'What if we just forced people to buy stuff?': The imagined thoughts of the Canadian EV mandate

National Post

8 hours ago

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The Carney government is under growing pressure to drop what is known as the 'EV mandate.' This is a policy first introduced in 2022 wherein Canadian auto manufacturers will be mandated to sell a minimum quantity of EVs each year until 2035, when the sale of new gas-powered cars will be banned entirely.
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The singular problem with the mandate is that nobody wants to buy EVs. Even with Canada having the highest fuel prices in the hemisphere, sales of EVs have only ever peaked at about 20 per cent of new vehicle sales. And even that has been in freefall in recent months.
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In Dear Diary, the National Post satirically re-imagines a week in the life of a newsmaker. This week, Tristin Hopper takes a journey inside the thoughts of the EV mandate.
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Monday
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One of the most pressing challenges of modern governance is how to compel ones' citizenry to meet a rote, inconsistent and often contradictory picture of ideal behaviour. We have identified the perfect Canadian life: The specific pattern of development milestones, core values and consumer choices that will yield a citizen best attuned to the interests of the collective.
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The only problem is to how to take this average Canadian — a scared, superstitious and mostly obese bipedal primate — and mould them into the rational, inclusive, evidence-based form that we have decreed for them.
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Because it is here where we are weakest. I need not remind you that China is nipping at our heels. If we are to stay competitive, I'm afraid that we risk too much by sticking to archaic models of 'letting people buy the vehicles they would like to buy.'
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I admit the EV mandate may look draconian in isolation. If presented as a stark dichotomy of 'freedom' versus 'compulsion,' a sentimental public will naturally favour the former.
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But if we start from the premise that the Canadian public must obviously be compelled to cease purchasing internal combustion engines within 10 years, then the only question is how to go about it.
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My sober and reasonable offer is that private businesses be obliged to meet an objective, and the details are left to them … as would be expected of any free society.
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Would a better solution be to incarcerate the owners of gas-powered cars? To mandate gasoline additives that prematurely wear the engines of ICE vehicles? To make highways more dangerous to facilitate higher attrition of the existing vehicle fleet? I think you'll agree that mine is the most humane and inobtrusive option.
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Wednesday
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In this line of work, one quickly grows weary of the bottomless mendacity of the auto sector. Their chief criticism of the EV mandate, to my read, is that it stands in defiance of 'consumer preferences.' They say the Canadian auto buyer does not want to purchase EVs at the 'arbitrary' rates we are setting, and thus the program is unworkable.
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I find their lack of imagination insulting, if not traitorous. These are companies that routinely convince chartered accountants that their daily driver needs to be a Ford F-350. Or that a 700-horsepower sedan is an appropriate vehicle to pick up their kids from school. There are people out there driving Cybertrucks, Pontiac Azteks and Hummer H2s, all of them brainwashed by clever marketing into thinking that they made a smart decision.
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Tell the public that the gas cars cause impotence. Shoot a couple commercials with Jason Statham. Offer the cars with a free Spotify subscription. It's not my fault you're not trying hard enough to sell EVs.
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The public has an unfortunate habit of obsessing over the alleged downsides of green policy. This came up often in regards to carbon pricing. Joe and Sally Taxpayer would complain endlessly about the extra $10 or $20 at their fill-up, without a thought as to how their government had won the acclaim of closing plenary delegates at multiple U.N. climate change summits.
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But these boors miss the opportunity inherent in the mandate. Remember when we made it unbelievably difficult to build houses, thus causing a housing shortage that caused the existing housing stock to perpetually skyrocket in value? In a world with no new gas-powered cars, your 2009 Jetta could become a luxury commodity sooner than you think.
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The worst thing about all this current controversy is that when the policy is inevitably a smashing success, all of today's critics will pretend they supported it all along. But any cursory reading of history reveals that true progress comes only from government telling private firms the precise share of their sales that should be filled by a politically desirable consumer product.
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Did the fisherman not swap out row boats for motor vessels because a government told him to? Did we not transition from VHS to DVDs based on the sage yet mandatory advice of a centralized bureaucracy? Forcing people to purchase things is the Canadian way.
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