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The federal government’s successful incentive program for zero-emissions vehicle purchases is running out of money and not slated for renewal, much to the dismay of environmental and industry groups.
The federal government’s decision not to top up the rebate program with additional funding jeopardizes Canada’s target for 20 per cent of vehicle sales to be zero-emissions vehicles (ZEVs) by 2026, warned Electric Mobility Canada in a press release.
“Canadians who want to make the switch to electric mobility are left with very little time to take advantage of the incentive, which is the exact opposite of a predictable and sustainable program for consumers and industry,” said Daniel Breton, President and CEO of Electric Mobility Canada.
The up-front cost to purchase an EV is typically higher than a comparable gas-powered vehicle. The federal rebate program aimed to alleviate some of this sticker shock and encourage people to make the switch from gas to electric by bringing down the purchase price of electric vehicles, which save owners money in the long run thanks to cheaper charging and lower maintenance costs.
Electric Mobility Canada, Environmental Defence and Clean Energy Canada quickly called on the current government — or a future government — to continue the ZEV rebate program.
The funding program provides rebates of up to $5,000 for battery-electric, plug-in hybrid and hydrogen vehicle purchases and leases. The program was scheduled to pause at the end of March, but the money could run dry before then.
Since the program started up in 2019, it has provided rebates for over 546,000 vehicles, according to Transport Canada. As of Jan. 10, 2024, $71,817,104 remained, enough to provide rebates for approximately 16,000 ZEVs, according to Electric Mobility Canada.
This popular, climate-fighting program didn’t have to end, Environmental Defence’s clean transportation program manager Nate Wallace lamented in a press release. In the third quarter of 2024, 16.7 per cent of new vehicles registered in Canada were zero-emissions vehicles, according to S&P Global. That number was only 3.1 per cent back in 2019, according to Transport Canada.
“The federal government has long known that due to rapidly growing electric vehicle sales, funding for the iZEV program was going to run out early in 2025,” Wallace said.
“There was an opportunity in Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s recent Fall Economic Statement to include stopgap funding to top up the program and prevent this from occurring.”
The lack of federal rebates mean Canadians will have to pay more up front to switch from gas to electric, Wallace said.
Canadian EV drivers save about $30,000 to $40,000 over the course of the vehicle's life compared to driving a gas car according to a Clean Energy Canada analysis published Oct. 16 2024. This translates to savings of $3,000 to $4,000 per year, or, can be visualized as EV drivers paying the equivalent of $0.40 per litre of gas to charge their cars over the vehicles’ lifetime.
“The appeal to Canadians was undeniable,” Joanna Kyriazis, director of public affairs at Clean Energy Canada, said in a press release. Rebate claims hit an all-time high in the third quarter of 2024 but with the lapse of the rebate program and new tariffs restricting imports of cheaper EVs from China, Canadians could be facing higher initial costs, Kyriazis warned.
In the last four years Canada has attracted over $46 billion in investments across the EV battery supply chain, according to a June report by the Parliamentary Budget Officer. This is paired with an estimated $52.5 billion in federal and provincial support for projects like Stellantis-LGES and Volkswagen’s electric battery plants.
“Pulling the rug out from under the incentive program represents a short sighted approach — we are making it harder for Canadians to buy the very cars they are invested in making,” Kyriazis said, adding this is an unnecessary barrier for Canada’s “still vulnerable” EV industry.
Natasha Bulowski / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer
Comments
why did the author not include how much money the federal government kicked each year.. or has spent.. and why no numbers on how much taxpayers dolled out to oil coal and lng?
not a very good article in my mind.. anyone can get the same info from any source.. as a reader, if you expect to keep me paying you, I'd like to see some some original investigative writing. not msm dribble
I don't agree, I think the article brings together key information from a variety of sources and presents a good picture of the current situation. I was unaware of most of the information contained in the article.
Sounds like good news to me.
Next step. Cancel carbon capture (CCS) subsidies for the O&G industry.
EV and CCS subsidies rank among the least effective, least progressive, most inefficient ways to reduce emissions. You may as well throw money out the window.
EV subsidies perpetuate the most destructive, least sustainable form of transportation, namely the private automobile.
Climate activists fixated on electric vehicles as a climate solution ignore the prohibitive environmental, social, and health costs of cars, car culture, and urban sprawl. Blinkered thinking. Climate is not our only problem.
Meanwhile, public transit — the optimal transportation solution — is starved for funds.
In cities like Edmonton, public transit has entered a death spiral with reduced service, fewer routes, higher fares, poor security, long waits in bitter winter weather, etc. People cannot take a bus that does not run from bus stops that do not exist.
Canadian cities have been super-sprawling for decades, as public transit goes into a death spiral. EV subsidies only exacerbate the problem.
Urban planning advocate Jason Slaughter: "EVs are here to save the car industry, not the planet. Electric cars are still a horrendously inefficient way to move people around, especially in crowded cities."
"With their futuristic designs and new technology, EVs are the seductive consumer-friendly face of the energy transition.…For people with money and a conscience, EVs are doubly satisfying. They allow the affluent to indulge in the time-honoured pleasures of conspicuous consumption while at the same time saving the planet."
"Rush to electric vehicles may be an expensive mistake, say climate strategists" (CBC)
EVs are the yuppie response to climate change. Not for nothing that most of the first EV models were luxury cars beyond the reach of most citizens. Wealthy progressives want EV subsidies so they can salve their guilty conscience over their outsize footprint without having to make any real change in their unsustainable lifestyles.
"Shifting to EVs is not enough. The deeper problem is our car dependence" (CBC)
We can cut far more emissions far faster starting today with public transit. Not least because cars spent most of the 24-hour day parked.
Economies of scale matter. A bus can carry 40 to 60 people at a time — and hundreds throughout the day. A car typically carries just one — the driver.
Given the high price per tonne of carbon reduction, auto-industry and EV subsidies rank among the least cost-effective and least efficient ways to spend our transportation and climate dollars.
Climate/EV subsidies for households are regressive, because they largely flow to affluent consumers who do not need them.
Two hundred EV subsidies ($5000) for 200 affluent households who do not require subsidies while non-drivers, the marginalized, the young, the old, the disabled wait for a bus that never comes? Or 20,000 free transit passes? Or a brand-new electric bus with room for 60 passengers?
For $1 million in public funds, we can shift 60 ICE car drivers at a time onto a new electric bus that runs all day — or subsidize 200 EVs that cost $40,000-$75,000 a pop (plus infrastructure costs) that spend most of their life parked.
Aggregated, $5000 EV subsidies per household can move many more people on transit. We can move far more people on transit for less cost.
Fiscal efficiency matters.
So it's EV subsidies or Transit? Why not EV subsidies and Transit vs Oil and Gas subsidies or fighter jets or whatever? There's this belief in the environmental community that we should fight for the crumbs between ourselves.
As for your EV pricing, I would suggest you look at the price of Chinese EVs. Also there's no reason we need to be driving EV tanks. EVs could be much smaller. Mostly people drive alone or have one passenger. So make an EV that has two seats, one behind the other. Add solar and make it super efficient like an Aptera.
P W wrote: "Why not EV subsidies and Transit vs Oil and Gas subsidies or fighter jets or whatever?"
Like arguing for subsidies for soda pop and chips as well as fruits and vegetables because subsidies for beer and tobacco are bad policy.
1) As noted above, public dollars for transportation are not infinite. We have to make choices. We should support the best options, not the worst.
Granted, oil and Gas subsidies and fighter jets are poor public investments. But that does not make EV subsidies a good investment. EV subsidies are still inefficient, regressive, destructive, and lousy public policy.
2) Cars, car culture, and sprawl defeat efficient public transit.
Sinking public dollars into private cars and cramming more cars into finite road space just slows public transit down — and puts the only sustainable solution out of reach.
Sprawl forces people to drive, and cars enable sprawl.
There is no evolution from more private cars and more sprawl to efficient public transit. More private cars and more sprawl do not enable efficient public transit at some future date — they make it impossible.
If the ultimate goal is efficient public transit, it is self-defeating to promote car use and enable sprawl.
Mass transit does not work without the masses.
Sprawl enabled by cars is inherently inefficient. The most efficient EV will never make the sprawl – car model efficient.
Sprawl is not enabled by cars. That's like saying cute Euro trams will magically produce walkable car-free communities. Nope. Too many examples of trams / buses in car dependent suburbs that have very poor ridership. Sprawl is enabled by ZONING for car dependent neighbourhoods and subdivisions. Transit and land use planning using mixed use zoning are the key. Zoning cars out of the equation starts with building transit-oriented communities, that also naturally promote walking because of the creation of shorter distances to attain food, services and so forth. Unfortunately, there is a lag time of generations to rebuild our car saturated suburbs, even with both transit and zoning acting together.
@Alex Botta: Revisionist history and backwards logic.
Impossible to imagine the explosive growth of North American cities without the automobile.
Can you imagine anyone building a house five, ten, twenty, fifty miles outside the city and commuting five days a week to the city without a car? How would they get there?
Bill McKibben: "With its highways and suburbs, modern America was built around the automobile and powered by fossil fuels.
"… Americans had, of course, been buying cars in big numbers since Henry Ford started up his assembly line in 1913, but until the end of World War II the numbers were not that big: in 1950 there were only 25 million cars registered in the country.
"… U.S. factories produced 8 million new cars [in 1950], and by the end of the decade there were 67 million cars on the roads of America.
"… It took no time — a decade — for America to construct itself around the car. That’s what the suburb was, a reflection in concrete and wood and brick of the logic of the automobile, designed for its dimensions, its turning radius. … And the further out you went, the more car-centric the suburbs became, just a series of branching roads that eventually turned into driveways.
"More than three-quarters of Americans drove to work, and most of them drove by themselves. As Meg Jacobs wrote in her history of the period, by 1970, Americans consumed a third of the world’s energy — more than the Soviet Union, Britain, West Germany and Japan combined. And mostly because of the car. By then there were 118 million cars and trucks on the American road — more than quadruple the number 20 years before."
Bill McKibben: "Wrong Turn: America’s Car Culture and the Road Not Taken" (Yale Environment 360, 2022)
"Levittown, New York, is a pleasant collection of Long Island bungalows that sprouted between 1947 and 1951. It’s become popularly known as the 'first suburb' …
"But Levittown was among the first postwar communities that established the idea of the middle-class suburb as we knew it in the second half of the 20th century: a car-centric community built around automotive access. By the 1950s, the increasing affluence of the American family and the declining cost of the automobile made this postwar suburban dream possible for even the average worker … White Americans could now drive far further, in a reasonable commute time, than had ever been possible with transit. And transit companies did little to serve these fast-growing new communities.
"Like most of these postwar suburbs, Levittown had no meaningful transit to speak of. The nearest Long Island Rail Road station was well outside the town; its service was limited and its trains elderly and dilapidated. Those who worked in Manhattan, 30 miles away, were expected to drive.
"… In the biggest cities, the radius from downtown accessible within an hour—generally considered the limit for daily commuting—by transit was fully developed by World War II. Cars dramatically extended that radius, and made it very hard for conventional transit to compete.
"… In 1956, Congress passed the Interstate Highway Act, which promised federal funding for 90 percent of the cost of a grid of free high-speed autoroutes across the country. State highway officials used much of that funding on elaborate city expressways, comprising circumferential and radial highways that cut through urban neighborhoods. As average commute speed rose, the sprawl of urban areas grew exponentially. Over time, suburban developments shifted to locations along the circumferential highways, where abundant cheap land was available. Urban areas were no longer restricted by remaining within a reasonable commute distance by expressway from the city center—they could now sprawl virtually without limit."
Jonathan English: "Why Did America Give Up on Mass Transit? (Don’t Blame Cars.)" (Bloomberg)
AB wrote: "Sprawl is not enabled by cars. That's like saying cute Euro trams will magically produce walkable car-free communities."
Logic? Of course, once sprawl is established, efficient public transit becomes impossible. Hence, the urgency to halt sprawl and stop subsidizing the private automobile.
Cities abandoned the "walkable car-free community" model in the mid-twentieth century — and it was the automobile that enabled that rapid transition to car-dependent sprawl.
Subsidizing the private automobile, electrified or otherwise, at the expense of transit defeats the solution.
AB wrote: "Unfortunately, there is a lag time of generations to rebuild our car saturated suburbs, even with both transit and zoning acting together."
So no sense in delay, right? No sense in making the problem even worse. No sense in putting sustainable solutions like transit out of reach.
Cities do not consist merely of car-saturated suburbs on the periphery. People living within the high-density city core can take the bus starting tomorrow. We just have to make that service available to them. Redirecting EV subsidies for the rich to public transit for the masses is a good place to start.
We do not have to wait generations to start investing in and improving public transit. Simply gaslighting.
AB wrote: "Sprawl is not enabled by cars. That's like saying cute Euro trams will magically produce walkable car-free communities."
The very fact that sprawled suburbs are car-dependent tells us that cars enable sprawl. If unicorns, unicycles, or roller-skates enabled sprawl, suburbs would depend on those modes of travel.
If cars were banned tomorrow, how long would suburbs survive? Who lives twenty or fifty miles from work if they cannot get there and back within a reasonable time?
The heroin addict cannot resolve his addiction by doubling the dose. Nor can we can resolve car dependency by doubling down on cars.
When you are in a hole, stop digging.
Suppose we have two modes, options, or solutions: Unsustainable Option #1 and Sustainable Option #2.
If Sustainable Option #2 cannot succeed due to damage, insufficiencies, or losses caused by Unsustainable Option #1 — or cannot undo or resolve that damage — then Unsustainable Option #1 cannot be the cause, driver, or enabler of that damage. So says Mr. Botta.
Patent nonsense.
My neighbour replaces his furnace with a heat pump. But not even the most advanced heat pump can work efficiently in his old, draughty, poorly-insulated house. Nevertheless, he insists that poor insulation cannot be the reason for his sky-high energy bills.
Suppose we have a problem and its prevention.
If the prevention cannot succeed due to damage caused by the problem, then the problem cannot be the cause, driver, or enabler of that damage. So says Mr. Botta.
More nonsense.
A COVID vaccine administered post mortem has no effect. Therefore, COVID cannot be the cause of death.
A healthy diet and exercise cannot save someone after a fatal heart attack. Therefore, a poor diet and sedentary lifestyle cannot be the cause of heart disease.
A fire alarm and extinguisher are useless after your house burns down. Therefore, fire cannot be the cause of the conflagration.
Better check your logic circuits.
Sprawl is not simply a zoning issue.
In recent decades, new neighbourhoods have sprung up on the periphery with few amenities. A shopping complex may be located between neighbourhoods, but the neighbourhood itself has no destinations — other than perhaps a school. Residents are forced to drive to the shopping complex and to all points beyond.
Even if amenities are eventually built inside the neighbourhood, it does not solve car dependency.
If a student wants to study at the distant university, she must travel there. If a lawyer works at the office and law courts downtown, he must travel there. If a young man serves at the military base on the far side of the city, he must travel there. If the family belongs to a church on the other side of downtown, they must travel there. If the family wants to cheer on the football team, they must travel to the stadium. If they want to meet their friends at a certain park in the river valley, they must travel there. If they want to go to a music concert, they must travel to the concert venue.
Zoning changes, allowing more shops and stores within the community, does not take the family everywhere they need to go. For that, they need a car. Or make that three cars.
The damage is done. Zoning changes can reduce but not solve car dependency. Public transit introduced after the fact will be expensive, prohibitively slow, inconvenient, and often unavailable. No one will accept a commute of two to three hours to distant destinations. Outside peak periods, transit may not run at all.
Transit is not the only victim. The car is the victim of its own success. Sprawl not only makes transit grossly inefficient and expensive, but also makes car travel difficult. Freeways turn into parking lots twice a day. Self-defeating.
Without a push from voters, there is no incentive for change. As long as voters demand EVs and EV infrastructure, there is no incentive for rezoning and transit funding — no challenge to the status quo.
The decisions we make now about urban design and transportation set the blueprint for generations to come.
Switching from billions of ICE cars to billions of EVs is not a green solution. Another technological fix that isn't.
Cars and car culture are an environmental and human catastrophe even without a tailpipe. The energy extravagance of billions of people using private vehicles in sprawled cities is obscene. Billions of people commuting hundreds and thousands of kilometres per week is an environmental nightmare. Such a system will never be sustainable.
Huge energy expenditure. Lost productivity, sedentary lifestyle (and health problems), millions of deaths and injuries, roadkill, and social isolation.
Urban sprawl, disintegration of community, loss of green space, endless freeways and traffic jams, inefficient public transit, strip mall blight, mega-mall culture, parking lot proliferation, accidents, and property damage.
Insanely long commutes in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Sprawl multiplies congestion, energy consumption and waste, time and productivity loss, emissions, and footprint.
In perpetuating sprawl, EVs exacerbate the problem and obstruct real solutions. A one-Earth footprint cannot accommodate an energy-intensive lifestyle where people drive everywhere they go — or an urban model relying on millions of cars to transport millions of people. Using two tons of metal to transport a 150 lb human being is an ecological non-starter.
Large sprawled cities are inimical to efficient, sustainable transport. 20th century sprawl is a failed experiment.
EVs perpetuate a litany of environmental problems that only public transit and smart urban design can solve. Cities need to be built for people, not cars.
Car culture will never be sustainable. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.
No sense pursuing it further. More cars will just make it worse — regardless of what's under the hood.
We need to hit the brakes on sprawl and car culture ASAP.
When you're in a hole, stop digging.
Sinking public dollars into private cars just slows public transit down — and puts the only sustainable solution out of reach.
There is no evolution from more private cars and more sprawl to efficient public transit. More private cars and more sprawl do not enable efficient public transit at some future date — they make it impossible.
If the ultimate goal is efficient public transit, it is self-defeating to promote car use and enable sprawl.
The supply of tax dollars is not infinite. Scarce public dollars spent on private cars are dollars not spent on public transit.
Once middle- and upper-class consumers are happily ensconced in their automobiles, there is no shifting them. There is no incentive for governments to invest in and improve transit if the vast majority vote for cars and EV subsidies.
Transportation policy and investment focussed on cars abandons the marginalized — the poor without political power, seniors, the handicapped, and environmentalists — without hope of essential mobility options. While the Liberals pour tens of billions into the auto and O&G industries, millions of ordinary Canadians are left stranded due to lack of transportation options. Non-drivers — the poor, the young, and the old — remain marginalized.
Down with EVs, EV subsidies, sprawl, and private convenience at public expense.
Up with public transit, cycling, and walking. The only sustainable options.
Though unfortunate, you can bet that Pierre "Snake Oil Salesman" Poilievre would have killed it anyways to appease its biggest corrupt donor, oil & gas. The Feds likely see that things like axe the tax and these incentives will be short lived with Pierre anyways.
I'm sure Pierre will gut anything else that oil & gas don't like once elected.
Will Pierre solve all the issues he rants to his naive base, not likely, Pee Pee is full of hot air and will do anything the oil & gas industry wants, Canadians will come second. I can't wait to see the look on his con'd base, when Pee Pee delivers nothing to ease their economic concerns. After all, Pee Pee has zero control over global impacts and 1/2 of the worlds farm land drying up.
While EVs will not save cities from the tyranny of car dependency, the billions invested in battery R&D worldwide will certainly help get trucks off diesel, which is one of the biggest sources of particulate pollution from transport on the planet.
Germany is now electrifying its road-based freight industry and building out a network of high power fast charging stations at truck rest areas. E -trucks easily overtake lumbering diesel trucks on hills, each carrying 20+ tonnes of cargo. Each E-truck can save fleet owners up to 100,000 euros a year in energy and maintenance costs, rendering government grants as icing on the cake. Charging station companies are also building out nearby solar and wind generating capacity and massive banks of batteries for on-site storage.
Most E-truck brands use lithium iron phosphate batteries, which have become the world's standard chemistry. No cobalt. No nickel. No explosive dendrite issues. Today, the industry has just introduced sodium batteries. Less or even no lithium. Salt batteries have equal energy density with LFP but are far lighter in weight and have great cold weather performance.
Note that Elon Musk hasn't introduced the Tesla truck to a widespread extent yet in the EU. Meanwhile, Iveco, Scania and Volvo are jumping in with full immersion in battery electric trucks and have a big head start.
Battery R&D, motivated by the economics behind replacing the internal combustion engine, has also led to direct applications in grid power storage and rendered the problem of intermittency redundant.
And before the critics jump in and trash talk mining, they should take a moment to look up EV battery recycling. It's evolving into a big parallel industry that has the potential to dramatically lower demand for freshly mined minerals. All today's battery components can be recycled. Once sodium chemistry becomes standard, then battery life will also be extended whuch in itself will further reduce mining demand.
The critics seem to forgive or conveniently ignore oil and gas exploration and moonscape mining practices when hammering mining for critical minerals. Since when does bitumen or LNG get recycled like battery materials? How does diesel and its current use in moving essential freight like food and building materials factor in to the criticism about EVs.
As an urbanist I'm all for car free, transit rich cities. I already live 90+% car free in a walkable neighbourhood with great transit options and wouldn't have it any other way. But no one on an anti-EV rant has yet explained how moving cargo, an absolute necessity which comprises about 1/3 of all road traffic, can be replaced by transit or will be expected to replace diesel fuel which is one of the largest sources of urban particulate pollution and health risks from the equation without electrification and batteries.
AB wrote: "But no one on an anti-EV rant has yet explained how moving cargo, an absolute necessity which comprises about 1/3 of all road traffic, can be replaced by transit …
Straw-man argument.
No one suggests that cargo transport can be replaced by transit.
Nor does opposition to EV subsidies imply that cargo trucks should not electrify.
Electrification of truck transport is not a valid justification for dependency on cars for personal transportation when sustainable options are available.
Personal automobiles are not required for battery R&D. Cars are not a necessary condition for advancement in battery technology. Batteries have all sorts of applications. Including transit and school buses and cargo trucks.
The R&D conducted into batteries for EVs has included all vehicles, cars, trucks, scooter, bikes and BE buses. No one is isolating battery research and market targets exclusively for trucks or the grid.
Personally, I don't need a car more than once every three weeks or so. I get it re: car-free communities. But CATL, Northvolt, BYD, LG Chem, Form Energy, Natron etc. are not splitting their effort or redirecting their commercial interests to exclude the auto sector because their focus is diverse.
Seems to me trains did a pretty good job with cargo till they were privatized and ditched routes in rural areas. Neither are there bus lines there any more.
So there will continue to be a need for private vehicles for what, 20+% of the Canadian populace?
Heavy industry is often located in rural, or relatively rural areas. Indeed, at least some operations have railway spurs. Way back in the mid-60s, there were operations where raw materials went in one end of the building, and wrapped and strapped product was loaded onto trains before they left the building.
It's easy enough to consider what works for a population Just Like Oneself, but that's not generally how societies are. Just like it's easier for people who've lived with kids to notice what doesn't work for them, it's probably easier for older people ot appreciate the extent to which one size does not fit all.
I totally agree, though, with the points raised.
(Canada's really quick off the blocks, so round about when there's no demand, we'll open cobalt and lithium mines. 'Cuz we're climate leaders, eh?)