Last week, New Democratic Party leader Andrea Horwath traveled to Guelph to get her party off the ground‘s proposal to help accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles in Ontario. Implementation of a commitment made for the first time in the NDP‘s environmental plan – billed as a “Green New Democratic Deal “- the party would set mandates for the minimum proportion of new cars sold in Ontario that must be battery-powered, as well as help meet some costs for consumers and provide incentives for manufacturers to convert their current internal combustion engine production lines.
The plan is hardly groundbreaking, but it is‘is not bad for that. In fact, the NDP took the opportunity to stab a trick or two at the current progressive Conservative government, noting that some of their proposals would simply make amends for the damage done by Premier Doug Ford‘s government did in its earliest days. (The Tories have at least gotten around a little about electric cars since then.)
However, even the relatively simple parts of these plans can get more complicated than they initially appear. Take the NDP, for example‘s promise that everyone will incentivize electric car buyers‘Does not apply to luxury models. This is a serious problem, and one we do‘I’ve seen growling into details at both the provincial and federal levels. Kathleen Wynnes Liberals implemented an incentive for potential buyers to switch to electric, then trimmed it so that it couldn’t be used to subsidize high-end Teslas, and then made the policy more generous again to allow Teslas to qualify (shortly thereafter, a Liberal worker went to work for Tesla – will the miracles never stop?).
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Last week I asked Horwath if she could be more specific about the types of “Luxury vehicles “would and would‘do not qualify for the NDP‘s proposed grant.
“I think we need to be really considerate of people who have different lifestyles and different challenges and needs in terms of transportation depending on where they are in our very diverse province, ”she said. “I think we need to think carefully about being us‘t prevent people who really need heavier vehicles from receiving this type of help. “
This policy dossier is devilishly complicated, and it requires policymakers to pause for a second and ask what EVs should do for us instead of simply reassuring us that all new EVs are a good thing.
Take, for example, the imminent arrival of the Ford F-150 Lightning, an all-electric version of the venerable pickup truck. It‘It is likely to be one of the best-selling electric vehicles in North America when it becomes available, if for no other reason than that its internal combustion engine ancestor has been the best-selling vehicle of all types in Canada for more than a decade.
Some EV boosters are overjoyed with the F-150 Lightning. They hope that this will turn the buyers of electric vehicles into a completely new type of customer: people who would have earlier dismissed battery-powered cars as underpowered for their taste. But the price of the base model – nearly 60,000 Canadian dollars – seems to qualify it as one “Luxury ‘vehicle, at least if we are‘the current blocking period for the federal government’s EV discount is observed. On the other hand, every single non-electric pickup truck purchased in 2021 is likely to spend about a decade on the road, emitting more than 100 tons of greenhouse gases during that time. Even conservative estimates of the social costs of carbon pollution suggest that we should convert as many pickup consumers as possible to electric versions.
But maybe we should talk instead about whether we should subsidize electric cars and trucks at all: If we were honestly trying to get people clean around our cities (where most of us live) with the most efficient investment of public money,‘I’ll likely be subsidizing electric bikes for anyone who wanted one, with additional support for electrifying transit fleets (something the NDP also has on their platform).
In a nutshell: What a meaningful subsidy for electric vehicles looks like depends heavily on what exactly you do‘try to reach again. If your goal is to get consumers to abandon some of the most polluting vehicles on the road, you could persuade yourself to subsidize electric pickups. But that‘It is nowhere near the only political goal if we‘We’re talking about electric vehicles (e.g. the ability of electric vehicles to stabilize power grids is another important piece of the puzzle).
In Ontario, it looks like all four parties are currently represented at Queen‘s Park are likely to develop some sort of EV policy: even the Tories have started to see which way global industry is headed, and they are‘They are not about to sacrifice automotive jobs in Ontario to their own skepticism about battery-powered cars. It’s worth seeing where they match – and, more importantly, where they diverge.
