Canada's New Electric Vehicle Availability Standard

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - On Tuesday, December 19, The Government of Canada announced a gradual phasing out of gas powered light vehicle sales until 2035, after which all new vehicles must be 100% emissions free.


“Transportation is the most polluting  sector in Canada after oil and gas, a lot of that comes from road transportation. So from the vehicles we drive that are on the road, from sitting in traffic. This regulation is aiming  to ensure that we're putting forward technologies like zero emission vehicles, that includes electric vehicles, that will drastically reduce emissions within that sector and this regulation says that it will have emissions reductions of 360 million tons. That's the equivalent of 62,000 Olympic swimming pools full of gas that have been burned,” explained Meena Bibra, Senior Policy Analyst with Clean Energy Canada. 


“To put that into perspective, around 15,000 premature deaths happen in Canada because of air pollutants from exhaust fumes, essentially.  Moving to zero emission technologies is going to ensure that there's going to be $90 billion of net benefits coming from just air pollution. That's less visits  to the hospital, to their emergency room. If you have an asthma attack or if you have lung disease,  impacting children less than an elderly folk less or those who already have other diseases that are related to respiratory illnesses.”


Cortes Currents: You’re quoting the same statistics I saw in the government press release and their backup material. Where did they come from? 


Meena Bibra: “The air pollution analysis essentially came from the atmospheric fund, but they used data from Health Canada and from Environment Canada to make this analysis. The ’62,000 million tons’ illustration was actually done by Environment Canada themselves, as a part of the regulatory process. It's required that they quantify what those emissions reductions are going to be looking like.”


To put a local spin on this story, Cortes Currents recently interviewed Forrest Berman-Hatch, lead author of the Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) report ‘The Carbon Footprint of Traveling to or from Cortes Island.’ He identified the ferry as the biggest polluter for any vehicle travelling to Vancouver, but if you are driving an EV that is almost the only source of pollution.   
By 2026, 20% of Canada’s new car sales must be emissions free, which can be fuel cell or plug-in electric. According to a recent report from Clean Energy Canada, British Columbia has already crossed that threshold, but the rest of the nation is lagging behind.  


We have a number of EVs on Cortes, including at least two Teslas, a Chevy Bolt and a number of e-bikes, but the only charging port is at Hollyhock.  


Cortes Currents: What can you tell us about Canada’s charging infrastructure?


Meena Bibra: “The most accurate update that we found for charging infrastructure in Canada is about 25,000 charging ports. The Auditor General recently released a report saying that the federal government is on track to meet its targets of 33,500 chargers by 2026.  The federal government has also spent 2 billion on charging infrastructure investments. So we are moving in the right direction.”


“The Federal Government can't do everything by themselves. This is where it's going to be really important to bring in other partners like provinces,  utilities, municipalities,  car makers as well to build infrastructure where it's needed.”