If Carney serious about turning Canada’s economy around, he will put delusional EV policy out of its misery and return to market-driven solution rather than government-mandated one
By ADAM PANKRATZ, National Post, Sept 9, 2025
Those with an attentive ear may have picked up on the distinct sound of sobbing emanating from the Department of Canadian Identity and Culture. They are the sobs of its minister, erstwhile minister of environment and climate change, Steven Guilbeault, watching the slow but certain immolation of Canada’s electric vehicle sales mandate, as it goes up in smoke.
Friday, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that automakers would no longer need to have 20 per cent of their sales be zero-emission vehicles, either fully electric or hybrid election, in 2026.
The target has been delayed by a year, and the entirety of the program, which also mandates that 60 per cent of sales by 2030 and 100 per cent by 2035 be zero emitting will be reviewed over the next two months. If Carney is truly serious about turning Canada’s economy around, he will put Guilbeault’s criminally delusional policy out of its misery and return to a market-driven solution rather than a government mandated one.
The electric vehicle mandate has always been something of an environmentalist absurdity from the beginning. To start with, Canada doesn’t have enough electricity. In British Columbia, for example, it has been estimated that to meet the 100 per cent zero-emitting vehicle sales goal by 2035, B.C. needs to produce an additional 9,700 gigawatt hours of electricity with some estimates saying the province may need to double its entire electrical power output.
Provinces can’t generate enough power to meet mandate
The lower end estimates would require the construction of further Site C dam equivalents. Site C is BC Hydro’s most recent crown jewel of electrical generation. Created by damming the Peace River, it came online in August after well over a decade of planning and construction.
That is to say, if we indeed wanted a 100 per cent EV mandate to be even remotely realistic, we need shovels in the ground today on massive hydro dams and nuclear power plants across the country. That’s just not going to happen on the government’s 2035 time frame.
The other problem the EV mandate was always going to face is consumer demand and business profitability. Even now, EVS are unprofitable for many, if not most, car manufacturers. In February, Ford announced that it was projected to lose US$5.5 billion in 2025 on it EV and software division. Volkswagen is now less profitable because it sells more EVS and even GM, the best of the lot, is only breaking even at best.
Most consumers don’t want EVs
These are not sustainable numbers and the uncertainty created by the Trump tariffs have merely exacerbated the obvious issues with EVS mandates, not created them. This is all something automakers themselves have been saying for some time now, though until Friday their pleas landed on deaf ears.
The root cause of all this lies with consumers. They simply don’t want an EV for the very simple reason that, as it stands, EVS are less functional and versatile than vehicles powered by gas alone. This is by no means to say they will remain so forever — indeed they likely will not — but at the moment, consumers are looking at EVS, which cost more, are less functional, give them less value for money and are concluding that a traditional vehicle remains the more economically sensible decision. A government mandate would only hit consumers, already dealing with affordability issues, even harder.
The green lobby will seethe but the stark reality is that the EV mandate was always a pipe dream and that has now been laid clearly bare. Mandates of the EV type don’t work when they hurt both consumers and businesses. Instead of only delaying the 2026 targets, Carney should end the whole charade and cancel an unrealistic EV mandate which was set up to fail from the beginning.
Adam Pankratz is a lecturer at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business.