Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
Thank you for having me.
My name is Travis Allan. I'm the president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Charging Infrastructure Council. We represent Canada's EV charging industry.
I'd like to start with my top message. We see Canada's new automotive strategy—which has a thoughtful blend of incentives, greenhouse gas regulation and capped allowances of new globally leading EVs allowed into Canada—as a national job strategy. The charging sector is ready to deliver on its part.
To realize the value of this strategy and to deliver on our national EV targets, I would suggest that the committee focus on two key areas. First is the need to implement clear, credible greenhouse gas emissions standards for vehicles. Second is calling for the recapitalization of the highly successful zero-emissions vehicle infrastructure program, ZEVIP, which is run by NRCan, beyond 2027.
While many have identified the important local job benefits to southern Ontario from our automotive policy, I want to note that this is actually a Canadian issue. We see this as a broader Canadian job generator because when we look at our members and survey them, they tell us that between 50% and 65% of every dollar spent on installing EV charging stations across Canada goes to local civil and electrical trades—which means great jobs—as well as to utilities.
We estimate that a typical ultra-fast charging station is around $125,000 per port to deploy in Canada.
We've conducted preliminary analysis on the release of the Canadian automotive strategy and specifically on the targets of 75% ZEV sales by 2035 and 90% by 2040. Our preliminary modelling suggests that this could lead to over $4 billion of public fast-charging investment alone in Canada, to say nothing of the private charging investments.
The key issue here is that these regulations need to be credible and sufficient to meet Canada's objectives. In that case, we know the charging industry can deliver. Paren recently reported that, despite uncertainty, Canada's charging industry added 1,925 new fast-charging ports in 2025, which is a 28% increase year over year, reaching 8,804 total ports.
Analysis from the CCIC indicates that Canada's public fast-charging deployment growth has risen 25% year over year in each year since 2020. That is despite several headwinds we're all familiar with over that period.
The big question that our members face is this: Can we predict how many people will be driving EVs over the next decade? A typical ultra-fast charging site can cost upwards of $500,000—even a million dollars—because it usually involves multiple ports. Charging companies are accountable to sophisticated capital providers. These include lenders and investors who need to see an economic return. That's why they closely analyze projected traffic and numbers of EV adoption over the eight-year to 12-year period that they are typically looking at in order to deploy charging stations.
This cycle means that regulatory certainty today can help deliver billions of dollars of infrastructure investment for tomorrow. If we don't have credible standards, if we don't have standards that allow us to do this modelling, that can severely interfere with the ability to leverage that private capital to deploy.
The other really important issue is making sure that all Canadians get to take advantage of the cost and use benefits of electric vehicles. That means looking at areas that have low charge reports deployed per capita—which we call underserved—and looking at areas of multi-unit residential buildings like condos, strata and apartments.
While the CIB's program, which will get $1.5 billion, will play a key role in areas where we know we're going to have a lot of EVs, the ZEVIP, which is run by NRCan, plays a very important role for these other regions. It is specifically designed and has been very successful at deploying in low-density areas and also in multi-unit residential buildings. It's a real focus for our industry to get that redeployed beyond the 2027 funding cycle.
I will pause there, but I look forward to any questions you may have. Thank you.