By 2035 all cars, SUVs and light trucks sold in Canada must be electric, a goal experts describe as an ambitious one by the federal government as part of its plan to decarbonize the transportation sector and reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
But will Canada’s infrastructure be able to handle all of these new electric vehicles?
There doesn’t seem to be a clear answer, as experts in the automotive and green energy industries say there are several factors to consider.
According to the federal government’s data, electric vehicles only made up 5.3 per cent of all vehicles, or 86,000 vehicles, in Canada in 2021.
The Liberal government’s 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan outlines an increase of up to 395,000 new Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) sales in 2026; 1.2 million ZEVs in 2030; and a whopping 2 million ZEVs sold in 2035 — which translates to 5 per cent, 16 per cent and 40 per cent of all ZEVs on the road, respectively.
There are several elements to improving Canada’s electric vehicle infrastructure. The most obvious is the need for a dramatic increase in charging stations, of which the federal government has committed over $1 billion to build 84,000 over the next four years.
Daniel Breton, the president of Electric Mobility Canada, a national not-for-profit working to advance electric mobility in Canada, said one of the main issues today in electric vehicle infrastructure is that there just aren’t enough of them for sale.
“Canadian consumers want to buy electric vehicles,” Breton said, “but they’re really hard to come by. That is why we think we need more infrastructure for electric vehicles and we need to make sure that the infrastructure is reliable.”
A new Volkswagen ‘gigafactory’ assembling electric vehicle batteries in St. Thomas, Ont. is expected to begin production in 2027, creating up to 3,000 jobs in the region.
A General Motors plant, just 50 kilometres away from the Volkswagen factory in Ingersol, Ont. converted their facility into Canada’s first full-scale electric vehicle manufacturer. By 2025, the plant is expected to make 50,000 electric vehicles a year.
CHARGING
Charging an electric vehicle at home may sound simple: you plug your car into an outlet and let the battery charge. But it’s a little more complicated than that.
According to Natural Resources Canada, there are three ways to charge an electric vehicle.
The first, Level 1, is when you use your vehicle’s portable cord and plug it into a standard 120 volt wall socket. This is the slowest speed — it will get you about 3 kilometres to 8 kilometres of juice for every hour it’s left charging.
The second level requires electric vehicle owners to install a Level Two charging station in their homes. A Level 2 charger will get you 16 kilometres to 97 kilometres of energy per hour charged. But Level 2s require more electricity voltage, about the same as a stove or air conditioner might — 208 to 240 volts.
And a Level 3 charger is a “DC charger that provides the fastest charging time,” Natural Resources of Canada says on their website, but these are typically found in public places and businesses.
Most electric vehicle owners opt to install Level 2 chargers in their homes because they work faster and more efficiently, but many homes in Canada are built with older 120 volt electrical grids, which put out significantly less electricity than a 240 volt grid.
When homeowners already have their stoves, fridge, air conditioners and other mega-electricity consumers plugged into their electrical grids, charging an electric vehicle at the same time may overload it and burn it out.
84,000
charging stations being built by the Government of Canada by 2027
$1 billion
invested to build more charging stations since 2016
$1.7 billion
in incentives for zero emissions vehicles
Over 185,000
incentives provided to Canadians and businesses
Nearly 20,000
publicly available charging stations today
But Kevin Lisso, the CEO and co-founder of the Toronto-based green energy company EnerSavers, says many chargers today are equipped with a load management system, where the charger is smart enough to find the remaining power on the grid, whether it be 10 available amps or 40 amps, and it won’t overload the system.
“It will charge your car a little bit slower for 20 amps, but then as soon as you go to bed at night and your washing machine is off, your dryer turns off, the air conditioning is off, then all of a sudden you have all of this power available, and the charger will find it and use it because it has load management built into it,” Lisso said.
Charging at home may work for many electric vehicle owners now, but Canada’s electrical grid infrastructure will need a significant overhaul when thousands more electric vehicles are on the road.
According to a study by the Canadian Climate Institute, the move away from fossil fuels to clean energy in electricity consumption will put much more strain on Canada’s electrical grid, especially during ‘peak hours,’ between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m., when most people get home from work start using their appliances. This is also a prime time to plug in their cars to charge for the night.
In a study by Claude El-Bayeh, a University of Concordia postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, he and his colleagues found that if too many electric vehicles charge at the same time, “it will create a lot of problems for the network and perhaps cause a blackout,” said El-Bayeh in the study.
“Instead of improving the stability of the network and reducing pollution by using EVs, you’ll have the reverse effect.”
One of the suggestions the study makes is to utilize batteries that are bidirectional, where “the vehicle discharges power from its battery back into the grid.” This will allow vehicles to store more energy than they need. When a bidirectional battery is plugged into a socket, it can feed electricity back into the grid, powering buildings and homes and easing the tension put on Canada’s electrical system.
Today, many provinces are rolling out studies and testing their electrical infrastructure. In Alberta, FortisAlberta, an electricity distribution provider for the province, offered customers who owned electric vehicles up to $250 to sign up for a study based on their car’s charging data.
ELECTRIC VEHICLES ARE HEAVY
Another major issue with electric vehicles is that they’re significantly heavier than gas-powered vehicles.
“It’s a matter of physics,” said David Adams, the president of the Global Automakers of Canada. “The batteries are extremely heavy and the vehicles are extremely heavy.”
Adams explained that the larger the vehicle, the bigger and heavier the battery will have to be to power it, which makes it even more dangerous to cars on the road. He added that the tires for electric vehicles are also heavier than combustion engine vehicles because they are built to sustain the weight of the battery.
This added weight will put more strain on our roads. It also makes it much more dangerous for gas-powered vehicles when an electric vehicle and a gas-powered car collide.
In 2011, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that if a vehicle weighs 1,000 pounds more than another vehicle, it results in a 47 per cent increase in fatality risk.
Earlier this year, the National Transportation Safety Board in the U.S. raised concerns over the increasing weight of electric trucks and Hummers, saying, “We have to be careful that we aren’t also creating unintended consequences: More death on our roads…[s]afety, especially when it comes to new transportation policies and new technologies, cannot be overlooked.”
OTTAWA – Whole Foods Market is joining the growing list of brands whose frozen waffles have been recalled in Canada this week because of possible listeria contamination.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency says the newest recall spans the Amazon-owned grocer’s organic homestyle and blueberry waffles sold under the 365 Whole Foods Market label.
The agency says the waffles recalled by Horizon Distributors Ltd. were sold in British Columbia, but may have also made their way to other provinces and territories.
It adds there have been no reported illnesses associated with the waffles, but the agency is conducting a food safety investigation, which it says may lead to the recall of other products.
Dozens of frozen waffles from brands like Compliments, Great Value, Duncan Hines and No Name were recalled earlier in the week over similar listeria concerns.
Food contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes may not look or smell spoiled but can cause vomiting, nausea, persistent fever, muscle aches, severe headache and neck stiffness.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 26, 2024.
The 26-year-old dreams of going back to university to study politics and environmental science, and ultimately pursue a career to “try and make things better” in society.
“I’m not the person I want to be yet and I want to be able to achieve certain goals and be a well-rounded, well developed person. But I’m prevented from doing that because I live in legislated poverty,” they said.
Thompson is one of 600,000 working-age Canadians with disabilities that the federal government said it would help lift out of poverty with the Canada Disability Benefit, which takes effect next July. The program is meant as a top-up to existing provincial and territorial income supports.
“We had huge expectations and we had all this hope, like finally we can escape poverty,” Thompson said.
But after last spring’s federal budget revealed that the maximum people will receive per month is $200, the hopes of people like Thompson were dashed. Now, advocates are asking the federal government to reconsider the amount in the months before the benefit rolls out.
Thompson, who uses they/them pronouns, has worked at Tim Horton’s, Staples and a call centre, but said their physical and mental disabilities — including osteoarthritis, which “heavily impacts” their mobility, along with clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder — have forced them to leave.
They look for jobs, but many require the ability to lift or stand for long periods, which they can’t do. So Thompson lives on $1,449 a month from the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) and shares a house with three roommates in Kingston, Ont., along with Thompson’s 12-year-old emotional support cat, Captain Kirk.
Thompson went to university in 2017, but their mental health issues flared and they had to leave after a semester. Seven years later, they’re still trying to pay that student loan back.
When Bill C-22, which mandated the creation of a Canada Disability Benefit, was passed into law last year, Thompson was “so excited.”
A news release issued by the federal government on June 22, 2023 called the legislation “groundbreaking,” saying the disability benefit would “supplement existing federal and provincial/territorial disability supports, and will help lift working-age persons with disabilities out of poverty.”
It said the benefit would be part of the government’s “disability inclusion action plan” that would “address longstanding inequities that have led to the financial insecurity and exclusion” experienced by people with disabilities.
The government simply hasn’t lived up to its promise, said Amanda MacKenzie, national director of external affairs for March of Dimes Canada, one of the organizations that supported the creation of the benefit.
Now that a public consultation period on the benefit ended last month, she is hoping the government will reconsider and increase the benefit amount in its next budget.
”These are people that are living well under the $30,000 a year mark, for the most part,” MacKenzie said.
“These are the people that you hear about all the time that are saying, ‘I can only have two or one meal a day. I can only afford to take my medication every other day … I can’t support my kids. I can’t help my family. I can’t do anything because you know, I can barely pay my rent,'” she said.
March of Dimes Canada and many people with disabilities all participated in early government consultations about how the federal benefit could be effective in topping up provincial disability support programs to provide a livable income.
”Who were they listening to?” asked Thomas Cheesman, a 43-year-old in Grande Prairie, Alta., receiving provincial disability benefits due to a rare disorder that causes his bones to break down.
“Not one single disabled person would say that this is an adequate program,” he said.
Cheesman was born with Hajdu-Cheney Syndrome and knew he wouldn’t be able to work as long as most people, but managed to work as a chef until he was 39.
At that point, his physical symptoms became so debilitating he had to stop.
“It was just too dangerous between either taking medications to handle pain and being distracted from that, or not being able to function because of the pain,” he said.
Cheesman and his wife, who works as a supervisor at Costco, have three children. Before the Canada Disability Benefit became law, he “did a lot of math” and calculated it would need to total almost $1,000 a month for his family “to have a life outside of poverty.”
In an emailed response to The Canadian Press, the office of Kamal Khera, minister of diversity, inclusion and persons with disabilities, said it was making a $6.1-billion investment “to improve the financial security of over 600,000 persons with disabilities.”
“This is a historic initial investment … and is intended to supplement, not replace, existing provincial and territorial income support measures,” said Khera’s press secretary, Waleed Saleem.
“We also aspire to see the combined amount of federal and provincial or territorial income supports for persons with disabilities grow to the level of Old Age Security (OAS) and the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS), to fundamentally address the rates of poverty experienced by persons with disabilities.”
That would mean people with disabilities would get a total monthly income equal to what low-income seniors get from the federal government.
MacKenzie said the lack of adequate financial support for people with disabilities is “not OK,” noting that the money they spend goes back into the economy.
“We tell people with disabilities that what they deserve and what we can afford to give them in society is an existence. It’s not a life,” she said.
For Thompson, that’s “a really hard pill for me to swallow.”
”A lot of people don’t see us as human. They see us as a drain on society,” they said.
”We’re worth investing in.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 26, 2024.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
MONTREAL – The Quebec Liberal Party has called for the French language commissioner to investigate the cancelling of some French-language training courses for newcomers to the province.
Citing an “ongoing series of closures of francization programs,” the Opposition party announced Saturday morning in a news release that its critics for the French language and French classes, André Albert Morin and Madwa-Nika Cadet, sent a letter to the Commissioner of the French Language.
The letter asks commissioner Benoît Dubreuil to “investigate to ensure that the right to French language learning services, included in the Charter of the French Language, is respected,” the release said.
The Liberals are blaming the Coalition Avenir Québec government’s budgetary decisions, which it says, “jeopardize the possibility for immigrants to become French speakers within a time frame that would facilitate their integration into the job market and into Quebec society.”
In several interviews this week, Quebec’s Immigration Minister Jean-François Roberge blamed school service centres for the closures, saying his government has actually increased budgets for French-language courses.
However, media reports this week described education centres forced to cut back on programming because of budget constraints imposed on them by the province, which have also resulted in teachers losing their jobs.
“These cuts have led, in recent weeks, to the cancellation of French courses, particularly in the regions of Abitibi-Témiscamingue, the Capitale-Nationale, Estrie, Laval , the Laurentides, Mauricie and Montreal,” the release said.
Aside from cancellations, the Liberals say average wait times for full-time French study has recently doubled to four months while people who are enrolled are sometimes forced to travel hundreds of kilometres to attend class.
“There is an impression of disorder that suggests the government is unable to meet its obligations under the Charter of the French Language,” the letter sent to the Commissioner late Friday stated.
The closures come at a time of increased demand for the classes, with Quebec currently hosting around 600,000 temporary immigrants. Quebec has repeatedly asked the federal government for more power and funds to deal with the surge in newcomers, but the CAQ leadership has also come under fire from Ottawa.
Federal Public Services and Procurement Minister Jean-Yves Duclos said Friday that the $750 million the federal government is spending to help the province with newcomers is not being fully used.
“We absolutely must invest the necessary sums in francization,” said Duclos. “If we want new arrivals to be able to reach their full potential, we have to offer them appropriate services.”
Cadet told The Canadian Press in an interview the government is clearly struggling to provide the right to learn French.
“So in our opinion, the commissioner should have the mandate to investigate this, and that’s why we wrote him this letter,” Cadet said, but would not say whether her party would increase French-language budgets.
Last February, Dubreuil stated it would cost between $10.6 and $12.9 billion for all temporary immigrants to complete intermediate-level training in French.
Cadet responded by saying, “I don’t think we’re in that type of scenario. I think there’s a way to better deploy the offer and make sure there are no service breakdowns.”
–With files from La Presse Canadienne
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 26, 2024.
