This commentary originally appeared in The Western Standard.

Earlier this month it was reported that Brian Kingston, the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association CEO, had met with the prime minister along with the CEOs of Ford Canada, Stellantis Canada, and GM Canada. His message, and that of the companies he represents, was clear: the Liberal government’s electric vehicle mandate is totally unachievable.

“If we are going to hit the 2026 mandated target of 20 per cent EV sales, you would have to grow Zero-Emission-Vehcile (ZEV) sales by 180,000 units,” Kingston said.

To put that number in perspective, MacLean’s reported earlier this year that despite the roughly $52 billion that our federal and provincial governments (especially the Ford government in Ontario) have poured into the electric vehicle industry, “to date, only 40,000 EVs have been built in Canada.”

So, by the industry’s own calculations, we would need to quadruple our total EV output in the next six months.

That’s just not happening — especially since Canadian automakers have been scaling back their planned EV production.

In May, Honda announced that it would be pushing back its planned electric vehicle and battery production at its facility in Alliston, ON by two years. That should sound ominous to anyone who remembers that Ford Motor Company had similar plans to delay EV production in its plant in Oakville by two years, only to later announce that they were scrapping their EV production plans entirely.

General Motors too, has delayed EV production at their plant in St. Catharines and scaled back production at their plant in Ingersoll. All of these blows to the industry underline how unworkable the Liberals’ EV mandate is.

Said Kingston, “There is simply no way that that can occur on such a short timeline, given all of the current market forces at play.”

Now, as I’ve discussed in the past, those “market forces” include uncertainty around tariffs and U.S. trade, which is true across the economy. But it is a particular challenge for Canada’s EV industry, whose whole business model was built on the assumption of unique and unrestricted access to the American market. Without that, and without Americans being similarly forced to purchase EVs (as they would have had Joe Biden or Kamala Harris won the last election,) the whole scheme falls apart.

There are simply not enough Canadians to support the kind of investment in electric vehicles the Trudeau-and-Carney Liberals had in mind when the mandate was passed.

Moreover — and here’s another one of those “market forces” Kingston referred to — even Canadian car buyers have cooled on EVs. According to Stats Canada, EVs made up only 7.5 per cent of new vehicles purchased in Canada as of this past April, a 28.5 per cent decline from April, 2024. And total EV sales in Canada last year fell to just 13.7 per cent, a number which Tristin Hopper pointed out is itself somewhat misleading: “Of the 81,205 zero-emission vehicles sold in Canada in the last quarter of 2024, 49,357 were sold in Quebec.”

Which is to say, 60 per cent of that already-deflated number can be sourced to a single province. That doesn’t bode well for the future of the EV industry in Canada.

How Carney handles the EV mandate will say a lot about how he plans to govern the country. Is he going to be the businessman PM his X/Twitter shills are constantly saying he is? Or will he govern as the environmentalist activist that he has been for his entire career?

It isn’t like he can sweep this one under the rug, like he did with the Consumer Carbon Tax. While he might be able to keep up this Carbon Tax shell game with Canadian consumers for a while yet, people have a tendency to notice when they’re being forced to buy cars that they don’t want.

That’s especially true when the electric vehicles his government is mandating we purchase are significantly more expensive and inconvenient than the gas-and-diesel driven cars and trucks we do want, the ones we grew up driving, which we learned how to fix from our fathers or our uncles, and which our cousins in the States can buy for a fraction of the cost we will be paying.

For these reasons and more, Carney should scrap the EV mandate.

He can’t ignore this matter for much longer. It isn’t going away on its own.

Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.