Evidence of meeting #9 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was work.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Conservative
Dan Mazier Conservative Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB
I heard that you're going to take them into account, but I didn't hear a specific plan.
Liberal
Steven Guilbeault Liberal Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC
We will be deploying these charging network stations all across the country, including in rural Canada.
In Quebec in 2015, we had six charging stations. We have more than 2,000 now, in a matter of four or five years. Things can change really rapidly and things are changing rapidly when it comes to electrification.
Conservative
Dan Mazier Conservative Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB
Are you confident that electric vehicles can survive -45°C going across the Prairies, with five charging stations?
Liberal
Steven Guilbeault Liberal Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC
I don't own an electric vehicle. I don't own a vehicle, full stop. My service vehicle is fully electric. It's 100% EV. I take the train as much as I can between Montreal and Ottawa, but when we take the car, even in the winter, it works.
Norway, as you may know, is a cold country. Fifty per cent of the vehicles in that cold country are electric today. It can be done.
Conservative
Liberal
Steven Guilbeault Liberal Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC
It's 3,000 kilometres from one coast to the other.
Conservative
Dan Mazier Conservative Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB
Minister, what is the average cost of an electric vehicle in Canada?
Liberal
Steven Guilbeault Liberal Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC
I don't know that by heart. We could provide that information to you in writing.
Conservative
Dan Mazier Conservative Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB
You're going to be mandating Canadians to buy electric vehicles, and you don't know the cost of them.
Liberal
Steven Guilbeault Liberal Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC
Again, it's 50% by 2030, and 100% by 2035. Most experts agree that by 2024-25, there will be no cost difference between an internal combustion engine and electric vehicles. Our mandate will come—
Conservative
Liberal
Conservative
Dan Mazier Conservative Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB
Toyota was in front of the committee here a while back, and they said that basically the average cost of a zero-emissions vehicle was $56,000. That's double the price of a gas-powered vehicle.
Minister, the median household income in my riding is just below $50,000. Not all Canadians make $270,000 like you, Minister.
Do you believe these vehicles are affordable?
Liberal
Steven Guilbeault Liberal Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC
As I said, most experts agree that by 2024-25, there will be no cost difference between electric vehicles and internal combustion engines. Our mandate comes years after that. The first part of the mandate comes in 2030—it will come into force way after the cost difference between internal combustion engines and electric vehicles....
You have to remember that right now EVs are more expensive to buy, but they're way cheaper to operate. If you look at the full life-cycle cost of owning and operating a vehicle, there are substantial savings. Simply looking at the cost of purchasing the vehicle is only looking at half of the equation.
Conservative
Liberal
Leah Taylor Roy Liberal Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON
Thank you.
I actually wanted to turn to the supplementary estimates for Parks Canada. I was noticing that we do such great work with Parks Canada in terms of our cultural and heritage sites.
I was also noticing that we need a lot of money to go into protecting them, especially with the extreme climate events that we've been seeing recently. I was wondering whether the supplementary budget requests will be going into protecting these parks and dealing with wildfires and other threats.
Liberal
Steven Guilbeault Liberal Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC
I could try to answer, but I think Andrew could give you a much better answer than I can on that.
Andrew Campbell Senior Vice-President, Operations, Parks Canada Agency
Thank you, Minister and thank you, member.
Certainly, a portion of the $7.5 million that is in supplementary estimates (C) does go directly into our wildfire preparedness program.
It actually does, I think, three things that are important to talk about. One, it does fire safety around different communities and economic interests that we have close by in parks. Two, it looks at the effect of fire on biodiversity and our ways of projecting into what will go on. Three, from a fire prevention perspective, it looks at how we would reduce some of the fuel stores through a prescribed burn-type of operation that we do in many places across the country.
