November 11, 2021

Doug Ford and Ontario’s EV Car Potential

By admin

The CBC ran an update on Doug Ford’s failure to get Ontario consumers to purchase new EV cars and immediately cut their carbon emissions and gas dependency.

Here’s the thing: Doug Ford seems hell bent on insulting pretty much every stakeholder in the room when it comes to the EV market.

As a family of three not-quite-millionaires, we’re committed to making an EV our next car purchase, but they are CURRENTLY unafforable.

The First Nations people around/near the ‘Ring of Fire’ don’t seem to be singing the same tune as Dougie when it comes to rseource extraction.

The OEMs haven’t made any commitments beyond the bare basics for EV manufacturing in Ontario.

The Ford government continues to avoid building appropriate infrastructure for EV drivers, including charging stations. This alone feels like the biggest missed opportunity for a public utility like the Ontario Power Authority (which never should have been sold given the looming EV / gas transition that should have taken place decades ago).

Unfortunately, a LOT of what Doug Ford is doing misses the mark and opportunity completely. A mine for EV-related resources is AT LEAST a decade away. A mine for EV-related resources doesn’t get me driving a new EV car tomorrow.

Removing the incentives to buy an EV was the worst mistake by the Ford government, but there are many others that compound the situation.

Compare the base price of any OEM vehicle to the EV equivalent. For starters, this is a LOT of work and is a tedious way to prove a point, but it’s still worth doing if you’re looking to buy an EV as well. I found that the difference can be anywhere from 50% to 100% more in price. And we’re not talking a few dollars here. The difference can be in the range of $25,000-$50,000 in price and as a result, I will never save money with EV charging vs using gas (a common reference point that many consumers, including myself, will use).

Ultimately, I think it’s fair to ask why we should be paying a premium at all when there’s actually less moving parts for EV cars. Are the car companies using this sense of ‘carbon guilt’ to gouge consumers? Why isn’t our government working proactively to protect its consumers from price manipulation?

With that in mind, we have to close the gap with pricing QUICKLY. Appropriate policy for Ontario would be to put pressure on the OEMs to deliver more competitive pricing with EV cars, but also use incentives to close these gaps. If the former were to minimize the gaps, the latter would not be necessary. Think about it.

Furthermore, if Doug Ford did his homework, he’s understand that the federal government does this by encouraging specific models on a sliding scale as opposed to $100,000+ vehicles, ensuring that it’s ‘average’ people getting ‘average’ cars at affordable rates. Ford’s insinuation that this is a ‘millionaire’s pipedream’ shows his bias and disconnection from reality.

And failure as a green policy and climate change leader.

As an aside, think about federal/provincial programs like the RRSP/RESP/TFSA incentives work to encourage mostly millionaires, and yet they remain in place because they’re proven methods to encourage saving.

As I said, we’d like to do the right thing, but our current Doug Ford government is making this VERY difficult.