From day one, Ottawa’s electric vehicle mandate was bad policy.
It’s basic goal — to phase out all sales of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035 — has always been unrealistic and a threat to consumer choice. Last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a pause of Ottawa’s electric vehicle mandate. The mandate was set to start to be phased in just months from now, in January 2026, with 20 per cent of all new vehicle sales mandated to be electric. For now, Carney is pausing the 2026 element of the electric vehicle mandate and has announced a 60-day review of the entire policy. But, as of today, Ottawa’s requirement that 60 per cent of all new vehicle sales be electric by 2030, and 100 per cent be electric by 2035, remain very much in place.
The Carney government’s 60-day review of Ottawa’s entire electric vehicle mandate can have only one outcome that truly benefits consumers and doesn’t threaten the very future of the auto industry’s existence in Canada: scrapping it altogether.
Should the Carney government simply seek to delay the implementation of its electric vehicle mandate, the results will be the same. As of today, just 7.9 per cent of consumers are buying electric vehicles. That’s down substantially from 11.7 per cent two years ago.
No matter how much governments talk up electric vehicles and offer huge subsidies for consumers, most people simply aren’t interested. In fact, they’re less interested than before.
That’s not going to change in the next year or two. And sentiment certainly won’t change enough in the next four years to get to 60 per cent of all new vehicle sales being electric by 2030.
Whenever Ottawa seeks to implement this policy, if it’s not scrapped entirely, vehicle prices will soar, auto jobs will leave, and consumers will have fewer choices.
The Carney government’s 60-day review should not be all about rebranding this initiative, delaying it, or offering bigger and bigger subsidies for consumers. It should focus on scrapping this Trudeau era policy, full stop.
Because the electric vehicle mandate was only set to apply to new vehicles, any auto salesman could have easily predicted exactly how consumers would respond.
More people would turn to buying used vehicles. Others would simply keep their existing cars for longer. Either way, this would have been a huge hit to the auto industry, which needs to sell new cars to consumers to make a profit and keep producing new products.
It’s also important to dispel another myth: The electric vehicle mandate was never about the environment. If that was the focus, it would have factored in hybrid cars and the utility of people keeping efficient gasoline-powered cars longer. The rigid mandate, as it stands now, does neither. Instead, the government admits that the electric vehicle mandate is “part of a comprehensive plan by the Government of Canada to develop a robust electric vehicle supply chain infrastructure.”
In other words, this was all about trying to build an electric vehicle supply chain in Canada, an initiative that has clearly failed. Company after company that received massive federal subsidies, like the Ford Motor Company and General Motors, have announced delays or cancelled plans to build electric vehicles in Canada.
Northvolt, which was to produce electric vehicle batteries in Quebec with taxpayer assistance, has gone bankrupt.
This is the inevitable outcome when governments intervene in the marketplace, bet big with taxpayer dollars, and seek to arbitrarily restrict consumer choice to prop up an industry.
The Carney government needs to do a big U-turn from the Trudeau years. It’s time to leave decisions in the hands of consumers.
Canadians who want to buy electric vehicles should be allowed to do so. Those who want to buy hybrid cars or old-fashioned gasoline-powered cars should be able too as well.
Outcomes should be dictated by the market and consumer demand, not government.
It’s time for Carney to abandon yet another failed policy leftover from the Trudeau era.
Originally published here