Madam Speaker, we are here tonight to talk about the EV mandate the Liberal government has put forward, which states that 20% of Canadians will have to be driving electric vehicles by 2026, 60% by 2030 and 100% by 2035. These are not targets. It is going to be a mandate that will force Canadians to drive electric vehicles whether they want to or not.
There is a cost associated with this, because within the mandate it says that the auto manufacturers will have a quota of how many EVs they have to sell. For every one they do not sell, they will be charged a punitive fine of $20,000 per vehicle. We can be sure they are not going to absorb that cost themselves, but will pass it on to the consumers, which will drive up the price of the electric vehicles people are being forced to buy.
I am opposed to this EV mandate on a whole number of grounds, which I will outline.
The first thing I would say is that this mandate is not freedom of choice. I really believe there has been a huge war on our freedoms under the Liberal government over the last 10 years. We know that freedom of expression has been under attack with bills such as Bill C-11, where the government gets to control what social media content is put up, such as videos and the like. We have seen Bill C-63, where it wanted to put people in jail in the future if it thought they might commit a hate crime. Fortunately, that one died on the vine. I hope not to see it again. There have also been attacks on freedom of the press, not just through buying the media by donating huge sums of money to mainstream media, but also with bills such as Bill C-18, which really compromised the ability of Canadians to share news links now on things like Meta and hurt a lot of local smaller media because of it.
Freedom of religion has got to be a concern for every person of faith across this country. It does not matter which faith one talks about, we have seen attacks on people and their places of worship, and a rise in violence against them and vandalism. We have seen our freedoms under attack, and now the Liberals want to add another freedom. They do not want to let people choose what kind of vehicle they want to buy. They want to make them buy an EV.
If somebody wants an EV, I am happy for them to have it. I am all about choice. I do not want one because I live in a really rural part of the riding and there are no charging stations. I have not seen a plan from the government to put any charging stations in place. I can just see myself trundling around the riding and running out of juice with no options. I would have to get towed, and then the next day I would have to get towed, because there is no infrastructure there.
What I would also say is that EVs do not work very well in the cold. If it gets to -40°C, they lose 40% of their efficiency. We have all seen online the experiences of people who have electric vehicles and were trapped in snowstorms. They were very concerned about the fact that they were trapped and did not have enough power to keep the car warm. That is another risk there.
Also, the current technology for lithium batteries is not great in that they catch fire. According to the U.S., 3% of vehicles catch fire. We saw the horrific accident that happened in Toronto recently where the battery caught fire in an electric vehicle, and that shorted out the electricity in the car so the doors could not be opened. Sadly, four people burned to death.
The technology is developing, and the proposed solid-state batteries do not catch fire, so I think better technology is coming, but at this time, with the existing technology, I have concerns. I am sure other Canadians do as well.
When it comes to freedom, I see this as another step through which the government is trying to remove our freedom. What is next after this? Is it going to try to control what we can and cannot eat or what kind of house we buy? Where does the control of the government stop? I have a problem with that.
What are we trying to achieve with the mandate? We talk about how we are trying to address climate change, but the reality is that this mandate will reduce the carbon footprint of Canada, which is now 1.6% of the world's footprint, by 0.08%. If we compare that to those of China and India, which are at about 60% of the world's footprint, it is an insignificant change. It is not going to impact climate change in a real way.
If we really wanted to impact climate change, we would sell Canadian LNG to supplant coal and heavy oil in China and India, and that would reduce their 60% to 15%. That is huge. It would create well-paying jobs here in Canada, and it would help the environment and address climate change.
I just think that the initiative would not make any difference, but it would really hurt Canadians because it would cost us 38,000 jobs and $138.7 billion. That is assuming it does not put the car businesses and the auto manufacturers out of business, which is a real possibility.
The next reason that I do not like the mandate is that there is no plan. The Prime Minister was supposed to be the man with the plan. What do we need to put this mandate in place? We have to have places to plug the things in. We have to have a source of electricity. We have to have the infrastructure in the residential and commercial places where people are in order to make it all go.
With respect to the issue of charging stations, it is being said that we would need 670,000 charging stations across Canada, and we currently have fewer than 150,000. How much would that cost, and how long would that take? The government has not provided any answers. It does not know. That is not a plan.
Also, with respect to the practical details, people living on a suburban block will notice that there are 600-volt transformers. If one person has an electric vehicle, it is no big deal, but if everybody is forced to buy an electric vehicle, there is this little equation in electricity that says voltage is equal to current times resistance, and plugging in cars is resistance. If the resistance is increased with the same voltage, that will reduce the current, and eventually people will not have enough current to turn the lights. This is especially problematic with respect to high-rise apartment buildings, where there could be 20 or 40 floors. If everybody has to plug in, the infrastructure is not there to supply the electricity to them. How much would it cost to get that? Again, there is no plan for that.
Then there would not be enough electricity in the grid. We can see that people recognize that we are going to be increasing our take of electricity. We have brought four million people into Canada, which increases, by about 10%, the usage of electricity. We have emerging businesses, which is a good thing, but it takes electricity. There is a pinch point, and we are going to see brownouts before we can build the capacity in electricity that we need.
In my riding of Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong, the Ontario government has provided a mandate to build a facility, the Riverside Generating Station. It is going to build a cogen plant, small modular nuclear reactors and alternate energy in conjunction with the indigenous people in my riding. That is fantastic, and it will take a certain number of years to get it in place, but the federal government has no plan for how the rest of the country would get electricity and get it into the grid with the infrastructure. Again, there has not been a lot of thought to that.
How much is all of this going to cost? The government will not even come forward with a budget, and I would like to be helpful, so here we go. This is from the government's own web page and finances.
The government gets about $459 billion in revenue every year. It has to pay $75 billion on the debt, $55 billion for health transfers, $25 billion for social transfers, $20 billion for equalization payments, $5 billion for territorial transfers, and $259 billion for the cost of running the government. That gives the government $20 billion before it starts doing any other projects. However, the government announced $77 billion during the election, and then after the election, with the estimates, it announced $486 billion. Now we are talking about possibly $543 billion in deficit before we even talk about building more charging stations, building the electrical infrastructure and building the infrastructure in apartment buildings and neighbourhoods to take it on. This would absolutely bankrupt Canadians and drive the affordability crisis even further into the ground. We need to check what we are doing here.
There is also no solution for the roads. EVs are heavier than regular cars. They do more damage to the roads. Today, the system is that people pay a gas tax and that gas tax is sent back to the municipalities to build roads. In rural communities, it is very difficult, with the number of people the communities have and the amount of gas tax they get back, to maintain the roads.
Now the roads are going to be in even worse condition. How will we address that? I am sure there is another tax coming, because if it is not spending with the Liberals, it is taxing. That is why people call them tax-and-spend Liberals. Those are some concerns.
The other concern I would highlight is my concern about the whole cradle-to-grave of the lithium batteries. The amount of energy that it takes to mine, process and turn them into batteries is actually net destructive to the planet. Then, at the end of life, there is currently no idea of how we are going to dispose of these things, so we may be creating another contamination issue that, again, will cost money to fix. That is not part of the plan, because there is no plan. These are all concerns that I have when it comes to why I do not think these EV mandates need to happen.
I think a much better way to go would be to introduce targets. The automotive industry has said that it will work towards that. The technology, as I said, is developing and I think people are willing to do something, but we are not going to fix the fact that Canada is cold. The solid-state batteries do run better at cold temperatures, so we will see. It is not commercially proven yet, so we do not know.
If people have a desire to do it, my question again is, why are we trying to do it? Are we really going to get this kind of reduction in our footprint? No, we are not. We should be building LNG facilities and shipping it to China and India. That is the bigger success for Canadians. It would also help pay down the huge $2-trillion deficit that we have racked up and that we will keep racking up, as far as I can see. Those are things that would be of great concern to every Canadian, and I am sure that when it comes to the mandates, we are going to continue to see them.
We know that the previous minister of the environment, the radical environmentalist who is like a convicted felon, is now the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture. I can say that this is certainly not my definition of Canadian identity and culture. He has said so many ridiculous things, starting with saying that he is not going to build any more roads. Do members remember that? Now there is this EV mandate, which is an ideological thing, but it is not practically something that we are able to afford to do. I really think there needs to be some reflection on the Liberal benches to say, “We do not have a plan. Let us at least cost the plan, figure out how much it is going to cost to build all this stuff or at least figure out the timing.”
The Liberals have already set the time in the mandate: 20% by 2026. We are only at 7.5% right now. How are we going to incentivize people to buy EVs? The government invested $55 billion of taxpayers' money trying to build battery plants, EV facilities and the downstream supply chain, so they were trying to pick winners and losers. What have we seen from that money that was spent? Most of them have gone bust, and those that have not, like Stellantis, have announced they are going to move their production to the U.S.
The government has already put out a huge amount of money without getting anything for it. I think Canadians are right to be concerned that we will not be able to meet this mandate. The automotive manufacturers are raising the flag; many of them have already shut down their facilities because of lack of demand. There are a lot of Canadians, as I said, including myself, who will not buy them.
I do not see any evidence of a plan of how we are going to essentially triple in one year, by 2026, the uptake in electric vehicles. There is nothing, not even a marketing campaign that I can see, that would drive any kind of behaviour like that. The incentive program is out of money, and people are not going to pay the additional cost.
All of these reasons, from freedom to cost, the lack of a plan, the cradle-to-grave and the fact that we are not going to achieve anything, are good reasons why I cannot support an EV mandate, and I will continue to stand against it.