Do Electric Vehicle Subsidies Work?

Governments in Canada have been begging us to purchase EVs and plug-in hybrids for years. The carrot has been $600 million annually in federal subsidies (and more at the provincial level) aimed at consumers. The stick is the dark threat of outlawing internal combustion engines altogether. A third approach involves splashing billions of dollars of handouts and tax credits in the general direction of companies with starry-eyed plans to manufacture EV components locally.

I’m not going to discuss whether EVs are actually the best solution for whatever ails the environment. That may be a few levels above my pay grade. Instead, I’d like to analyze whether the consumer-focused subsidies actually worked.

To do that I first identified the provinces that offered subsidies for “battery electric vehicles” (i.e., EVs). Those would be British Columbia, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. That’ll give us a nice reference point for comparison against provinces that don’t offer subsidies. Specifically, those are Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario. (Although Manitoba did just introduce a rebate program in July of 2024.)

Of course, there are also federal subsidies available across the country.

Now there is one problem with the Statistics Canada sales data. Due to some weird licensing issue, there’s no sales data at all for Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, or Alberta. We’ll just have to do our best with what we’ve got.

Here are the numbers expressed as sales per 100,000 people (based on 2024 provincial population estimates):

The obvious big mover here is Quebec. Their Roulez Vert program – at $7,000 – is the most generous in the country (although it’s currently set to be phased-out by 2027). But Roulez Vert has been around since 2012, so it might not completely explain those huge jumps since 2022.

If you squint really hard at the graph, you should notice a modest jump in Ontario EV sales back in 2018. That would probably be due to last-minute bargain hunters reacting to the Ford government’s plans to cancel Ontario’s rebate.

But none of that is going to give us the precision we need to answer our real question: did government subsidies actually drive more EV sales? For that, we’ll need a bit of statistical analysis. This scatter plot visualizes the relationships between subsidies and average sales over time:

If our only data point was Quebec – with its impressive sales and high subsidy level – then the conclusion would be straightforward. But that’s exactly why we look for more data. So, for instance, BC has sales that, proportionally, were close to Quebec’s but with rebates that were 40 percent lower. And Canada’s federal rebates played a role in relatively few overall sales.

For those of you who enjoy such things, here are the actual numbers SciPy’s linear regression gave me:

Slope: 0.005910745672259122
Intercept: 13.256019105900187
R-squared: 0.31881294222441453
P-value: 0.14480378835260208
Standard Error: 0.00352721449117312

The slope indicates that for every additional thousand dollars of subsidy, EV sales would increase by only around six vehicles per 100,000 people. That’s compared with the intercept (13.26) which estimates the baseline (no-subsidy) sales at 13.26 units per 100,000 people.

The R-squared value suggests that about 32 percent of the variability in EV sales per 100,000 people is explained by the subsidy amount. But the P-value strongly suggests that the relationship is not statistically significant.

Meaning, in other words, that there’s no clear cause-and-effect relationship between the billions of dollars of government handouts and real-world vehicle sales. It’s distinctly possible that just as many EVs would have been purchased had there been no subsidies.

Related Topics:#DavidClinton #EVSubsidies DoEVSubsidiesWork ElectricVehicleSubsidies TheAudit

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Canada’s EV experiment has FAILED

Published on November 3, 2025

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By Dan McTeague

The government’s attempt to force Canadians to buy EVs by gambling away billions of tax dollars and imposing an EV mandate has been an abject failure.

GM and Stellantis are the latest companies to back track on their EV plans in Canada despite receiving billions in handouts from Canadian taxpayers.

Dan McTeague explains in his latest video.

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Carney’s Budget Risks Another Costly EV Bet

Published on November 2, 2025

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Marco Navarro-Genie

GM’s Ontario EV plant was sold as a green success story. Instead it collapsed under subsidies, layoffs and unsold vans

Every age invents new names for old mistakes. In ours, they’re sold as investments. Before the Carney government unveils its November budget promising another future paid for in advance, Canadians should remember Ingersoll, Ont., one of the last places a prime minister tried to buy tomorrow.

Eager to transform the economy, in December 2022, former prime minister Justin Trudeau promised that government backing would help General Motors turn its Ingersoll plant into a beacon of green industry. “By 2025 it will be producing 50,000 electric vehicles per year,” he declared: 137 vehicles daily, six every hour. What sounded like renewal became an expensive demonstration of how progressive governments peddle rampant spending as sound strategy.

The plan began with $259 million from Ottawa and another $259 million from Ontario: over half a billion to switch from Equinox production to BrightDrop electric delivery vans. The promise was thousands of “good, middle-class jobs.”

The assembly plant employed 2,000 workers before retooling. Today, fewer than 700 remain; a two-thirds collapse. With $518 million in public funds and only 3,500 vans built in 2024, taxpayers paid $148,000 per vehicle. The subsidy works out to over half a million dollars per remaining worker. Two out of every three employees from Trudeau’s photo-op are now unemployed.

The failure was entirely predictable. Demand for EVs never met the government’s plan. Parking lots filled with unsold inventory. GM did the rational thing: slowed production, cut staff and left. The Canadian taxpayer was left to pay the bill.

This reveals the weakness of Ottawa’s industrial policy. Instead of creating conditions for enterprise, such as reliable energy, stable regulation, and moderate taxes, progressive governments spend to gain applause. They judge success by the number of jobs announced, yet those jobs vanish once the cameras leave.

Politicians keep writing cheques to industry. Each administration claims to be more strategic, yet the pattern persists. No country ever bought its way into competitiveness.

Trudeau “bet big on electric vehicles,” but betting with other people’s money isn’t vision; it’s gambling. The wager wasn’t on technology but narrative, the naive idea that moral intention could replace market reality. The result? Fewer jobs, unwanted products and claims of success that convinced no one.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has mastered the same rhetorical sleight of hand. Spending becomes “investment,” programs become “platforms.” He promises to “catalyze unprecedented investments” while announcing fiscal restraint: investing more while spending less. His $13-billion federal housing agency is billed as a future investment, though it’s immediate public spending under a moral banner.

“We can build big. Build bold. Build now,” Carney declared, promising infrastructure to “reduce our vulnerabilities.” The cadence of certainty masks the absence of limits. Announcing “investment” becomes synonymous with action itself; ambition replaces accountability.

The structure mirrors the Ingersoll case: promise vast returns from state-directed spending, redefine subsidy as vision, rely on tomorrow to conceal today’s bill. “Investment” has become the language of evasion, entitlement and false pride.

As Carney prepares his first budget, Canadians should remember what happened when their last leader tried to buy a future with lavish “investment.”

A free economy doesn’t need bribery to breathe. It requires the discipline of risk and liberty to fail without dragging a country down. Ingersoll wasn’t undone by technology but by ideological conceit. Prosperity cannot be decreed and markets cannot be commanded into obedience.

Every age invents new names for old mistakes. Ours keeps making the same ones. Entitled hubris knows no bounds.

Marco Navarro-Genie is vice-president of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and co-author, with Barry Cooper, of Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023).