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Automotive

Power Struggle: Electric vehicles and reality

Published

3 months ago

9 minute read

From Resource Works

Tension grows between ambition and market truths

Host Stewart Muir talks on Power Struggle with Brian Maas, president of the California New Car Dealers Association, and Maas introduces us to a U.S. problem that Canada and B.C. also face right now. “The problem is there are mandates that apply in California and 11 other states that require, for the 2026 model year, 35% of all vehicles manufactured for sale in our state must be zero-emission, even though the market share right now is 20%.  “So we’ve got a mandate that virtually none of the manufacturers our dealers represent are going to be able to meet.”

Maas adds: “We’re trying to communicate with policymakers that nobody’s opposed to the eventual goal of electrification. California’s obviously led that effort, but a mandate that nobody can comply with and one that California voters are opposed to deserves to be recalibrated.” Meanwhile, in Canada, the same objections apply to the federal government’s requirement, set in 2023, that 100% of new light-duty vehicles sold must be zero-emission vehicles, ZEVs (electric or plug-in hybrid) by 2035, with interim targets of 20 per cent by 2026 and 60 per cent by 2030. There are hefty penalties for dealers missing the targets.

Market researchers note that it now takes 55 days to sell an electric vehicle in Canada, up from 22 days in the first quarter of 2023. The researchers cite a lack of desirable models and high consumer prices despite government subsidies to buyers in six provinces that run as high as $7,000 in Quebec.

In the U.S. The Wall Street Journal reports that, on average, electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids sit in dealer lots longer than gasoline-powered cars and hybrids, despite government pressure to switch to electric. (The Biden administration ruled that two-thirds of new vehicles sold must be electric by 2032.) For Canada, the small-c conservative Fraser Institute reports: “The targets were wild to begin with. As Manhattan Institute senior fellow Mark P. Mills observed, bans on conventional vehicles and mandated switches to electric means, consumers will need to adopt EVs at a scale and velocity 10 times greater and faster than the introduction of any new model of car in history.”

When Ottawa scrapped federal consumer subsidies earlier this year, EV manufacturers and dealers in Canada called on the feds to scrap the sales mandates. “The federal government’s mandated ZEV sales targets are increasingly unrealistic and must end,” said Brian Kingston, CEO of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association. “Mandating Canadians to buy ZEVs without providing them the supports needed to switch to electric is a made-in-Canada policy failure.” And Tim Reuss, CEO of the Canadian Automobile Dealers Association, said: “The Liberal federal government has backed away from supporting the transition to electric vehicles and now we are left with a completely unrealistic plan at the federal level.  “There is hypocrisy in imposing ambitious ZEV mandates and penalties on consumers when the government is showing a clear lack of motivation and support for their own policy goals.”

In B.C., sales growth of ZEVs has recently slowed, and the provincial government is considering easing its ZEV targets. “The Energy Ministry acknowledged that it will be ‘challenging’ to reach the target that 90 per cent of new vehicles be zero emission by 2030.”  Nat Gosman, an assistant deputy minister in the B.C. energy ministry, cited reasons for the slowdown that include affordability concerns due to a pause in government rebates, supply chain disruptions caused by U.S. tariffs, and concerns about reliability of public charging sites.

Barry Penner, chair of the Energy Futures Institute and a former B.C. Liberal environment minister, said the problem is that the government has “put the cart before the horse” when it comes to incentivizing people to buy electric vehicles. “The government imposed these electric vehicle mandates before the public charging infrastructure is in place and before we’ve figured out how we’re going to make it easy for people to charge their vehicles in multi-family dwellings like apartment buildings.”

Penner went on to write an article for Resource Works that said: “Instead of accelerating into economically harmful mandates, both provincial and federal governments should recalibrate. We need to slow down, invest in required charging infrastructure, and support market-based innovation, not forced adoption through penalties. “A sustainable energy future for BC and Canada requires smart, pragmatic policy, not economic coercion. Let’s take our foot off the gas and realign our policies with reality, protect jobs, consumer affordability, and real environmental progress. Then we can have a successful transition to electric vehicles.”

Back to Power Struggle, and Brian Maas tells Stewart: “I think everybody understands that it’s great technology and I think a lot of Californians would like to have one.  . . . The number one reason consumers cited for not making the transition to a zero-emission vehicle is the lack of public charging infrastructure. We’re woefully behind what would be required to move to 100% environment. “And if you live in a multifamily dwelling, an apartment building or something like that, you can’t charge at home, so you would have to rely on a public charger. Where do you go to get that charged?

“The state’s Energy Commission has said we need a million public chargers by 2030 and two million public chargers by 2035. We only have 178,000 now and we’re adding less than 50,000 public chargers a year. We’re just not going to get there fast enough to meet the mandate that’s on the books now.”

In Canada, Resource Works finds there now are more than 33,700 public charging ports, at 12,955 locations. But Ottawa says that to support its EV mandate, Canada will need about 679,000 public ports. “This will require the installation of, on average, 40,000 public ports each year between 2025 and 2040.”

And we remind readers of Penner’s serious call on governments to lighten the push on the accelerator when it comes to ZEV mandates: “Let’s take our foot off the gas and realign our policies with reality, protect jobs, consumer affordability, and real environmental progress. Then we can have a successful transition to electric vehicles.”

  • Power Struggle YouTube video: https://ow.ly/8J4T50WhK5i
  • Audio and full transcript: https://ow.ly/Np8550WhK5j
  • Stewart Muir on LinkedIn: https://ow.ly/Smiq50UWpSB
  • Brian Maas on LinkedIn: https://ow.ly/GuTh50WhK8h
  • Power Struggle on LinkedIn: https://ow.ly/KX4r50UWpUa
  • Power Struggle on Instagram: https://ow.ly/3VIM50UWpUg
  • Power Struggle on Facebook: https://ow.ly/4znx50UWpUs
  • Power Struggle on X: https://ow.ly/tU3R50UWpVu
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Automotive

Big Auto Wants Your Data. Trump and Congress Aren’t Having It.

Published on October 5, 2025

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Ken Blackwell

Congress is not going to allow Big Auto to sideline consumer privacy and safety while getting subsidized massively by the federal government.

That is because, in late September, by an overwhelming vote of 50 to 1, Chairman Brett Guthrie’s (R-KY) House Energy & Commerce Committee joined the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee in passing the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act.

This legislation is in response to some automakers removing AM radios from new model vehicles despite pleas from America’s public safety community not to do so.

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Advisors to President Trump have argued they continue doing so for financial reasons — because they want to force increased traffic onto their infotainment systems, which collects drivers’ personal information and sells it to third parties.

“They’d rather force consumers to use their infotainment devices — which collect and sell their third-party data — than protect American lives,” Corey Lewandowski, President Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and senior adviser to his 2020 and 2024 campaigns, stated.

 No one in Congress likes that the auto companies are doing this. That is why the bill has broad bipartisan support with over 300 cosponsors in the House as well as a filibuster-proof level of support in the Senate.

The entirety of America’s public safety community spanning the federal, state, and local levels, insists AM radio remaining in cars is critical for protecting the nation’s emergency alerting systems. These systems rely heavily upon AM radio, the only communication method that has stayed reliably accessible during many disasters such as the Sept.11 terrorist attack and major disasters like Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and most recently, Helene.

Brendan Carr, the current chairman of President Trump’s FCC, nominated by President Trump, has also endorsed the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act. In a statement, Carr said that “millions of Americans depend on the value of AM radio and the local news that AM broadcasters offer in communities across the country.” He also recounted hearing firsthand stories of Hurricane Helene victims who “could only access lifesaving information in the days following the storm by tuning into their AM radios.”

AM radio also serves another purpose that the elites in Silicon Valley and Detroit often forget: it keeps rural and working-class America connected. Millions of people outside the big cities rely on AM for local news, farm reports, weather alerts, and even community events. For many small towns, AM stations are a lifeline—far more reliable than expensive streaming services or spotty cell coverage. Pulling it out of cars is yet another way of telling Middle America: “you don’t matter.”

Of course, no good idea in Washington is safe from special interests.

Despite the broad support within Congress, the administration, and throughout the public safety and first responder communities, the bill has faced a full-court press by the musicFIRST Coalition — a group backed by the Recording Industry of America — to tank the legislation unless it is tied to unrelated music royalty reform legislation.  That’s cronyism politics at its worst—holding public safety hostage to squeeze out another payday.

However, now that the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act has passed both committees by overwhelming margins, the only stop left for the legislation is the House and Senate Floor — meaning Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and House Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) must call it up for a roll call vote.

At the heart of this fight is more than just whether a radio dial stays in your dashboard. It’s about whether Americans can trust that their safety won’t be sacrificed for corporate profit.

It’s also about data privacy. Automakers and Big Tech are eager to funnel drivers into infotainment systems that monitor every move, harvest personal information, and sell it to the highest bidder. AM radio doesn’t spy on you. It doesn’t crash when the grid goes down. It doesn’t put profit ahead of people. It just works.

For the sake of both public safety and personal freedom, Congress should make sure it stays that way.

Ken Blackwell (@KenBlackwell) is an adviser to the Family Research Council and a chair at the America First Policy Institute. He is a former Mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio, Ohio Treasurer and Secretary of State, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. He is also a former member of the Trump transition team.

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Automotive

Canada’s EV subsidies are wracking up billions in losses for taxpayers, and not just in the auto industry

Published on October 2, 2025

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By Dan McTeague

To anyone who thought that the Liberals’ decision to postpone enforcement of their Electric Vehicle (EV) mandate by one year was part of a well-thought-out plan to get that disastrous program back on track, well, every day brings with it news that you were wrong. In fact, the whole project seems to be coming apart at the seams.

Here’s the latest crisis Mark Carney and his carnival of ideologues are having to deal with. Late last year, the Liberal party instituted a 100% tariff on Chinese-made EVs. The idea was to protect the Canadian EV industry from China dumping their vehicles into our country, at prices far lower than Canadian companies can afford due to their massive state subsidies. This has been a major problem in the EU, which is also attempting to force a transition to EVs.

But Beijing wasn’t going to take that lying down. Taking advantage of Western environmentalist sentiment is an important part of their economic plans — see, for instance, how they’ve cornered the global solar panel market, though the factories making them are powered by massive amounts of coal. So they retaliated with a 75% duty on Canadian canola seed and a 100% tariff on canola oil and canola meal.

This was big enough to really hurt Canadian farmers, and Ottawa was forced to respond with more than $300 million in new relief programs for canola producers. Even so, our farmers have warned that short-term relief from the government will do little if the tariffs are here for the long-term.

With pressure on Carney mounting, his Industry Minister Melanie Joly announced that the government was “looking at” dropping tariffs on Chinese EVs in the hope that China would ease off on their canola tariffs.

That may be good news for canola producers, but how about the automotive companies? They’ve grown increasingly unhappy with the EV mandate, as Canadian consumers have been slow to embrace them, and they’ve been confronted with the prospect of paying significant fines unless they raise prices on the gas-and-diesel driven vehicles which consumers actually want to make the EVs that they don’t really want more attractive.

That’s the context for Brian Kingston, CEO of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association, saying that dropping these tariffs “would be a disaster.”

“China has engaged in state-supported industrial policy to create massive overcapacity in EV production, and that plan is coming to fruition now,” Kingston said. “When you combine that with weak labour and environmental standards, Chinese manufacturers are not competing with Canadian, American, or Mexican manufacturers on a level playing field. We simply cannot allow those vehicles to be dumped into the Canadian market.”

The auto manufacturers Kingston represents are understandably upset about suddenly having to compete with underpriced Chinese EVs. After all, with the government forcing everyone to buy a product they really don’t want, are most people going to patriotically pay more for that product, or will they just grab whichever one is cheaper? I know which one I think is more likely.

And then there’s a related problem — the federal and provincial governments have “invested” somewhere in the neighborhood of $52.5 billion to make Canada a cog in the global EV supply chain. In response to Joly’s announcement, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has gone “all in” on EVs, wrote an open letter to the prime minister saying that canceling the tariffs would mean losing out on that “investment,” and put 157,000 Canadian automotive jobs at risk.

Now, it’s worth noting that automakers all over Ontario have already been cutting jobs while scaling back their EV pledges. So even with the tariffs, this “investment” hasn’t been paying out particularly well. Keeping them in place just to save Doug Ford’s bacon seems like the worst of all options.

But it seems to me that the key to untangling this whole mess has been the option I’ve been advocating from the beginning: repeal the EV mandate. That makes Canada less of a mark for China. It benefits the taxpayers by not incentivizing our provincial and federal governments to throw good money after bad, attempting to subsidize companies to protect a shrinking number of EV manufacturing jobs.

The heart of this trade war is an entirely artificial demand for EVs. Removing the mandate from the equation would lower the stakes.

In the end, the best policy is to trust Canadians to make their own decisions. Let the market decide.

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Canadians for Affordable Energy is run by Dan McTeague, former MP and founder of Gas Wizard. We stand up and fight for more affordable energy.

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