From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Marco Navarro-Genie

At what point does Ottawa admit its EV plan isn’t working?

Electric vehicles produce more pollution than the gas-powered cars they’re replacing.

This revelation, emerging from life-cycle and supply chain audits, exposes the false claim behind Ottawa’s more than $50 billion experiment. A Volvo study found that manufacturing an EV generates 70 per cent more emissions than building a comparable conventional vehicle because battery production is energy-intensive and often powered by coal in countries such as China. Depending on the electricity grid, it can take years or never for an EV to offset that initial carbon debt.

Prime Minister Mark Carney paused the federal electric vehicle (EV) mandate for 2026 due to public pressure and corporate failures while keeping the 2030 and 2035 targets. The mandate requires 20 per cent of new vehicles sold in 2026 to be zero-emission, rising to 60 per cent in 2030 and 100 per cent in 2035. Carney inherited this policy crisis but is reluctant to abandon it.

Industry failures and Trump tariffs forced Ottawa’s hand. Northvolt received $240 million in federal subsidies for a Quebec battery plant before filing for bankruptcy. Lion Electric burned through $100 million before announcing layoffs. Arrival, a U.K.-based electric van and bus manufacturer, collapsed entirely. Stellantis and LG Energy Solution extracted $15 billion for Windsor. Volkswagen secured $13 billion for St. Thomas.

The federal government committed more than $50 billion in subsidies and tax credits to prop up Canada’s EV industry. Ottawa defended these payouts as necessary to match the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, which offers major incentives for EV and battery manufacturing. That is twice Manitoba’s annual operating budget. Every Manitoban could have had a two-year tax holiday with the public money Ottawa wasted on EVs.

Even with incentives, EVs reached only 15 per cent of new vehicle sales in 2024, far short of the mandated levels for 2026 and 2030. When federal subsidies ended in January 2025, sales collapsed to nine per cent, revealing the true level of consumer demand. Dealer lots overflowed with unsold inventory. EV sales also slowed in the U.S. and Europe in 2024, showing that cooling demand is a broader trend.

As economist Friedrich Hayek observed, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Politicians and bureaucrats cannot know what millions of Canadians know about their own needs. When federal ministers mandate which vehicles Canadians must buy and which companies deserve billions, they substitute the judgment of a few hundred officials for the collective wisdom of an entire market.

Bureaucrats draft regulations that determine the vehicles Canadians must purchase years from now, as if they can predict technology and consumer preferences better than markets.

Green ideology provided perfect cover. Invoke a climate emergency and fiscal responsibility vanishes. Question more than $50 billion in subsidies and you are labelled a climate denier. Point out the environmental costs of battery production, and you are accused of spreading misinformation.

History repeatedly teaches that central planning always fails. Soviet five-year plans, Venezuela’s resource nationalization and Britain’s industrial policy failures all show the same pattern. Every attempt to run economies from political offices ends in misallocation, waste and outcomes opposite to those promised. Concentrated political power cannot ever match the intelligence of free markets responding to real prices and constraints.

Markets collect information that no central planner can access. Prices signal scarcity and value. Profits and losses reward accuracy and punish error. When governments override these mechanisms with mandates and subsidies, they impair the information system that enables rational economic decisions.

The EV mandate forced a technological shift and failed. Billions in subsidies went to failing companies. Taxpayers absorbed losses while corporations walked away. Workers lost their jobs.

Canada needs a full repeal of the EV mandate and a retreat from PMO planners directing market decisions. The law must be struck, not paused. The contrived 2030 and 2035 targets must be abandoned.

Markets, not cabinet ministers, must determine what technologies Canadians choose.

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).

From LifeSiteNews

By Jonathon Van Maren

Paul Brandt is calling on Parliament to exercise the notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms after a teen in Calgary made deepfake child porn from photos of schoolgirls.

Canadian country music star Paul Brandt is calling on Parliament to exercise the notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the wake of another horrifying case of a boy creating digital deepfake pornography of female classmates—child sexual abuse material (CSAEM).

A 17-year-old boy in Calgary, Alberta used AI to transform normal photographs of schoolgirls into child sexual abuse material and then uploaded them to social media. According to police, the teen is facing charges “including making, possessing, and distributing child sexual abuse and exploitation materials, along with criminal harassment.”

“The victims—teen girls from multiple high schools—are now in trauma counselling,” wrote Brandt in an X thread that has already been viewed nearly a million times. “Some may never feel safe at school again. Their images are forever weaponized. This isn’t ‘bullying.’ This is sexual violence enabled by technology and enabled by weak laws.”

“Under the law before October 31, 2025, this boy faced a mandatory 1-year jail sentence for making & distributing CSAEM, plus another possible 1-year for possession,” Brandt continued. “That floor sent a clear message: you do not get to sexually exploit children and walk away with probation…The Supreme Court struck down the 1-year mandatory minimum for possession of CSAEM because of a hypothetical 18-year-old who keeps a consensual sext from his 17-year-old girlfriend.”

RELATED: Canada’s Supreme Court goes soft on child pornography

This ruling, Brandt noted, means that many judges will let “young offenders” off light—and the social consequences of this will be transformative. “Imagine being one of those Calgary girls and hearing the boy who deepfaked you into porn might get… house arrest,” Brandt wrote. “Or a conditional discharge. Or NOTHING. Because a court 3,000 km away worried about a different, hypothetical 18-year-old’s love life.”

These “mandatory minimums,” Brandt stated, are essential. “They are the only way to tell every teenager with a phone and an AI app: If you turn a classmate into child sexual abuse material, your life changes too. You do not get to ruin hers and live yours without consequence. Without that certainty, we are teaching two generations the wrong lesson: Victims: ‘Your trauma is negotiable.’ Perpetrators: ‘Worst-case scenario is a stern talking-to.’”

Importantly, mandatory minimum sentences for these crimes were an important deterrent to sexually predatory behavior. “After mandatory minimums were introduced in 2015, self-reported teen sextortion and revenge-porn cases dropped,” Brandt wrote.

When the floor disappears, the behaviour comes roaring back—we’re already seeing it in the 54% surge in Alberta ICE files this year. The perpetrator is also a child. He needed a bright red line years ago—before he pressed “generate.” Clear, certain punishment protects him too: from becoming an adult predator, from a lifetime on the sex-offender registry, from potentially destroying his own future along with theirs.

Brandt called on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government to invoke the notwithstanding clause and “restore the mandatory minimums for possession, making, and distribution of CSAEM,” and table a bill “with even stronger sentence if necessary. Brandt called on Canadians to sign his petition urging the government to take action “before the next classroom is violated.”

Paul Brandt launched an anti-sex trafficking organization in 2017 called #NotInMyCity, which focuses on raising awareness, advancing preventative strategies, mobilizing communities, and “facilitating transformational systems change.” The organization has assembled a vast army of corporate, political, and social allies over the past eight years.

LSN published a report in this space on December 3, detailing the growing crisis of AI-generated pornography via apps like “nudify,” which children and teens have used to digitally undress their classmates and produce CSAEM.

RELATED: AI is accelerating the porn crisis as kids create, consume explicit deepfake images of classmates

Jonathon Van Maren

Jonathon’s writings have been translated into more than six languages and in addition to LifeSiteNews, has been published in the National Post, National Review, First Things, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The Stream, the Jewish Independent, the Hamilton Spectator, Reformed Perspective Magazine, and LifeNews, among others. He is a contributing editor to The European Conservative.