By Canadian Press

Canada moves to mandate electric vehicle sales starting in 2025

Dec 21, 2022 | 10:01 AM

OTTAWA — One-fifth of all passenger cars, SUVs and trucks sold in Canada in 2026 will need to run on electricity under new regulations Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault is proposing Wednesday.

By 2030, the mandate will hit 60 per cent of all sales and by 2035, every passenger vehicle sold in Canada will need to be electric.

Manufacturers or importers who don’t meet the sales targets could face penalties under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.

Canada still has a long way to go before approaching the first target in 2025.

In the first six months of this year, electric vehicle sales, including fully-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, made up just 7.2 per cent of new car registrations. For all of 2021, the proportion was 5.2 per cent.

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Under the draft regulations, to be formally published Dec. 30, the government proposes tracking the sales by issuing credits for vehicle sales.

Fully electric cars and trucks would be worth a bigger credit than plug-in hybrid versions, though the government acknowledges that plug-in hybrids will likely remain in demand in rural and northern areas.

The mandate fulfils a 2021 Liberal election promise. It’s the first major set of regulations to come out of an emissions reduction plan the government published in April.

That plan is Canada’s broad road map toward hitting its goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors to a level in 2030 that is 40 to 45 per cent below what it was in 2005.

Passenger vehicles account for half of all road transportation emissions and about one-tenth of Canada’s total emissions across all sectors. 

Before Wednesday’s move, Canada already had targets for electric vehicle sales. But they were not enforceable, and the government wasn’t successfully compelling car companies to ramp up the number of electric vehicles available for sale. 

The new targets will be nationwide, though some provinces are already ahead of others. 

Quebec and British Columbia already have provincial sales mandates. An analysis released last week by the Canadian Climate Institute concluded that the mandates helped both provinces move well out ahead of the rest of the country on electric-vehicle use.

Anna Kanduth, a senior research associate at the institute, said global supply of zero-emission vehicles is still limited, though it is growing quickly. 

“Auto manufacturers are largely prioritizing jurisdictions with some type of sales mandate,” she wrote, adding that places with mandates have much higher rates of zero-emission vehicle adoption and more model choice.

B.C. is leading the field in electric-vehicle sales, which account for almost 15 per cent of all new vehicles registered between January and June. Quebec is in second, at 11.4 per cent of registrations. 

There is a steep drop off to third-place Ontario, where only 5.5 per cent of new registrations are for electric vehicles. The number is below four per cent in all other provinces.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 21, 2022.

Mia Rabson, The Canadian Press