell, given that the government recently passed a law protecting our supply management systems from being traded away.
So if that is off the table another negotiating point, especially around the auto sector, will be Canada’s electric vehicle (EV) mandate. The mandate requires that all new auto’s sold in Canada must be not polluting by 2035, with some interim targets along the way.
President Trump has been a climate change denier every day he has been in office.
Trump has always hated electric cars. He removed all of the US federal consumer incentives to purchase them from previous Biden rules. And he orchestrated a legislative override of California’s EV mandate, which looks a lot like Canada’s. Trump, Mr. Drill-Baby-Drill, makes no bones about being a climate change denier, and his disdain for the EV has amplified ever since he ended his bromance with Tesla EV company owner Elon Musk.
In preparation for Mr. Carney getting down to the nitty gritty of these US/Can trade talks, he was recently visited by the three wise men from the the US auto industry, but instead of gifts they gave him threats, and likely ultimatums. They argued that they can’t meet the EV mandate and it has to go or they probably will.
Of course, this is not new. Those very same wise men, or some reasonable facsimiles, have resisted every health and safety rule governments have had to implement, going back to padded dashboards in the sixties. They fought against taking the lead out of gasoline; against EPA fuel efficiency standards; against emission controls; and now this. Perhaps it’s just time to let them go and look at the alternatives.
Chinese EV’s selling around the world.
China is the largest car market in the world. 11 million EVs were sold last year alone, about 50% of all new car sales, thereby making that country the global leader in electric vehicle adoption in absolute terms. As we’ve been told repeatedly, Norway is nearly 100% EV, but even tiny mountainous Nepal is at 75%. By comparison EVs represent less than 15% of the new car market in this country.
Chinese EV makers are spreading their tentacles, starting to manufacture in Pakistan, a country without anything like Canada’s auto making tradition. Why hasn’t the Canadian government invited them to start manufacturing here? That would give Mr. Carney considerable leverage in his auto sector trade talks with Trump.
The 1960’s Can/US auto pact came about because the big three were worried about the Japanese and European car invasions into this country at that time – threatening the dominance of their models. The auto pact worked for them and for us, and was overtaken by all those NAFTA trade deals. But now we’re back to square one, with Mr. Trump demanding tariffs on just about everything.
And Trump means business, tariffs are here to stay. So forget about exporting cars to the US market. The future of Canada’s auto industry to build for the Canadian market – Canadian cars for Canadians. And it shouldn’t matter if those cars are owned by an American or a Chinese company. Though it would be ideal for a Canadian entrepreneur to step into the game.
Federal government has been providing funding for EV stations.
And about the EV mandate. Norway has one and so does China. But the market will ultimately decide, and there will be no going back. After all electric vehicles, now with driving ranges paralleling those of gas guzzlers, are superior in so many ways: lower refuelling costs; almost no regular maintenance; smooth and rapid acceleration; almost silent ride; no messy toxic gasoline fill up; and no tail pipe exhaust or air pollution. Once Canada has rationalized its EV charging systems, only a fool would buy a new gas guzzler.
Ray Rivers, a Gazette Contributing Editor, writes regularly applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking. Rivers was once a candidate for provincial office in Burlington. He was the founder of the Burlington citizen committee on sustainability at a time when climate warming was a hotly debated subject. Ray has a post graduate degree in economics that he earned at the University of Ottawa. Tweet @rayzrivers
Background links:
Auto Boys – Carney Kills DST – California EV Mandate – Dump the Big Three –
Nothing changes. EV sales would surge if we had affordable products available. Not what the big 3 offer or what Musk offers costing on average 50K+ but Chinese imports without tariffs @ less than 20K or better yet Chinese EVs made in Canada. Won’t happen though because Washington has said NO & it’s the same old story as Carney can’t upset the apple cart & say yes.
Michael makes very good points and should be read more than once. The road to EVs is going to be very bumpy. When all of the numbers are put into the very long viability equation, the future for EVs is much more murkier than you need to have to make an informed purchasing decision.
Anytime a government mandates something and tell you it’s for your own good, run, and run away fast. The EV mandate brought down by to Trudeau government is extremely bad policy and now being promoted by the Carney Liberals.
The market for these cars is now flatting or declining for many reasons once government (tax payer) incentives were removed and interest rates increased, and for many consumer choice reasons.
If you’ve not read the details of the liberal policy, you will not have noticed that there is a $20,000 fine paid by manufactures that cannot make the mandated target, which starts out at 20% in 2026. Who will pay that fine, not the manufacturers but those purchasing the vehicles – so cars will instantly get move expensive in Canada. Next, this one is a beauty, that fine can be offset, by purchasing a credit from another car manufacturer that has exceeded the 20% target in 2026. Guess who will be the beneficiary of that, his initials are EM!
As EV sales around the world have declined, manufactures are pulling out of the market, or rolling back commitments. What does that mean, the cost for EV’s will go up as manufacturing scale goes down.
Because of the very high voltage used in EV batteries and a number of other complex systems, they are every bit as maintenance intensive the traditional cars, anyone that tries to tell you otherwise simply does not understand these vehicles or is promoting falsehoods.
Technicians are few and far between and labour rates are very high. The risk of battery damage in a minor collision results in higher insurance costs as the threshold for total write off is much lower with and EV.
The promotion of faster charging times is a fairy tale, its only partially dependant on battery technology but largely dependent on power available at the point of charging – this is very different that filling up with fuel. A more cars charge from a connected point, charging times, double and quadruple and is independent of battery technology.
Charging at home is less expensive for now, charging on the road is about the same or more than fuel due to the cost of the electrical infrastructure, cost of complex charging equipment, demand charges by the utility and need to recoup costs.
As tax revenue from fuel decreases, you can be sure that the governments will reed to recoup those costs through other means. Your charging cost at home won’t stay low for long, and with the need to build more nuclear plants to charge EV’s there will be a greater burden.
Range does not equal traditional fuel cars, that is a pure false hood. Range of an EV drops off with age, it drops of by about 40% when driving in the winter, you should not run your EV below 10% of battery, that is the real range. Range drops of dramatically when towing, or driving above 100 km/h. ever notice why there are few if any EV’s in the fast lane of a highway – higher speeds kills their range and adds an extra hour or more of charging to a long trip!
The carbon foot print to manufacture an EV is vastly higher than an ICE car and takes about 7 years to offset when driven 20,000 km per year. Forcing Canadians to buy EV’s will make no difference in GHG’s, its less than a rounding error, and initially will increase GHG’s!
I could go on, but its hard to imagine a worse policy – I expect Carney will flip flop on this, elbows up, elbows down, tariffs on the US, no tariffs, for the time being we are told its absolutely necessary, just like the consumer carbon tax, just like the DST – see the pattern?
Drive what suits your needs, ICE, BEV, HEV, Ebike, whatever, but let consumers and the market decide, that will drive technology and innovation.
The big three do not produce many vehicles right now in Canada.The big players and employers are Honda And Toyota.Carney should be talking them.If Ontario loses the auto industry there would be massive unemployment from parts suppliers and assemblers in the one manufacturing industry left here.
Making our own cars…..remember the Bricklin
POTUS seems hell bent to follow through on his, we dont need Canada to make anything, or want anything from us, except of course our rare earth minerals or oil and gas products. With respect to ICE vehicles and the EV mandate, the big 3 plus Toyota etc will probably disinvest the manufacturing of these vehicles and wont have much incentive to reinvest in EV’s for the Canadian market, the market is just too small. So where does that leave us, we do have the technical and operational know how to build the next Avro Arrow version of an EV. Or as Ray suggests import a best in class EV from other countries and that may include importing what are now the best in class EV’s from China. If POTUS then backs off on his musings what then? Without acess to the U.S. auto market we cant compete on scale and no amount of elbow grease will change that.