Thank you.
Thank you to the witnesses for being here today.
I've sat in on a few of these meetings now, and a lot of the conversation has been very similar. I want to return to something my colleague touched on in our last meeting, and that's with respect to the constituency concerns we have around the EV mandates, especially as that translates out in rural areas. One of the responses we've commonly gotten is this notion that it's really just a result of myth or misinformation that's been spreading with respect to the EV mandates. My translation of this is that the government just hasn't convinced the Canadian public yet.
I want to respond today with some of the realities of the rural communities I represent. Just because these concerns or this information comes from around kitchen tables or the floors of dealerships in rural communities, that doesn't mean that it's misinformed or that rural people's voices are not educated enough.
Allow me to give you some information about my riding. Then I'm going to allow you to respond.
The riding I represent is 47,000 square kilometres in area and extremely sparsely populated. As an example, we have communities of 150 people or 40 or 50 people. The low density alone of my riding makes the rollout of charging infrastructure fundamentally different from the rollout in an urban centre. We can't assume that the solutions for Toronto and Vancouver are going to translate well in some of these more rural areas.
I want to give you some context. If you live in St. Anthony, in Newfoundland and Labrador, you have to travel 470 kilometres to deliver your baby. If something happens while you're in the hospital and, heaven forbid, that child has to go to a NICU, that's over 1,000 kilometres away from this community. These are some of the challenges these people are facing.
In addition to that, there are three communities in my riding—Grey River, François and Ramea—that you can only get to by ferry. There is no charging infrastructure in any of these places.
These are some of the really rural components that we're talking about. I know that we're often framing these conversations to say that you don't need to buy an EV today, but practically speaking, whether that's seven, five or four years down the road, and whether it's 20% or 80%, it might as well be 100%, given what these people are looking at right now.
My question is especially as it relates to this myth-busting narrative, because another piece of this is that we're asking these people to pay $15,000 to $20,000 more in upfront costs for a lot of these vehicles that absolutely don't make any sense for their communities and the areas in which they live. When we're having these conversations, I get extremely frustrated because I feel they're deeply dismissive of the lived experience of rural Canadians in some of these really rural and remote areas.
It's not just about educating them. It's also about really understanding the dynamics when you look at these family-owned and -operated repair shops. They don't have the upfront money to invest in new electrification within these areas, or the specialized technicians. These seem like some pretty far-fetched concepts for people living in these rural communities.
I wanted to put that out there, for either of you, actually, to walk me through this, based on the picture I've just painted for you. How do I respond to my constituents who look at me and say that this makes absolutely no sense to them? Can you help me overcome that barrier? Are we just going to give them more information and debunk these challenges for them?