ICE cars will be around for a long time yet
A story in Blacklock’s Reporter brings the grim news that “Barely one percent of road vehicles in Canada are battery-powered electrics, Statistics Canada said yesterday.” Not very many, is it?
And here you said we’d all be driving electrics by 2035 and be happy.
Of course that promise was made back when 2035 sounded as though it was a long way off.
But objects in calendar are closer than they appear… unless they’re the actual achievement of ‘green’ goals.
As Blacklock’s explains:
“New data were released as members of the Commons trade committee questioned the feasibility of cabinet’s mandate to abolish new sales of gasoline and diesel powered cars by 2035.”
Well, we’re glad someone did. And we weren’t expecting the ill-informed zealots running Canada’s executive branch to do it. For instance Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, who told the committee:
“When you’ve been doing the same thing for a hundred years and you change the technology in the way that we’re doing, you have short term adjustment.”
Again one can only wish in vain that he was deliberately muddying the waters. Because the whole point is that we don’t have short term adjustment. We have everyone still driving gasoline- and diesel-powered cars and trucks because they work.
OK, to be fair, the city of Calgary, in progressive hands, launched an ambitious half-billion-of-other-people’s-dollars plan to the municipal vehicle fleet to electric and show those short-sighted private-sector fools what real efficiency looks like.
And how did it go? Oh. Awkward.
The suppliers of 14 “emissions-free, 28-foot shuttle buses” to be delivered in 2022 instead went… bankrupt. So they leaped into committee, preparing to draft a scheme for a plan to devise a call for bids by year-end for a handful of buses to arrive in 2026, or on the 14th of never.
Meanwhile a conservative MP asked Champagne “Isn’t it better to remove those mandates?” and was told “To your point, we see the transition.” But nobody else can.
Incidentally in addition to 327,732 EVs out of 25,700,000 registered road vehicles, Canada also has 444,564 hybrids and another 145,101 “plug-in hybrids”.
So progress of a feeble sort, right? No. The 2035 ban on new ICE cars includes hybrids.
Evacuate in our moment of triumph?
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