Canada should heed Germany’s destructive climate policies

Volkswagen may soon close three vehicle factories, cut 10,000 jobs and impose steep across-the-board pay reductions. Volkswagen has avoided involuntary layoffs for 30 years and hasn’t shuttered a factory in its home country in its 87-year history.

According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Germany’s climate policies—chasing after “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions, aggressive electric vehicle sales mandates, and moving electricity production away from fossil fuels to renewable sources such as wind and solar—has imperiled Germany’s massive auto-sector, the central pillar of its economy.

Specifically, Volkswagen may soon close three vehicle factories, cut 10,000 jobs and impose steep across-the-board pay reductions. Volkswagen has avoided involuntary layoffs for 30 years and hasn’t shuttered a factory in its home country in its 87-year history.

While politicians in Germany blame this downturn to poor management of the company, the WSJ blames Germany’s climate policies, which are largely mimicked by Canada. “Germany’s auto industry is trapped in a vise between higher energy prices that drive up the cost of production, and electric-vehicle mandates that drive down sales.” Due to Germany’s intensive switch from coal and nuclear electricity production to renewables, electricity prices for large industrial users in Germany are well above the European Union average, and above prices in the United States, China and Japan.

Then there’s Germany’s electric vehicle (EV) mandates. As with Canada, Germany (under EU policy), requires that EVs constitute a higher share of vehicle sales each year, with internal-combustion engines phased out by 2035. The WSJ reports: “Stellantis has warned that it may also scale back car production to avoid running afoul of the Brussels EV mandate, and Ford is cutting several thousand jobs in Europe in its shift to EVs.” Germany’s climate policies are the “worst act of economic masochism in the West since the 1930s.” And it’s an act that Canada’s government seeks to emulate, with its own “net-zero” emission policies, clean electricity regulations and EV mandates.

Like Germany, Canada’s drive to “decarbonize” the electricity sector has led to higher prices for industrial users. For example, when Ontario decarbonized its electricity sector (by shuttering coal-fired power generation) from 2008 to 2016, Ontario’s residential electricity costs shot up by 71 per cent, far outpacing the 34 per cent average growth in electricity prices across Canada. The skyrocketing electricity rates also hit the province’s industrial sector. Between 2010 and 2016, large industrial users in Toronto and Ottawa experienced cost spikes of 53 per cent and 46 per cent, respectively, compared to 14 per cent (on average) for the rest of Canada. In 2016, large industrial users in Toronto paid almost three times more than consumers in Montreal and Calgary and almost twice the prices paid by large consumers in Vancouver.

And like Germany, Canada’s EV mandate is already showing painful signs of failure. As reported by CBC, back in April Ford announced that its EV unit lost US$1.3 billion in the first quarter of 2024 alone, selling only 10,000 vehicles in that period. Possibly a good thing, because Ford lost about US$132,000 for every EV it sold in the first three months of the year. Ford and General Motors, are cutting back on EV production, with Ford planning to cut its electric pickup production by half.

Germany’s self-inflicted harms from its great spasm of climate policy masochism, like Canada’s self-inflicted harms from its masochism mimicry, should prompt Canada’s politicians to take a deep breath and shift away from economically destructive climate policies such as net-zero and EV mandates.

Kenneth P. Green

Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute

Related Topics:#ElectricVehicleMandate #FraserInstitute #KennethGreen #NetZero CanadaClimatePolicies GermanClimatePolicies GermanEconomy

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Ford’s EV Fiasco Fallout Hits Hard

Automotive

Ford’s EV Fiasco Fallout Hits Hard

Published on December 17, 2025

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

I’ve written frequently here in recent years about the financial fiasco that has hit Ford Motor Company and other big U.S. carmakers who made the fateful decision to go in whole hog in 2021 to feed at the federal subsidy trough wrought on the U.S. economy by the Joe Biden autopen presidency. It was crony capitalism writ large, federal rent seeking on the grandest scale in U.S. history, and only now are the chickens coming home to roost.

Ford announced on Monday that it will be forced to take $19.5 billion in special charges as its management team embarks on a corporate reorganization in a desperate attempt to unwind the financial carnage caused by its failed strategies and investments in the electric vehicles space since 2022.

Cancelled is the Ford F-150 Lightning, the full-size electric pickup that few could afford and fewer wanted to buy, along with planned introductions of a second pricey pickup and fully electric vans and commercial vehicles. Ford will apparently keep making its costly Mustang Mach-E EV while adjusting the car’s features and price to try to make it more competitive. There will be a shift to making more hybrid models and introducing new lines of cheaper EVs and what the company calls “extended range electric vehicles,” or EREVs, which attach a gas-fueled generator to recharge the EV batteries while the car is being driven.

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In an interview on CNBC, Company CEO Jim Farley said the basic problem with the strategy for which he was responsible since 2021 amounts to too few buyers for the highly priced EVs he was producing. Man, nobody could have possibly predicted that would be the case, could they? Oh, wait: I and many others have been warning this would be the case since Biden rolled out his EV subsidy plans in 2021.

“The $50k, $60k, $70k EVs just weren’t selling; We’re following customers to where the market is,” Farley said. “We’re going to build up our whole lineup of hybrids. It’s gonna be better for the company’s profitability, shareholders and a lot of new American jobs. These really expensive $70k electric trucks, as much as I love the product, they didn’t make sense. But an EREV that goes 700 miles on a tank of gas, for 90% of the time is all-electric, that EREV is a better solution for a Lightning than the current all-electric Lightning.”

It all makes sense to Mr. Farley, but one wonders how much longer the company’s investors will tolerate his presence atop the corporate management pyramid if the company’s financial fortunes don’t turn around fast.

To Ford’s and Farley’s credit, the company has, unlike some of its competitors (GM, for example), been quite transparent in publicly revealing the massive losses it has accumulated in its EV projects since 2022. The company has reported its EV enterprise as a separate business unit called Model-E on its financial filings, enabling everyone to witness its somewhat amazing escalating EV-related losses since 2022:

• 2022 – Net loss of $2.2 billion

• 2023 – Net loss of $4.7 billion

• 2024 – Net loss of $5.1 billion

Add in the company’s $3.6 billion in losses recorded across the first three quarters of 2025, and you arrive at a total of $15.6 billion net losses on EV-related projects and processes in less than four calendar years. Add to that the financial carnage detailed in Monday’s announcement and the damage from the company’s financial electric boogaloo escalates to well above $30 billion with Q4 2025’s damage still to be added to the total.

Ford and Farley have benefited from the fact that the company’s lineup of gas-and-diesel powered cars have remained strongly profitable, resulting in overall corporate profits each year despite the huge EV-related losses. It is also fair to point out that all car companies were under heavy pressure from the Biden government to either produce battery electric vehicles or be penalized by onerous federal regulations.

Now, with the Trump administration rescinding Biden’s harsh mandates and canceling the absurdly unattainable fleet mileage requirements, Ford and other companies will be free to make cars Americans actually want to buy. Better late than never, as they say, but the financial fallout from it all is likely just beginning to be made public.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

Automotive

Politicians should be honest about environmental pros and cons of electric vehicles

Published on December 13, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Annika Segelhorst and Elmira Aliakbari

According to Steven Guilbeault, former environment minister under Justin Trudeau and former member of Prime Minister Carney’s cabinet, “Switching to an electric vehicle is one of the most impactful things Canadians can do to help fight climate change.”

And the Carney government has only paused Trudeau’s electric vehicle (EV) sales mandate to conduct a “review” of the policy, despite industry pressure to scrap the policy altogether.

So clearly, according to policymakers in Ottawa, EVs are essentially “zero emission” and thus good for environment.

But is that true?

Clearly, EVs have some environmental advantages over traditional gasoline-powered vehicles. Unlike cars with engines that directly burn fossil fuels, EVs do not produce tailpipe emissions of pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, and do not release greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as carbon dioxide. These benefits are real. But when you consider the entire lifecycle of an EV, the picture becomes much more complicated.

Unlike traditional gasoline-powered vehicles, battery-powered EVs and plug-in hybrids generate most of their GHG emissions before the vehicles roll off the assembly line. Compared with conventional gas-powered cars, EVs typically require more fossil fuel energy to manufacture, largely because to produce EVs batteries, producers require a variety of mined materials including cobalt, graphite, lithium, manganese and nickel, which all take lots of energy to extract and process. Once these raw materials are mined, processed and transported across often vast distances to manufacturing sites, they must be assembled into battery packs. Consequently, the manufacturing process of an EV—from the initial mining of materials to final assembly—produces twice the quantity of GHGs (on average) as the manufacturing process for a comparable gas-powered car.

Once an EV is on the road, its carbon footprint depends on how the electricity used to charge its battery is generated. According to a report from the Canada Energy Regulator (the federal agency responsible for overseeing oil, gas and electric utilities), in British Columbia, Manitoba, Quebec and Ontario, electricity is largely produced from low- or even zero-carbon sources such as hydro, so EVs in these provinces have a low level of “indirect” emissions.

However, in other provinces—particularly Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia—electricity generation is more heavily reliant on fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas, so EVs produce much higher indirect emissions. And according to research from the University of Toronto, in coal-dependent U.S. states such as West Virginia, an EV can emit about 6 per cent more GHG emissions over its entire lifetime—from initial mining, manufacturing and charging to eventual disposal—than a gas-powered vehicle of the same size. This means that in regions with especially coal-dependent energy grids, EVs could impose more climate costs than benefits. Put simply, for an EV to help meaningfully reduce emissions while on the road, its electricity must come from low-carbon electricity sources—something that does not happen in certain areas of Canada and the United States.

Finally, even after an EV is off the road, it continues to produce emissions, mainly because of the battery. EV batteries contain components that are energy-intensive to extract but also notoriously challenging to recycle. While EV battery recycling technologies are still emerging, approximately 5 per cent of lithium-ion batteries, which are commonly used in EVs, are actually recycled worldwide. This means that most new EVs feature batteries with no recycled components—further weakening the environmental benefit of EVs.

So what’s the final analysis? The technology continues to evolve and therefore the calculations will continue to change. But right now, while electric vehicles clearly help reduce tailpipe emissions, they’re not necessarily “zero emission” vehicles. And after you consider the full lifecycle—manufacturing, charging, scrapping—a more accurate picture of their environmental impact comes into view.