Kenneth Green is a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute
Recently on Twitter, Alberta MP Shannon Stubbs, Tory shadow minister for the environment, put forth a series of tweets on Ontario’s Ring of Fire region, heretofore a promised land of metals and minerals invoked as an enabling resource for the Trudeau government’s electric vehicle (EV) dreams.
Her Twitter thread has a lot of politicking we’ll ignore, but Stubbs raises one particularly salient point that doesn’t get a lot of attention in the mainstream media — the policy hypocrisy of Canada’s EV transition policies.
“On one hand,” she observes, “they (the federal government) plan to ban the sale of internal combustion engines and allow only non-emitting and electrical vehicles in Canada eleven years from now, yet they themselves stand in the way of development of the resources right under our feet that can create the components for electric vehicles and battery storage systems, and enable our own self-sufficiency and security.”
Indeed, there’s a profound disconnect between the government’s timeline for the phase-in of EVs and the lengthy timelines needed to produce the metals and minerals to build them. The Trudeau government’s plan mandates 100% new light-duty zero-emission vehicle sales by 2035, with interim targets of 20% by 2026 and 60% by 2030. And 100% of new medium- and heavy-duty vehicle sales must be zero-emission by 2040.
For the rest of this article: https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/green-trudeau-ev-mandates-wildly-out-of-sync-with-ev-metals-timelines