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I’d like to wholeheartedly praise Prime Minister Mark Carney for his recent decision to kill the federal electric vehicle (EV) mandate, which required that all new light-duty vehicles sold by 2035 be battery electric or plug-in hybrids. The mandate was always a bad idea, as were similar EV mandates adopted elsewhere, such as in California in the 1990s. Canada’s EV mandate, like California’s, tried to force battery EVs into auto markets where consumers simply didn’t want them. Even with massive, inequitable, unsustainable government subsidies, EVs struggled to make any significant headway toward meaningfully replacing internal combustion (ICE) vehicles—and then, only in the luxury small car market in mostly wealthy urban enclaves.
Anyway, I’d like to praise Prime Minister Carney for ending the EV mandate—but I can’t because he didn’t. Instead, he simply hid the EV mandate under a new name and buried it in pre-existing air pollution regulations originally designed to deal with real toxic air pollutants (such as smog and soot). Those popular regulations will make a good hiding place for the EV mandate’s purpose of reducing non-toxic greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, Ottawa didn’t scrap the EV mandate, it put it into witness protection: name changed, taken out of the public eye, hidden in some innocuous business, nothing to see here.
Now, instead of a visible sales quota, the government is reportedly pivoting to a tightened vehicle fleet emission standard. “Canada will set a new, more ambitious sovereign path to reduce automobile emissions,” Carney said at a news conference at an auto parts manufacturer in the Greater Toronto Area. “We’re tightening by twofold our GHG emissions standards and we’re giving the industry the flexibility how they achieve that, whether through plug-in hybrids, EVs, more efficient ICE vehicles.”
Again, that sounds different but it isn’t. Because if you tighten your vehicle fleet emission standards enough, the only vehicles to meet the standard, functionally, will be battery electrics or plug-in hybrids. If your emission standard changes over the same timeframe as your scrapped sales mandate would have, you achieve the same end: forced adoption of EVs over the same timeframe as the mandate.
We’re starting to see a trend from the Carney government. When the federal consumer carbon tax became politically radioactive, the government didn’t abandon its emissions agenda—it shifted the tax burden into industrial pricing systems. The tax bite didn’t vanish; it just moved (and actually increased) and became harder for voters to trace. Now we’re seeing the same maneuver with vehicles. Publicly, with ceremony, declare the unpopular mandate dead. Then bury it in the fine print of emissions regulations and hope nobody notices.
But consumers will notice—at the dealership. Under a stringent fleet standard, automakers will have two options: sell more EVs (at less profit) or pay penalties. Manufacturers won’t absorb that; they’ll cross-subsidize EV sales with higher prices on ICE vehicles. That means Canadians who prefer gasoline vehicles—because they travel long distances, live in cold climates, tow things or simply don’t want a $50,000 battery pack—will help finance the transition whether they like it or not.
The EV mandate is not dead. It’s safely relocated to regulatory witness protection.
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