8,000 New EV Chargers To Be Installed In Canada

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Eight thousand new EV chargers will be installed in Canada at a cost of $84 million. At the moment, Canada has about 35,000 public EV chargers. Canada also supports the transition to zero-emissions vehicles with EV incentives and the country has huge sustainable transition goals, as stated here: “To help decarbonize the transportation sector, we need to accelerate the adoption of ZEVs. That is why the Government of Canada committed to achieve 100% zero-emission vehicle sales by 2035 for all new light -duty vehicles, including interim targets of at least 20% by 2026 and at least 60% by 2030, as announced in Canada’s 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan. These targets have been incorporated into Canada’s Electric Vehicle Availability Standard, which was finalized in December 2023.”

The EV incentive for fully electric vehicles is $5,000 and there is a plug-in hybrid incentive. This is just an opinion and one others may disagree with — plug-in hybrids use fossil fuels and are not zero-emissions vehicles. Additionally, there has been some research indicating many plug-in hybrid owners do not charge them with electricity, meaning they use fossil fuels primarily to operate them, thus defeating the purpose of having a plug-in hybrid. In terms of carbon emissions and generating harmful air pollution, they are not much of an improvement over gas and diesel vehicles. In fact, depending on what perspective one uses, one could say plug-in hybrid owners who do not charge them with electricity are fooling themselves into believing they are doing some good for the environment when they are not.

It may be more beneficial for national governments to provide incentives only for fully electric vehicles because fully electric vehicles provide the most benefits and are zero-emissions vehicles. One might take the view that incentives for plug-in hybrids are wasted because they could have been used for fully electric vehicles. There is an opportunity cost for providing incentives for plug-in hybrids.

Expanding public EV charger infrastructure and providing EV incentives supports EV adoption, which is exactly what Canada’s Prime Minister is doing, per Auto News Canada: “Prime Minister Mark Carney said last week Ottawa would spend $1.5 billion on EV infrastructure in Canada as part of a suite of changes to the federal auto strategy.”

Currently, there are over one million zero-emissions vehicles in Canada and the total number of vehicles is a bit less than 27 million.