Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.Nearly a year ago now, when Mark Carney enacted his carbon tax ploy, cutting the consumer tax while increasing the portion which targets industry and business, I found myself having frequent arguments with people about the move. I had to explain that this was a sleight of hand, and that ultimately the restructured carbon tax would be just as harmful, but with the cost hidden from Canadian consumers, “which is why Mark Carney likes it.”That particular trick was very much in mind when Mr. Carney announced, at an auto parts manufacturing plant in Vaughan, Ontario, on February 5, what many media reports called his plan to “scrap the EV mandate.”Had he simply done that, we at Canadians for Affordable Energy would have applauded. I have been a firm opponent of the mandate for years. Banning Internal Combustion Engine vehicles and forcing Canadians to buy Electric Vehicles (EVs) is perverse. It isn’t what we want or need.But instead, the Prime Minister announced that he was replacing the EV mandate with a 75% tailpipe emissions reduction target by 2035 and an aspirational 90% reduction by 2040.Now, this might sound much better initially. “Wow, instead of banning the sale of gas cars, Mark Carney is going to reduce their carbon footprint!”Except a policy target for emissions reductions doesn’t equate to emissions reductions — that takes technological change, fleet changes, time, and money. Which really means that in 2035 — less than 10 years from today — when the only vehicles which conform to this standard are EVs, then, well, that’s all you will be able to buy..Much the same happened in the United States under the Biden Administration’s EPA, which tried to enact extremely strict tailpipe regulations as part of an attempted stealth EV mandate. The Republicans called Biden and Kamala Harris out on it, which was effective enough that Harris was forced to loudly proclaim that there was no EV mandate. Voters disagreed and sent the Republicans back to the White House to change course, which they have done, returning to Americans the freedom to buy the cars that meet their needs.The kicker? Biden’s original backdoor EV mandate regs stipulated a 50% cut in tailpipe emissions, well short of Carney’s 75% cut.Let me be blunt: Regulations that demand a 75% emissions cut on cars sold in Canada are the same thing as an EV mandate. There is essentially no difference.But Carney is making it even worse — proposing spending a massive amount of public money on subsidizing the EV industry in several ways.First, he is reinstating the federal EV purchase rebate — effectively a subsidy for the wealthy, as they are the people who can afford the luxury of an EV. This means thousands of taxpayer dollars per vehicle. Second, he wants to spend $1.5 billion of our tax dollars to build up the EV charging network, on top of the $1.2 billion the government has allocated to building charging stations over the past ten years. For the record, money spent to date has bought us roughly 36,000 stations, well short of the 450,000 Natural Resources Canada estimates that we would need to service an all-EV fleet by 2035..Third, he announced a further $3 billion, “to help the auto industry adapt, grow, and diversify to new markets." Translation — to give car companies money to help them keep their plants open in Canada while they figure out how to get out of the corner we’ve painted them into.This is becoming a characteristic play for Mr. Carney. The public starts to notice that one of his policies is making our lives harder, and he responds by rearranging the deck chairs, in the hopes that we will forget, for a little while at least, that his ship is steaming towards an iceberg.As with the carbon tax, he heard our complaints, and he did whatever he could to keep the old policy in place while making it harder to see it. “Sure, your cost of living is way up, but it can’t be the consumer carbon tax, because I cancelled it!” “Sure, there are no gasoline powered cars which can legally be sold in Canada, but the moment someone invents one, we’ll consider letting you buy it!”It’s a cynical move. Make sure you don’t fall for it.Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.
