Faced with rising costs of living, a health-care system in crisis and growing public safety concerns, Manitobans haven’t ranked climate among their top provincial election priorities. 

But in recent years, the effects of climate change have become inescapable; summer skies shrouded in wildfire smoke; heat domes and polar vortexes are familiar seasonal vocabulary and farmers have struggled to adapt to a cycle of floods and droughts. 

Far from being a fringe issue for left-leaners and tree-huggers, the climate crisis has captured the attention of a majority of Manitobans. Angus Reid polls this summer found more than half of Manitobans have stayed indoors more than they’d like this summer to escape the smoky skies, while one in five have seen health problems worsen as a result of the smoke.

But as the Manitoba election campaign heats up, neither front-runner — incumbent Premier Heather Stefanson’s Progressive Conservatives or Wab Kinew’s New Democratic Party — has made climate policy a campaign priority. Neither leader appeared at a leadership debate on climate policy in late August, sending MLA surrogates in their place. 

Climate policy advocates have stressed the health-care, affordability and climate crises are intertwined and, according to Probe Research, 75 per cent of Manitobans think climate should be integrated into all policy decisions. The fact is: how Manitoba’s next leader tackles climate change will have a significant impact on Manitobans’ everyday lives. 

So what have the parties said — and not said — about their plans to navigate a planet in crisis?

As Manitoba election looms, Heather Stefanson’s comments suggest duel over energy, carbon pricing

With gas prices up nearly 90 per cent from the beginning of 2016 and rising residential electricity and natural gas rates, the cost of energy is set to be a key battleground this election.

The Tories came out swinging, promising in their first pre-election campaign announcement they’d eliminate the “Liberal-NDP carbon tax.” 

Stefanson’s PCs have long stressed Manitoba’s 97 per cent hydroelectric grid — one of the least polluting energy systems in the country — should exempt it from federal emissions targets. What they haven’t stressed is that Manitoba is one of only two provinces releasing more carbon pollution now than it was 20 years ago.

In a pre-election announcement blitz, Stefanson’s government touted an energy roadmap promising to modernize energy governance and infrastructure, attract investment from companies with net-zero goals, keep energy rates competitive and leverage federal funds by positioning the province as a “low-carbon leader.”

But couched in the roadmap, the Conservatives signalled a concern the energy transition away from petroleum sources is moving too quickly, noting it’s “disproportionately expensive” to eliminate all carbon pollution and instead suggesting a limited role for natural gas. 

The firm that prepared the report underpinning Manitoba’s energy roadmap suggested the province develop its own carbon pricing to fund investment in energy efficiency and green power generation. The Conservatives have instead planned to increase reliance on natural gas and consider charging more for power during peak usage times.

Manitoba’s New Democratic Party Leader Wab Kinew recently hinted he would negotiate a better deal on carbon pricing with the feds and temporarily suspend the 14-cent-per-litre provincial gas tax. 

He’s also promised to temporarily freeze Manitoba Hydro rates, which are typically set by the Public Utilities Board. Stefanson’s PCs have been accused of weakening the board’s independence by introducing legislation that gives cabinet more power to influence Hydro rates. Kinew has promised to restore independence to the board, despite plans to impose a year-long rate freeze.

The missing path to net zero in the Manitoba election

Neither parties’ energy policy plans thus far includes a clear commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050, and neither had made any reference to emission reduction targets until a climate change forum debate held at the University of Winnipeg in late August. 

There, Tory Environment Minister Kevin Klein did little more than raise a placard to say his party would cut emissions to 45 per cent of 2005 levels by 2030. The Tories have been criticized for moving backwards on home energy retrofits by approving building codes with the lowest possible efficiency standards, they’ve frozen funding transfers to municipalities that would support public and active transportation infrastructure and eliminated funding for both clean energy programs and environmental non-profits.

Though Klein said the party aims to “position the province as a trailblazer in reducing carbon emissions,” Stefanson’s PCs have not committed to net-zero targets.

Former NDP environment critic Lisa Naylor committed to the net-zero 2050 goal, promising policies to help expand electric-vehicle infrastructure, provide incentives to purchase new and used electric cars, transition public transit off diesel and work to reconcile with Indigenous communities over the damaging impacts of hydroelectric developments in their traditional territories. 

But electrifying transportation — a key platform topic for all parties this year — means more stress on the power grid, and Manitoba Hydro has publicly expressed concern demand will far exceed capacity. Kinew’s NDP have yet to present policies aimed at expanding and diversifying renewable energy sources to ensure power remains reliable and affordable, though Naylor hinted an announcement on geothermal heating is forthcoming.

Manitoba’s Liberal Party, led by Dougald Lamont, has pitched an ambitious plan to get Manitoba emissions under control. 

“What has been missing to take us to the next level is funding,” Lamont said during the climate debate before a crowd of approximately 200 people.

Weeks earlier, the Liberals released a campaign commitment to achieving net-zero by 2034 through a $300-million annual green fund. Lamont has pledged to take provincial control of carbon-price funds and invest the money in green initiatives including home energy retrofits, low or no-carbon transportation, renewable energy projects and increased green space — all under the governance of Crown corporation Efficiency Manitoba. Lamont has also reiterated an earlier pledge to restore the 50-50 transit funding agreement with the federal government and invest more in electrifying and expanding public transit in Winnipeg and rural municipalities. 

Energy transition an opportunity to grow green jobs

The inevitable energy transition has been a source of anxiety in Western Canada, as workers worry how their jobs will change in a pivoting economy. 

Manitoba farms are responsible for more than a third of provincial emissions. Mining — Manitoba’s second-largest industry — is facing both opportunities and challenges as global power needs evolve. Transport, construction and other crucial industries will continue to be affected. 

Navigating the transition requires whole-of-government leadership, from encouraging skills-training programs, to funding industries’ adoption of greener technologies, to investing in technological innovations to shepherd in a new era of work.

Manitoba’s Greens have pledged to set aside funds for green bonds (financial securities to stimulate investment in green programs) to support innovation in existing job fields. 

Liberal Leader Lamont has promised to support farmers through alternative land-use service programs, which pay farmers to protect natural assets, while creating a politically independent business development bank to stimulate job growth. 

Kinew’s NDP has promised to make investments in local employers like electric bus manufacturer New Flyer and to create jobs by expanding geothermal heating, but have otherwise offered little concrete plans for industries affected by the energy shift. 

As for Stefanson’s PCs, green economy job growth has centred on investments in mineral development. A critical minerals strategy the Tories released in the weeks leading up to the campaign communication blackout touted the province’s reserves of green tech minerals and promised incentives and tax breaks for prospectors and mine developers in Manitoba. While the strategy claims Manitoba has built sustainable development into its mining regulations, the Tories repealed sustainable development legislation in 2018 and have faced controversy over approvals for mining projects.

The province has touted investments from German manufacturer RCT Solutions, which plans to build a solar panel manufacturing plant in the province. That investment is tied to Calgary-based Sio Silica’s southeastern Manitoba mine proposal, which was referred to an independent clean environment commission for review owing to residents’ concern the company’s untested mining process could destroy the local drinking water aquifer. The mine has not yet been licensed, and NDP and Tory candidates have hesitated to weigh in on the project.

Heather Stefanson’s PCs haven’t adopted conservation targets seen as key to climate mitigation

While the economy is a key focus of this year’s election campaign, no topic has generated more concern in recent years than health-care policy — and climate plays a role there, too. 

There are several health risks associated with a changing climate; Canadians have already been impacted by wildfire smoke, extreme heat, severe fires and floods and resurgent infectious diseases.

The United Nations has touted its biodiversity target — known as the 30 by 30 commitment — as the “strongest natural defence” against climate change impacts, health or otherwise. The target aims to protect 30 per cent of global lands and waters by 2030. Canada has signed on to this commitment; Manitoba has not. 

In the last seven years, the province has added an insignificant amount of land to its network of protected areas (approximately 0.1 per cent) and has cut staffing and funding to protected areas. The NDP, Greens and Liberals have all committed to 30 by 30 targets. The Tories are the only party unwilling to make conservation commitments, with Natural Resources Minister Greg Nesbitt claiming — without providing evidence — such a commitment would “threaten our economic security,” harm Indigenous communities and drive up the cost of living.

Indigenous-led conservation has been at the forefront of 30 by 30 efforts across the country but a massive, Indigenous-led conservation effort that would protect 50,000 square kilometres of the pristine Seal River watershed in Manitoba has been awaiting substantive provincial support for months. No party has committed to establishing the Seal River protected area.

Manitoba’s future government also needs plans and funding to support Indigenous communities impacted by climate disasters. Peguis First Nation has been subject to repeated flooding and has spent years negotiating with provincial governments to develop long-term flood protection. Manitoba First Nations have faced repeated evacuations and dismal living conditions as a result of climate disasters, many made worse by Manitoba Hydro developments on their lands. 

The NDP, Greens and Liberals have promised to reconcile with Indigenous Peoples over the impacts of hydroelectric development, though the nature of that reconciliation is not yet clear. 

Manitoba election faces ‘defining crisis of our time’

 As it becomes clear climate is an issue of importance to voters and one that intersects with other issues top of mind for Manitobans, parties are slowly being forced to reckon with how they will handle what’s been described as “the defining crisis of our time.”

Two-thirds of the Manitobans see climate change as a crisis and more than half rate Manitoba’s performance on climate issues as poor. 

With election night just weeks away, it remains to be seen how seriously the parties will take these concerns.

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The fuel of my climate optimism, the reliable spark that keeps it moving, is a phenomenon I’ve come to think of as an offhand miracle.

That’s how I caught the bug. Way back in 2000, I was sent to Montreal by Time magazine to report on environmentally friendly cars. The occasion was one of those somewhat obscure trade shows that  would soon become central to my journalistic beat, an event called the 17th International Electric Vehicle Symposium—EVS-17.

Given what’s happened to electric vehicles in the 20 years since, I should set the stage here. As of 2000, nearly all the world’s major automakers had begun to tinker with the elusive promise of the emissions-free car, electric or otherwise. Toyota had the first version of the Prius there, and Nissan had a prototype of the Leaf. There were those little Smart cars alongside glorified golf carts, motorbikes and scooters. But this whole showcase was a minor sidelight on the heart of the automotive business. The major car companies had brought their prototypes and test models out to a racetrack in Montreal for us all to take for a test spin, but nobody was in any hurry to get those vehicles to a showroom near you.

The real star of EVS-17 wasn’t even a plug-in electric or hybrid. It was Ford’s P2000, an experimental sedan that ran on hydrogen gas and spat potable water and nothing else from its tailpipe. That was the car that attracted the crowd of journalists and motoring geeks at the racetrack, and it’s the one that I featured most prominently in my Time story. Because a fully functional Ford sedan whose only exhaust is water is pretty goddamn miraculous. And it was offhand, too, in the way that a test-lab engineer from Ford showing you the droplets of water on his hand as he squats next to a tailpipe on a racetrack at an obscure technical conference is intrinsically  offhand. It launched me on a quest — 20 years and counting — to find other offhand miracles.

That quest has been more fruitful than anyone’s wildest dreams that day in Montreal. Because here’s the thing: Everyone thought that day there would be Priuses and Leafs on the road before too long, maybe some little all-electric shoebox made in Europe for crowded city streets or a future car-share program. And some day someone might crack the range problem of fully electric cars and/or the cost problem of hydrogen-fuelled vehicles, and then those would find a place on a few roads away from a test track too.

Twenty years from then? Maybe 30? Sure, it could happen.

But no one had the slightest notion, not the vaguest inkling or the wildest premonition, that what would actually happen was some weird, megalomaniacal engineer who was working at the time on the thorny problem of small-scale internet business transactions at PayPal would cash out a couple of years later, use his dot-com riches to take over a fledgling manufacturer of experimental electric cars, and turn that company into not only the first successful automotive start-up in America in more than half a century but also the maker of the first mass-market all-electric sports car in history—all in barely more than a decade. But that’s what Elon Musk did with Tesla Motors. A fantastical idea too wildly speculative and distant-future-tense to even make it to a racetrack in Montreal in 2000 is now everyday reality. Keep that in mind as we discuss the limits of what’s possible for the next 10 or 20 years.

Now, if the miraculous rise of Tesla were the only story of its genre, the only wild arc from impossible fantasy to everyday reality I’d discovered in 20 years on this climate-solutions beat, I would have a hard time holding it up as the avatar of anything. Happily, that’s not the case.

My first focused reporting on this beat was a visit I made in 2005 to a Danish island called Samsø, which was endeavouring to become the world’s first island powered entirely by renewable energy. Fifteen years later, not only has Samsø surpassed its own goal, it is a pacesetter for the entire country and all of the European Union, which has pledged to duplicate the island’s achievement by 2050. (Denmark  itself  intends to eliminate all emissions from its electricity grid by 2030.) When I first began reporting on solar power in 2005, there were five gigawatts’ worth of photovoltaic panels connected to all the electricity  grids on earth, and it was common sense to suggest that solar would never amount to more than one per cent of the world’s electricity supply. It was at 0.2 per cent at the time. In 2020, China alone connected almost 50 gigawatts of new solar power to its grids, the largest share of 127 gigawatts added worldwide that year, for a grand total of 707 gigawatts — more than three per cent of global production and growing at a pace considered sheer fantasy back in 2005.The first bike-share system I ever encountered was a novelty at the Copenhagen train station, and I  rode my rented bike to the harbour and back on the first physically separated bike lane I’d ever seen. Bike and scooter shares are now commonplace in hundreds of cities around the world, including my own, where I can ride downtown and back on 10 kilometres of real separated bike lanes.

I went to the desert outside Taos, New Mexico, in 2006 to inspect a crazy hippie fever dream called an Earthship — a house designed to use the natural heating and cooling of the sun to achieve self-sufficiency for its energy needs. There is now an eight-storey apartment building in downtown Vancouver that uses “passive house” design principles to do roughly the same thing. By 2032, every  new building in the province of British Columbia will be built to a code broadly consistent with those “net zero” standards.I tracked a series of these victorious arcs in their paths from margin to mainstream. Offhand miracles, one after another.

Excerpted from How to Be a Climate Optimist by Chris Turner. Copyright © 2022 Chris Turner.Published by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Updated on May 27, 2022, at 10:52 a.m. EST: This story has been updated to remove a line that stated the Toyota Prius was not available in North America until 2003. The Prius was in fact available as of 2000.

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What happens when an electric vehicle battery the size of a small dinner table reaches the end of its life? 

That’s the question jurisdictions across Canada and the world are grappling with as more and more electric vehicles hit the roads in the coming decades. In B.C., government estimates there will be more than 2.5 million of these vehicles cruising along the province’s roadways by 2040.

With so much focus in B.C. on growing the mining sector and especially supplying minerals for the clean energy revolution, critics say the province is overlooking the potential economic benefits of extracting materials from used-up electric vehicle batteries — materials that don’t require the creation of new, environmentally impactful, mines.

Electric vehicles in Canada an opportunity to rethink battery recycling

There are already more than 60,000 electric vehicles on B.C.’s roads. Each car is equipped with a lithium-ion battery and while the design of those batteries is much the same as the one in your smartphone, electric vehicle batteries are, by necessity, much bigger. A single car battery can weigh several hundred kilograms and is made up of materials like manganese, graphite, nickel, cobalt and lithium. 

These behemoths of the battery world have an average lifespan of eight to 15 years, which means as the electric vehicle market continues to grow, B.C. faces an important opportunity to rethink the recycling sector.

It’s work that’s already underway across the continent.

Kunal Phalpher, chief strategy officer at Li-Cycle, a Toronto-based lithium-ion recycling company with four facilities operating and under construction across North America — including in Kingston, Ont. — said the more batteries become available, the better the opportunities become for recyclers.

He said it’s crucial to plan for recycling right at the start of the electric vehicle growth curve.

“In the next eight to 10 years we’re going through this first wave of rapid growth and rapid increase in demand for these materials where you’re still going to need new primary resources [from mines],” he told The Narwhal. 

“But it’s also the time to build up infrastructure to manage [batteries] at end of life so that we can continue to chip away and increase the percentage of recycled material back into the battery.”

Phalpher said he anticipates a sector-wide shift to reusing more materials. Electric vehicle batteries aren’t currently produced with recycled minerals because there’s not enough supply, he said.

“But as we get into the next decade, we’ll start to see a sharper increase in that,” he said. “And then you can eventually work towards not having to build new resources for pulling material out of the ground and really drive [production] through secondary sources.”

Until the time comes when recycling facilities start receiving high quantities of depleted batteries, the demand for minerals is expected to continue to increase exponentially.

B.C.’s mines and the need for electric vehicle materials

While B.C. is not a source of cobalt, nickel and lithium, it is home to several copper mines and a major aluminum smelter — materials commonly used in auto manufacturing. 

The basic composition of electric vehicle batteries is projected to remain fairly constant over the coming years, but one mineral found in B.C. is showing promising results in extending the lifespan of lithium-ion batteries. 

Tellurium can be mined directly or sourced as a by-product produced during copper smelting.

In northwest B.C., just south of Smithers, First Tellurium’s proposed tellurium, silver and gold mine could become a key supplier in the electric battery boom. 

First Tellurium points to research in Singapore and Texas where tellurium was added to existing lithium-ion technologies, the results of which “extend battery life up to 400 per cent and in some cases hold 10 times the charge.” 

The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions launched a three-year project in 2021 to research the possibilities of using tellurium to manufacture safer and more efficient electric vehicle batteries. 

“Extending the range and safety of zero-emission vehicles would help accelerate adoption rates around the world, and support progress towards a sustainable circular economy through raw material recycling,” Bentley Allan, associate director of the institute, said in a press release.

The experiment with tellurium is just one example of many projects aimed at reducing demand and increasing efficiency, according to Michael Stanyer and Balakrishnan Venkata with Plug in BC, an electric vehicle advocacy program run by the Fraser Basin Council.

“There are so many other cases that people have been researching and working on in order to reduce the need for these rare metals that are being used,” Venkata said over a Zoom call, noting a Surrey-based company called American Manganese, which is working to recover raw materials from spent batteries to produce new ones. “They’re able to get close to 100 per cent recovery of all materials that can be used in the new batteries.”

Stanyer noted Vancouver’s hybrid vehicle taxi fleet means the city has experience dealing with used car batteries.

“The batteries in those have been around for a long time and there’s a well-developed sort of niche ecosystem, removing and replacing and using those batteries and getting them into secondary storage or sort of stationary energy storage projects.”

But in anticipation of the rush for electric-vehicle resources in B.C., onlookers are saying the province should be doing much more to ensure the leftover potential in depleted batteries is being mined. And as B.C. positions itself as a supplier of responsible minerals, critics say the province must do more to ensure the mining for clean technology is itself clean.

Nikki Skuce, director at Northern Confluence, a responsible mining advocacy organization, sees the repurposing of battery waste streams as a way to potentially mitigate the negative impacts of mines in B.C.

The province needs “to really amp up repurposing and recycling and also diminish our consumption,” Skuce told The Narwhal. 

Skuce, whose organization is part of the B.C. Mining Law Reform Network, has advocated strenuously for changes to B.C.’s mining laws, some of which have not been reformed for more than a century. Mining watchdogs and critics became more vocal about flaws in B.C.’s mining legislation and regulatory oversight in the wake of the Mount Polley mine spill, one of Canada’s largest environmental disasters. In 2014, the tailings dam at the Mount Polley mine in central B.C. failed, releasing 24 million cubic metres of contaminated waste into lakes and waterways, a catastrophic event which mining watchdogs say could be repeated elsewhere in the province unless B.C. strengthens its regulations.

Early last year an internal audit from the B.C. Ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation found the province still has much work to do in the wake of Mount Polley to ensure its mines, and particularly the tailings ponds that hold mining waste, are safe.

Some positive developments have already come out of advocacy work for cleaner and safer B.C. mines. First Tellurium’s proposed mine, for example, is one of the first Canadian projects to join the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, a third-party certification program that rates mines on sustainability and responsibility.

“First Tellurium proudly adheres to and supports the principles and rights set out in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and in particular the fundamental proposition of free, prior and informed consent,” the company said in an emailed statement about recent developments in the electric vehicle battery sector.

Yet ongoing concerns with B.C.’s mining regulations are part of the reason Skuce and others are encouraging the province to take electric vehicle battery recycling seriously.

Skuce co-authored a recent report for the Pembina Institute that calls on B.C. to work with the federal government and learn from other jurisdictions like California, which is already well on its way to supporting battery recycling.

The report notes that B.C. is poised to reap the economic rewards from jumping on the recycling bandwagon.

“As an early leader in [electric vehicle] adoption, B.C. will see growing demand for end-of-life recycling, which offers the province the opportunity to also emerge as an early regional leader in battery recycling in the Pacific Northwest, and capture the associated economic benefits.”

And those benefits could be quite notable. 

Once recovered, the mineral components of batteries can be sold and used in numerous applications, including the production of new batteries — a practice which could reduce the cost of new electric vehicle manufacturing. The extraction and recycling process also drives employment directly from what would otherwise be a waste stream.

A 2020 report published in the journal Sustainability notes recycling is set to become an increasingly robust industry, playing an important role particularly in local economies.

“Recycling is expected to become a significant industry in the future,” the report notes, “generating billions of dollars in revenue, tax income and jobs, many of which would be in countries and regions that currently do not benefit from battery-related industrial activities.”

The report also notes that because transporting used electric vehicles batteries can be so expensive, there are “strong incentives” for places like B.C. to localize recycling infrastructure.

What’s more, battery recycling is anticipated to lead to a global decrease in the need for rare earth mines. According to a report by the International Zero-Emission Vehicle Alliance, of which B.C. and Canada are members, “developing recycling streams to recover approximately 90 per cent of the critical battery materials can significantly reduce the need for raw material mining from 2040 on.”The alliance’s analysis found that such recycling could reduce the need for new material mining by 20 per cent in 2040 and 40 per cent in 2050.

Can electric vehicle battery producers be held responsible for dangerous dead battery waste?

In addition to creating jobs and economic opportunity, there’s another incentive when it comes to finding ways to repurpose spent electric vehicle batteries: dangerous waste. 

As a means to push forward its plans for increasing the electric vehicle sector to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, B.C. passed legislation in 2019 that requires auto manufacturers to meet provincially mandated electric vehicle sales targets. By 2025, 10 per cent of all new light-duty vehicles sold need to be zero-emission vehicles and that percentage scales up to 30 per cent by 2030 and 100 per cent by 2040.

“We’ve got really ambitious targets for [electric vehicle] adoption and the early ones have already been surpassed,” Skuce, with Northern Confluence, said. “We’re going to start seeing more in the waste stream soon.” 

She said the province needs to navigate trade regulations and issues of hazardous waste transport, given electric vehicle batteries have a habit of catching fire or exploding if handled improperly.

“In developing a strategy looking ahead, you can see where all of these potential barriers are, and what needs to be shifted for this particular stream — and opportunity — to ensure that it can be done safely in British Columbia.”

B.C.’s Ministry of Jobs, Economic Recovery and Innovation said a number of initiatives are already underway to support the sector.

“With the highest uptake rates of electric vehicles in North America, and a number of local companies across the [electric vehicle] supply chain, B.C. is positioned to become a leader in the industry,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement to The Narwhal.

They highlighted the Innovative Clean Energy Fund, which “provides support for pre-commercial clean energy technology projects, clean energy vehicles, including producing low-cost, high-performance batteries for electric vehicles.”

Such incentive programs are important for the fledgling battery recycling industry, because as Environment and Climate Change Canada put it, the remaining barrier to progress is cost.

“Currently, the economics of [electric vehicle] battery recycling may not provide sufficient market incentives to capture all of the batteries reaching the end of life,” the federal ministry wrote in an email to The Narwhal. “One of the main barriers to scaling up [electric vehicle] battery recycling is the cost of reverse logistics: the process to collect and transport end-of-life [electric vehicle] batteries from consumers to recycling facilities.” 

Li-Cycle’s Phalpher agreed. 

“One of the challenges of the industry has always been logistics costs — distance and weight result in high cost,” he said, adding Li-Cycle is building facilities in New York, Arizona and Alabama as a means to reduce transportation costs.

“B.C. definitely needs a strategy around that and I think that needs to happen now, or yesterday, but we do have some initiatives happening in the province,” Skuce said.

Those initiatives include the province’s extended producer responsibility program, which B.C. launched last year. The five-year program is designed to ensure manufacturers — including electric vehicle battery producers — are responsible for recycling their own products.

“B.C. is committed to having producers be fully responsible for collecting and recycling the products and packaging it puts into the B.C. marketplace, shifting the responsibility and costs from local government and taxpayers to producers and consumers,” the province’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy told The Narwhal.

The ministry noted hybrid and electric vehicle batteries will be added to provincial recycling regulations in 2023 and the programs and processes to ensure those batteries are being recycled should be up and running by 2026.

The producer responsibility program requires companies to “manage their products to the highest level possible on the pollution prevention hierarchy,” the ministry stated, listing the hierarchy as “reduce, reuse, recycle, recover, residuals management.”

The program may require producers to “redesign products that are more recyclable or invest in research and development projects to improve recycling and drive technological innovation,” according to the ministry. 

This last point is key, Skuce said, explaining that not only is the technology new and rapidly evolving, there’s also no standardization of how electric vehicle batteries are built, which in turn leads to challenges within the recycling sector.

“There needs to be government regulation and policies so that these batteries are built to recycle,” she said. “And that that information is transparent — of how to dismantle and recycle them and all the different components within them — because that’s a basic thing that doesn’t exist right now.”

In the Pembina report, Skuce and her co-authors note the difficulties of recycling car batteries are not insurmountable but certain aspects pose challenges.

“Currently, less than five per cent of batteries are recycled worldwide, because it’s a far more complicated process than recycling old household batteries,” the report states. “Before they can be recycled, batteries must be discharged, stabilised and then dismantled to at least the module level, so that cell components can be separated into different material streams.”

Phalpher agreed it’s complicated but notes the five per cent statistic includes consumer products such as laptops and smartphones and is more about collection of dead batteries, particularly household items, than the actual recovery of raw materials. 

“If your car dies, you don’t go buy a new car and leave the old one in the garage — you take it to the dealer and the car companies are a little bit more focused on circularity in the raw materials,” he said, explaining it’s difficult to track how many batteries are actually being returned to recycling facilities.

Per battery, however, it’s a much more cheerful statistic.

“We recover up to 95 per cent of the various materials in the lithium-ion battery,” he said.

Skuce noted B.C. is already home to one of the largest recycling facilities in North America — Retriev Technologies, based in Trail. Retriev recently announced a merger with U.S.-based Heritage Battery Recycling, which includes operations in southern California. The state has more than 400,000 electric vehicles on its roads currently and recently struck a task force to advise its government on electric vehicle battery recycling.  

On Canada’s national scale, the federal government acknowledged the need to encourage the development of recycling infrastructure.

“Recycling of the lithium and other critical metals will be key to meeting the projected global demand for the metals associated with increased adoption of batteries for [electric vehicles] and other stationary energy storage systems while also reducing the environmental impacts from end of life batteries,” Environment and Climate Change Canada said.

The ministry noted it is collaborating with other federal departments to “develop a sustainable battery innovation and industrial ecosystem in Canada, including establishing Canada as a global leader in battery manufacturing, recycling and reuse.” 

The ministry added it is also “exploring innovative ways to enable [electric vehicle] batteries to have a ‘second life,’ when no longer suitable for powering vehicles, in stationary energy storage applications.”

Phalpher said jurisdictions need to work together to facilitate the recycling process.

“On the large volume side, which is the transport of batteries, I think what would help … is just streamlining regulations around permitting recycling facilities and transport,” he said. “In Canada, for example, there’s slightly different regulations and paperwork to transport batteries and how you classify batteries to get them to a waste facility. Harmonizing some of the rules would just make it easier for customers and companies.”

Skuce agreed and noted the Pembina report calls on the province to engage with “neighbouring jurisdictions to ensure efficient and safe collection and transport of batteries for recycling purposes, including across borders.”

She said the bottom line is simple.

“With B.C. being a leader in adopting [electric vehicles], it should also be a leader in repurposing or recycling.”

Updated Feb. 6, 2022, at 11:20 a.m. PT: This article was corrected to note the location of Retriev Technologies is Trail, B.C., and not Field as previously reported.

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Ontario Power Generation, the province’s largest power generator, seriously started thinking about electric vehicles only five years ago. 

Back then, Heather Ferguson recalls, charging stations across the province were few and poorly maintained. As the automotive and power industry started considering electrification more and more, OPG had an opportunity to “refresh” the charging infrastructure and think about the problem “in a whole new way.” 

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand we had a role to play,” says Ferguson, OPG’s senior vice-president of business development, strategy and corporate affairs. “We produce electricity and the connection to electric vehicles is pretty straightforward.” 

Fast forward many conversations with stakeholders and years of planning, OPG and Hydro One, the province’s largest distribution utility, announced a new joint venture: Ivy Charging Network. The company is funded in part by both companies, as well as $8 million from Natural Resources Canada, with the goal of launching 160 chargers at 73 locations, each an average of less than 100 kilometres apart, by the end of the year. As of mid-December, 28 of those stations were fully operational but Ivy hoped to have the full system up and running by spring 2022. It will make Ivy the largest fast-charger network connecting Ontario from Kenora in the northwest to Cornwall in the southeast. 

The company was created to solve “range anxiety,” or the fear of buying an electric vehicle in Ontario due to a lack of charging stations. Soon, for $9, electric vehicle users will be able to charge for half an hour to drive 150 kilometres — or about the distance from Toronto to Orillia.

“The idea is we’ll be able to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles,” says Matt Vines, co-president of Ivy Charging Network. “We’re going to build the network and then continue to proactively grow it.” 

“It’s a chicken and egg thing,” says Ferguson. “If you don’t have charging infrastructure, people aren’t going to buy EVs; if you don’t have EVs, people aren’t going to build charging infrastructure. So I think OPG and Hydro One decided to take a bit of a bold leadership role here and lay out the critical infrastructure for this electrification thing to happen.”

Ivy Charging Network is the latest initiative in a string of electrification projects that are being set up across Ontario. For the most part, they are being spearheaded by public utilities and municipalities — Hydro One is a 60 per cent private, 40 per cent public utility, while OPG is a Crown corporation. Many of the electrification projects have received financial backing from the federal government, which has contributed funding to 52 proposals in Ontario as part of its Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program. Such initiatives are now shaping political discourse ahead of a provincial election this spring, forcing Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government to enter a conversation it has largely stayed out of. 

Just this month, Ivy announced a series of agreements with ONroute, which had promised chargers five years ago but never followed through, to deploy chargers on Ontario’s 400-series highways by next summer. The agreements also include retailer Canadian Tire and, surprisingly for many in the electric vehicle industry, Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation. While the ministry offered no financial assistance, it owns the sites leased out to ONroute so its participation was needed for this agreement to move forward. Vines says it was “a priority” for the Ministry, that it was part of the negotiations and “extremely supportive.” (Minister of Transportation Caroline Mulroney declined to answer The Narwhal’s questions.)

This kind of positive support is a stark shift for the Ford government. 

Since coming into power in 2018, the government scrapped an existing buyer incentive program, which provided up to $14,000 on the purchase of an electric vehicle. (For comparison, buyer incentives exist in eight provinces and territories.) Ford also removed a $2.5 million incentive program that helped homeowners install their own charging equipment. The government also deleted electric vehicle charging station requirements in Ontario’s building code and ripped out a couple dozen public electric vehicle charging stations that had already been installed. 

“It only benefitted millionaires who could afford Teslas,” Premier Doug Ford said at the time. The government presented this move as a cost-cutting measure regardless of the fact that his government’s Made in Ontario Environment Plan, released in 2018, projected “low carbon vehicle uptake” would account for 16 per cent (or a sixth) of the province’s emissions reductions. Right now, transportation causes over a third of the province’s emissions. 

Still, Ford didn’t change his tune. “I’m not going to give rebates to guys that are buying $100,000 cars — millionaires,” he told CBC last month. 

The vacuum of electric vehicle policies and provincial investment dollars has had rippling impacts across Ontario. To start, the Canadian arm of Tesla took the government to court, claiming it was treated unfairly in the cancellation of the electric vehicle incentive program, and was arbitrarily exempted from a program that allowed customers of other cheaper electric vehicle brands to continue receiving rebates during a transition period. Tesla won the court challenge. 

In the absence of dedicated policies, sales of electric vehicles in Ontario dropped by over 50 per cent in 2019. 

According to data from Statistics Canada, electric vehicles represented 1.8 per cent of new light duty vehicle sales in Ontario in 2020, which was below the global average of 2.7 per cent and well behind the Canadian national average of 3.5 per cent. In the third quarter of 2021, according to data from IHS Markit, electric vehicles represented 3.1 per cent of new vehicle registrations in Ontario, compared to 13 per cent in B.C., which has a $3,000 incentive, and 9.9 per cent in Quebec, which has an $8,000 incentive. Last year, there were more electric vehicles registered in Vancouver than in all of Ontario. 

But then a series of industry shifts happened that forced the Ford government to take the future of electric vehicles in Ontario more seriously. 

How Doug Ford learned to love electric vehicles

Sometime in the summer of 2020, Ford called Magna founder Frank Stronach, an automotive tycoon who has twice donated to the Progressive Conservatives in 2021 and met with Ford once before in 2019. The premier was seeking advice on how to create jobs in the auto industry. Two years earlier, on the campaign trail, Ford vowed to bring back 300,000 manufacturing jobs he said the province had lost under Liberal governments. According to a report by The Auroran, Stronach came up with a solution: Focus on electric vehicles at home.

As both Ferguson of OPG and Vines of Ivy note, Ontario is in an ideal position to reap the benefits of electric vehicles. The province has a largely clean electricity system so the best way for it to further reduce its greenhouse gas emissions is to focus on the highest-emitting sector: transportation. OPG and Hydro One, along with many other utilities across the province, are leading the way, Ferguson says. 

“You take all the heavy lifting you’ve done to build out an extraordinary clean system and you power the transportation sector,” she says. 

Automakers are also taking note. Ontario is the only jurisdiction in North America where five major automakers build vehicles: Stellantis, General Motors, Ford Motor Company, Honda and Toyota. In 2020, three of those companies — General Motors, Ford and Stellantis — announced billion-dollar electric vehicle manufacturing investments. Stellantis’ Windsor assembly plant will transform to build more electric models, with plug-in and electric vehicle battery manufacturing starting in 2024. General Motors will invest nearly $1 billion to bring the production of the BrightDrop EV600 electric vehicle to its manufacturing plant in Oshawa. The government of Ontario and the federal government each committed $295 million toward the renovation of Ford’s Oakville assembly plant, which will exclusively build electric vehicles. 

“We all were waiting with baited breath to see if this was going to cause Premier Ford to change his tune on electric vehicles,” says Joanna Kyriazis, a senior policy adviser at Clean Energy Canada. 

It took a while, but it happened. 

Government data shows that electric vehicle manufacturing is already an economic win — in 2019, it contributed $13.9 billion to Ontario’s GDP.  And there’s a burgeoning market: global sales of electric vehicles in 2030 are expected to be 15 times what they were in 2020.

Last month, the Ford government released Phase Two of its Driving Prosperity plan, which puts an emphasis on manufacturing electric vehicles in Ontario. In it, 2030 looms large. Ford pledged to meet four key targets by 2030: “reposition vehicle and parts production for the car of the future, establish and support a battery supply chain ecosystem, innovate in every stage of development, invest in Ontario’s auto workers.”

The plan states the government’s goal is to see 400,000 electric vehicles manufactured in the province in the same time frame and also establish a new electric vehicle and hybrid assembly plant. It cites industry projections that by 2030, one out of every three vehicles sold globally will be electric and that the market volume will be 31.1 million vehicles. It’s estimated that there will be half a million electric vehicles in Ontario by then, which currently has a population of more than 14.5 million, versus 635,000 electric vehicles projected for B.C. at that time, with a third of the population. Hydro One expects electricity demand to grow around 15 per cent annually between 2022 and 2040 to meet this surge.

The battery aspect is an economic opportunity, albeit a complicated one. In 2019 alone, Ontario produced more than $10 billion worth of minerals, accounting for almost 25 per cent of Canada’s total mineral production. At the top of the list of naturally occurring minerals in Ontario are graphite, lithium, nickel and cobalt — all crucial raw materials in the production of batteries for electric vehicles, and many of which are found on First Nations land. Ontario’s Driving Prosperity plan is heavily reliant on taking advantage of critical minerals found in the Ring of Fire, with Ford and several ministers promising to work in concert with First Nations communities in the region to build an electric vehicle mining hub that will benefit all. 

Earlier this year, three First Nations communities in northwestern Ontario —  Neskantaga, Attawapiskat and Fort Albany — declared a moratorium on Ring of Fire development until further study has been done to ensure environmental risks are mitigated and First Nations are fairly consulted. Their concern is that communities will be “seriously and permanently desecrated by massive-scale mining in the Ring of Fire.” And as mining giants battle over rights for the region, there are questions about whether accessing the minerals is truly economically viable.

Ian Klesmer, director of strategy at The Atmospheric Fund, is encouraged by the government’s new enthusiasm for electric vehicles. “I think that’s a recognition among the province that [electric vehicles] are really important, both as an economic opportunity and also as an environmental opportunity,” he says. “I think right now the key is to focus on how we can put the right policies in place to scale that ambition.” Part of that, Klesmer says, will be to hear the government offer clear timelines and more details about how Ontario will “make EVs a central part of our future.”

Ontario Environment Minister David Piccini tells The Narwhal the government is “creating a climate where we’re seeing massive EV investment and an actual coherent strategy for this province that is increasing supply and driving down costs.” He calls this plan “a made-in-Ontario solution that’s creating wealth, that’s creating jobs and that’s driving electrification.”

Piccini says his government’s strategy is in line with other countries who are also pushing electric vehicles. “When I was at [the UN climate change summit] I spoke with the head of the Transportation Committee in the U.K., and everybody’s grappling with it together,” he says. “But as we have those sorts of debates and discussions one thing we can immediately do is create a competitive climate for manufacturing.”

But some critics are hesitant about this approach, arguing electric vehicles are only beneficial if they come with a whole myriad of policies that encourage driving less and taking public transit more. Several reports also note that electric vehicles won’t go mainstream until 2030, so it is imperative to reduce demand for fossil-fuel powered vehicles in the interim. 

Electric vehicles charge into the 2022 Ontario election

Wilf Steimle, president of the Electric Vehicle Society, says there are four pillars that the government needs to address: supply, charging, demand and education. Right now, the government is only focusing on the first two, he says. “There has been very little spent on any government to do broad comprehensive education to make sure everyone understands this technology and why it will save you money and is better for the environment.”

“The dialogue doesn’t stop at manufacturing,” Steimle says.

“I do think that Ford and his government are doing some good things on the manufacturing side. But still, he’s missing half the equation: helping Ontarians actually drive electric vehicles,” Kyriazis says. “Just because you build electric vehicles, doesn’t mean everyone will buy them.” 

Right now, 90 per cent of all electric vehicles built in Canada are exported to the United States, while B.C. and Quebec get the bulk of the Canadian supply. The current wait time for an electric vehicle in Ontario is nine to 12 months. Solving the supply-side problem is, as Kyriazis says, half the equation.

That’s why she wants to see the Ford government make a U-turn on a purchase incentive and propose something like a tax credit. She’d like to see provincial investment in charging infrastructure and an electric vehicle mandate in the building code — two things the government scrapped.

When asked recently if Ford would reconsider electric vehicle incentives, given that the government has in the last two months touted them as the cars of the future, the premier refused to commit. 

“Before the election, I didn’t believe in giving millionaires rebates on over $100,000 Tesla cars,” he told reporters. “Nothing against Tesla, they’re gorgeous cars. But, you know, I just didn’t believe in it. Let’s see how the market dictates.”

He added that the government’s approach to electric vehicles is sufficient. “We’re putting billions and billions of dollars into the electric vehicle market in the companies. We’re partnering with the federal government.”

Energy Minister Todd Smith defended the seismic shift in his government’s electric vehicle policy, some of which includes reinstating what it initially cut. In a recent question period, Smith said the electric vehicle charging stations that were ripped up in 2018 were removed because “the equipment the Liberals installed was substandard. It wasn’t working.”“Nobody was using it,” he said. “We’re going to put in world-class technology thanks to our partnership with Ivy Charging Network … that people are actually going to want to use.” 

Opposition parties, however, disagree and are making electric vehicle offerings that could turn it into an election issue next year. The Ontario Liberals have proposed an $8,000 incentive on the purchase or lease of electric vehicles, if they take power, as well as a $1,500 rebate on the purchase of home electric vehicle charging equipment.

The NDP plan includes setting a province-wide zero-emission vehicles sales target of 15 per cent by 2025, rising to 45 per cent by 2030 and 100 per cent by 2035. Their plan promises “strong incentives” for zero-emission vehicles; no dollar amount is provided. 

The Greens pledge to “increase access to electric vehicles (two-wheeled or more) and make them less expensive than fossil-fuel powered vehicles, through [incentives], rental systems, financing, and a zero emission vehicles mandate.”

Both the NDP and the Green Party also have extensive proposals to boost Ontario’s electric vehicle charging infrastructure at public buildings, private homes and multi-unit buildings, workplaces and on highways, and to reinsert electric vehicle charging infrastructure into the building code for new construction.

Ontario Greens leader Mike Schreiner considers the Ford government’s shift on electric vehicles a win, noting he has “pushed them hard publicly and privately.” He says these actions, however, “fall far short in terms of what’s needed for widespread adoption.” 

“While not being actively hostile to electric vehicles is welcome, their strategy is wholly ineffective because rebates are the most effective way to drive down costs,” he says. “Their plan is reactionary and insufficient.” 

At the moment, much of the gap in the electric vehicle space left by the provincial government has been filled in part by the federal government in the form of rebates and funds, as well as policies put forward by municipalities. This month, the City of Toronto released a climate plan that aims to reach net-zero emissions by 2040. The plan proposes that electric vehicles should account for 30 per cent of all registrations by 2030 and aims to deploy over 3,200 fast charging stations in high-priority public locations and create incentives for installing stations in existing buildings. The city also recently passed a bylaw requiring that all new parking stalls include electric vehicle chargers. Other municipalities across the province are following suit as the federal government also looks to impose a national mandate on electric vehicle sales by the end of 2022.

Looking ahead, a big challenge for the Ford government will be figuring out how to respond to the U.S. government’s proposal to implement an electric vehicle tax credit that will offer up to $12,500 to purchase American-made electric vehicles. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the U.S. electric vehicle tax credit is “going to undercut well-established systems and supply chains” across the continent, and indicated Canada could “align” its own electric vehicle incentives to promote buying Canadian. Automotive vehicles are Ontario’s top export item, and Canada’s second-largest; 93 per cent of all vehicles made in Canada, most in Ontario, are exported to the U.S. 

Brendan Sweeney, managing director of the Trillium Network for Advanced Manufacturing, says the U.S. tax credit is an opportunity for the federal government to build “a pan-Canadian electric vehicle industry” that will allow provinces to collaborate and join in. “Automakers need government help to build an electric vehicle industry to scale,” Sweeney says. “In the next five to 10 years, if we want this to happen, we all have to be tangled in this.”

He says automakers looking to build electric vehicles will seek out “the most hospitable ecosystem” that will help them sell electric vehicles, which are not yet easily profitable. 

“This is an all hands on deck situation,” Klezmer says. “We’ve got huge investments to make in a really small period of time in order to capture the economic opportunities and to meet our climate targets. So definitely the private sector needs to play a role, but we’re finding that in order to do that, a lot of those investments need to be unlocked through a favourable policy landscape.”

Kyriazis agrees. “If the election is causing the Ford government to be thinking about and talking about electric vehicles more, then that’s great,” she says. “But let’s actually propose meaningful actions and not pretend that helping manufacturers to make [electric vehicles] is also going to help Ontario residents to afford them and access them and benefit from them.”

Updated Dec. 16, 2021, at 7:28 p.m. ET: This article was updated to correct a photo caption that had incorrectly identified a Magna executive as company founder Frank Stronach.

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As the federal election looms, leaders of all political stripes are promising to increase the zero-emission transportation sector through incentives and investments as a key tool to tackle the climate crisis.

But there’s a catch. 

Positioning Canada as a leader in electrifying the transportation sector also means increasing mineral extraction to fuel that growth. Batteries that propel electric vehicles are powered by minerals like lithium, cobalt, graphite and nickel. 

The transition is necessary, given the implications of the alternative: continuing to burn fossil fuels as our means of getting around. The transportation sector in Canada currently accounts for around 25 per cent of national greenhouse gas emissions, around 180 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent annually, according to Natural Resources Canada. As the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warned, “unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5 C or even 2 C will be beyond reach.” 

At the end of 2020, Canada had over 200,000 electric vehicles on the road and according to International Energy Association projections, that number could rise to over 2.5 million by 2030.

The question is: what does the growth of the electric vehicle sector look like on a landscape level?

In northern Québec, a new lithium-tantalum mine is set to start production in 2024 after receiving approval from the federal government in August, and several other Québec lithium mines are in various stages of exploration and investment. The new Critical Elements Corporation mine will emit an estimated 74,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent annually, over its 20-year lifespan. In Northwest Territories, mining companies are eyeing cobalt reserves and across the country, mining activity is ramping up as demand increases for other minerals needed for the zero-emissions transportation sector, clean energy and other emerging industries.

Advocates for responsible mining practices caution that getting those minerals out of the ground also comes with its own environmental and social impacts.

“One of our concerns is that the transition to low-carbon energy sources and electric vehicles comes at the expense of negative legacies and mining impacts,” Nikki Skuce, co-founder of BC Mining Law Reform Network, told The Narwhal in an interview. 

For example, Skuce has pointed to the ongoing impact of B.C.’s Mount Polley mine disaster in 2014, after a tailings dam failure led to 24 million cubic metres of mining waste being spilled into an important salmon watershed.

Merran Smith, executive director of Clean Energy Canada, said the growth of the electric vehicle sector could be a catalyst for Canada to address some of these issues and prevent future disasters. 

“The opportunity for battery manufacturing, which is going to require an increase in metals and minerals, is an opportunity for us to really ensure we clean up mining from an environmental and a social perspective,” she said in an interview.

Liberals and Conservatives promise to support mineral extraction for clean energy

Not all political parties acknowledge the link between mineral extraction and widespread adoption of zero-emission vehicles, but each of the four largest parties vying for federal leadership promise to support the growth of the sector. 

For example, the Green Party’s election platform highlights Canada’s opportunity to “become a world leader in cleantech and renewable energy,” noting those sectors are “where the jobs of the future are, and how we will stay globally competitive and build a prosperous sustainable future.” The party also promised to ban the sale of internal combustion vehicles by 2030.

Jamie Kneen, co-founder and communications coordinator at MiningWatch Canada, said he agrees this is necessary and important. But he also believes it would be missing the point to only focus the conversation on increasing electric vehicle sales and infrastructure.

“I think that any commitment or any discussion of zero-emission vehicles has to be in the context of our commitment to not using private vehicles,” he said in an interview. “The bigger question is, how are we going to actually shift the transportation paradigm so that it’s more accessible and more equitable and less carbon intensive? Just putting people into public transit makes a much more immediate and bigger difference, even if they’re diesel buses.”

The Green Party acknowledged this by committing to “ensure access to zero-carbon public transportation, with high-speed rail networks between major cities, and spokes of light rail and electric bus connections across the country.”

While the NDP election platform does not address mining directly, the party has promised to establish a research and development centre to “move forward related technologies such as hydrogen, batteries and energy storage solutions.” The party also committed to the Liberal government’s plan to phase out fossil fuel vehicles by 2035 and said it would increase tax breaks to make it easier for people to purchase electric vehicles.

Both the NDP and the Green Party also promised to expand charging infrastructure, including in rural communities, and invest in public transportation.

The Conservative election platform digs into the projected demand for minerals, with a promise to “take advantage of Canada’s abundant resources of the minerals needed to power our clean energy future.” The platform noted this would include “adopting policies to facilitate the responsible exploitation and mining of lithium.”

The Liberal campaign zeroed in on battery manufacturing and the connection to mining. “As the market for batteries grows, the global race is on to attract new manufacturing facilities and jobs,” the platform notes. The party has promised to “double the Mineral Exploration Tax Credit for materials on the Canadian list of critical minerals which are essential to the manufacturing of vital clean technologies, such as batteries.” This proposed tax break would cut costs for mining companies exploring for minerals associated with battery production. 

“One of Canada’s advantages is we have all the metals and minerals needed for batteries.”

Merran Smith, Clean Energy Canada

Kneen said the public should be aware of potential consequences as a result of further subsidizing mineral exploration.

“What it does is support the exploration industry, which doesn’t necessarily lead to mining,” he said. “Something like one in 1,000 exploration projects turns into a mine. What it does is keep the helicopters flying in the Yukon.”

Pierre Gratton, president of the Mining Association of Canada, told The Narwhal more exploration is necessary if Canada wants to compete for a stake in the global battery market.

“We now have one rare earth mine in the Northwest Territories, that’s it. And it’s brand new,” he said in an interview. “There has been a dearth of base metal discoveries in the past 20 years, in Canada and around the world. We do need some new discoveries to come our way if we’re going to meet this challenge.”

He added that most of the domestic mines currently extracting the metals associated with batteries aren’t actually selling them to battery manufacturers.

“There’s very little of Canada’s current production that goes into batteries,” he said. “We are the fifth largest producer of nickel and a major producer of cobalt but it’s used for other purposes.”

Kneen said the truth of where Canadian minerals end up casts a shadow on a growing narrative that mining is vital for, and inextricably linked to, green technology.

“The extent to which [the mining industry] is actually being bolstered by renewable energy demands is, I wouldn’t say marginal, but it’s not as big as industry is trying to tell us.”  

Canada needs to live up to its commitments before expanding mining sector: expert

Gratton said that Canada has an opportunity to use existing laws and regulations to support and promote responsible mining activity associated with battery production. He said that compared to other countries, Canadian mines have a significantly lower carbon footprint, given the access to hydroelectric power. As an example, he said Canada’s nickel production is second only to Finland in terms of greenhouse gases emitted per tonne of saleable product and has a fraction of the emissions per tonne released in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines.

“In terms of fighting climate change, one of the issues is all this extra material that’s going to be needed consumes a lot of energy,” he explained. “If that energy comes from fossil fuels, then we may be, on a net basis, still reducing [emissions] but not as much as we could if we derive those materials from mines that don’t use fossil fuels, or use much less.”

“I’m sure Canadians wouldn’t want Canada to be the miner to the world for all of our electric cars but I think there would be pretty good support for Canada having a piece of it, knowing that if we didn’t it would be coming from other places where they wouldn’t be done as well,” he added. 

China, for example, is well-positioned to secure a monopoly on the market if other countries don’t step up, according to Gratton. The Chinese government has less stringent rules and regulations on mining activity, both in terms of environmental impacts and human rights.

Skuce said Canada does have an advantage, if it lives up to its federal and provincial commitments.

“Like British Columbia, the federal government has now passed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and needs to ensure that it is respecting that, which means mining companies should require free prior and informed consent on the ground,” she said.

Manufacturers are increasingly demanding assurances of responsible mining practices. Gratton said members of the Mining Association of Canada commit to a sustainable mining protocol framework, which include guidelines for climate change, biodiversity, water stewardship and more. 

“It’s an emerging global system that provides the kind of assurance that the Apples and the auto manufacturers are looking for.”

The framework, which is informed by an advisory panel that has included members of MiningWatch Canada and former Green leader Elizabeth May, has been adopted in countries like Finland, Australia, Argentina and Botswana, he said, though each is at a different stage in implementing the protocols.

Kneen agreed the association’s framework is an important part of helping the industry adopt better practices and described it as a “useful tool for companies,” but as a new BC Mining Law Reform Network and MiningWatch Canada report points out, the framework is voluntary and B.C. alone is home to dozens of mines either actively polluting watersheds or posing risk to downstream habitat and communities.

Critics warns recycling needs support as electric vehicle sector grows

While Kneen and Skuce admitted mining is likely to play a prominent role in the transition to clean energy and the zero-emission transportation sector, they both stressed the need for Canada to simultaneously focus on reduction and recycling as part of the solution.

“The easiest way to avoid mine waste problems is to make less mine waste,” Kneen said. He added current recycling facilities aren’t yet able to extract much lithium during the process.

“The cobalt or the nickel and other parts are kind of easier to separate out,” he said, suggesting that Canada could invest in research and development to reduce the amount of waste associated with batteries and support recycling facilities.

Skuce agreed.

“We need to look at reducing the waste [extracting] raw material produces and way more on recycling.”

B.C.’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy announced last week that it will include electric vehicle batteries in the province’s five-year recycling strategy. The strategy puts the onus on producers — manufacturers, distributors and retailers — to take responsibility for the full life-cycle of products, to encourage a circular economy.

Both the Conservatives and Liberals promised in their respective campaigns to support the growth of battery recycling in Canada.

Skuce noted there are still important outstanding issues in the mining industry that federal, provincial and territorial governments need to address before supporting industry growth.

“There’s all sorts of innovations that we need to make sure we’re looking at while at the same time making sure that we’re closing the gap on regulations, laws, compliance and enforcement so that we can be a part of [the transition] without putting watersheds and communities at risk.” 

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In a speech from the throne that largely focused on plans to steer Canada through the COVID-19 pandemic’s immediate health and economic crises, the federal government said climate action will be an essential part of efforts to create new jobs and stimulate an economic recovery. 

The speech, delivered on Wednesday by Governor General Julie Payette, opened a new session of Parliament and laid out the government’s priorities as Canada faces rising COVID-19 cases, double-digit unemployment and the ever-pressing challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 

“Climate action will be a cornerstone of our plan to support and create a million jobs across the country,” the speech said. 

“This is where the world is going. Global consumers and investors are demanding and rewarding climate action.”

Governor General Julie Payette arrives at the the Senate, before delivering the speech from the throne. Photo: Sergeant Johanie Maheu / Rideau Hall

The new and renewed commitments to climate action were welcomed by environmental organizations.   

“[They] acknowledged that this is where the world’s economies are going and that Canada needs to get in the game and stay in the game of producing low carbon and clean energy and clean technology solutions,” Clean Energy Canada executive director Merran Smith said. 

Smith said there were great signals in the throne speech and she will be watching to see how the government puts its commitments into action.

“The rubber hits the road when we see the budget update and when we see the climate plan,” she said.

The government promised a fiscal update this fall. Until then, here are some highlights from the Trudeau government’s throne speech commitments. 

A forthcoming plan to exceed 2030 climate targets

The federal government reiterated its commitment to exceed Canada’s 2030 climate targets, promising to “immediately” bring forward a plan. The government also promised to legislate its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 and to continue pricing carbon pollution.

Canadians “know climate change threatens our health, way of life and planet. They want climate action now, and that is what the government will continue to deliver,” the speech said.

Under the Paris Agreement, the federal government committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. 

Projections released in December 2019 show Canada will miss its emissions target by 77 million tonnes — roughly the annual emissions of 16.6 million cars — based on existing measures or those under development.

Isabelle Turcotte, director of federal policy at the Pembina Institute, praised the government for amping up its climate commitments. 

“The most exciting and, I think, concrete example of that is that they have a new plan to meet and exceed the 2030 target, and we’re really looking forward to seeing it,” she said.

“We’re excited to see them reiterate that they’re going to create an accountability mechanism to make sure that Canada stops missing its climate targets,” she added.

The government reiterated a commitment to support investments in renewable energy and to move forward with the Clean Power Fund — a $5 billion fund to support electrification of industry — that the Liberals committed to in their election platform.

The speech also promised investments in transit, charging stations for electric cars and to make zero-emissions vehicles more affordable.

“No one was expecting a lot of details in the speech in terms of funding envelopes, specific programs, or details in terms of how we will achieve or move on these really key objects,” Turcotte said.

 “But the direction, the tone and the vision is that climate action is really a cornerstone of rebuilding a stronger economy and that’s really key.”  

The Governor General Julie Payette delivers the speech from the throne, which introduces the government’s direction and goals, and outlines how it will work to achieve them. Photo: Sergeant Johanie Maheu / Rideau Hall

A plan to create a million jobs and transition the economy 

Unemployment in Canada has been in the double-digits for much of this year. The number of people who don’t have enough work is substantially higher than it was before the pandemic.

“Women, racialized Canadians and young people have borne the brunt of job losses,” the speech said.

The government promised to do “whatever it takes” to support people and businesses through the economic crisis, pledging to create more than one million new jobs in an effort to restore employment to pre-pandemic levels.

“This throne speech recognized that tackling coronavirus inequality and climate inequality go hand-in-hand,” Jesse Firempong, a climate justice spokesperson for Greenpeace Canada, said in a statement. 

“To turn this into real change for impacted communities — including to ensure they benefit from the green jobs promised today — we need to see fully funded plans in the upcoming ministerial mandate letters and economic update,” Firempong said. 

“The women, Indigenous Peoples and racialized and low-income communities on the frontlines of both crises should be front and centre in an equitable, feminist, green recovery.” 

In the speech, the government pledged to create thousands of jobs in energy efficiency building retrofits.

It also committed to launching a new fund to attract investments in the manufacturing of zero-emissions products and to cut the corporate tax rate in half for green manufacturing companies.

“A good example of adapting to a carbon-neutral future is building zero-emissions vehicles and batteries,” the speech said.

“Canada has the resources — from nickel to copper — needed for these clean technologies. This — combined with Canadian expertise — is Canada’s competitive edge.”

Mining for copper isn’t without controversy in Canada, especially after a tailings dam burst in 2014 at the Mount Polley copper and gold mine, which sent 25 billion litres of contaminated materials into B.C. lakes and rivers. 

The speech from the throne promised charging stations for electric cars and to make zero-emissions vehicles more affordable. The speech also indicated Canada could play a role in building zero-emissions vehicles and batteries. Photo: mariordo59 / Flickr

Vince Gasparro, managing director of corporate development and clean energy finance at Vancity Community Investment Bank, called the government’s decision to cut the corporate tax in half for green companies a “big, big win.”

“It improves the profitability of these companies and allows them to expand their businesses…and it helps attract capital,” he said.

“The ability to attract private capital into the renewable energy market … was always a critical component,” he said, noting the federal government won’t be able to meet goals such as becoming carbon neutral by 2050 without the private sector’s help.

Protecting nature and investing in climate mitigation

The speech said the pandemic has reminded Canadians of the importance of nature. 

“The government will work with municipalities as part of a new commitment to expand urban parks, so that everyone has access to green space,” it said.

The government reiterated its promise to protect 25 per cent of Canada’s land and oceans in five years and to use “nature-based solutions to fight climate change.”

The speech included commitments to invest in measures to reduce the impact of floods, wildfires, and other climate related disasters. 

What’s an intact forest worth? The tricky task of quantifying Canada’s nature-based climate solutions

Modernizing the Canadian Environmental Protection Act

The speech also committed to modernizing the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA), a move welcomed by Ecojustice executive director Devon Page, who noted in a statement that the legislation hasn’t been updated for two decades.

The act “is no longer up to the task of protecting Canadians, especially those in vulnerable situations, from toxic substances and pollution,” he said.

“Crucially, a modernized CEPA must include the right to a healthy environment.”  

Page pointed to a September report from the UN Special Rapporteur on hazardous substances and wastes that highlights Canada’s ongoing failure to protect Indigenous and racialized communities — the same communities most impacted by COVID-19 — from the worst effects of rising greenhouse gas emissions. 

“The report explicitly calls for Canada to legislate the right to a healthy environment,” Page said.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The Yukon government wants to see more than 4,800 electric vehicles on the road by 2030 as part of its bid to drastically cut the territory’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to its climate change strategy released Sept. 14.

The number of vehicles included in the strategy dwarfs the 22 electric vehicles currently registered in the territory, according to the Yukon Bureau of Statistics, among more than 40,000 cars and trucks registered in total.

To meet this mark, over the next 10 years the government is providing $18.4 million in rebates — including $5,000 for the purchase of an electric vehicle, along with incentives for installing charging stations to keep them going. 

“By participating in these new programs, we can collectively take steps toward a sustainable future that benefits Yukoners and the environment,” said Ranj Pillai, Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources, during the unveiling of the strategy. “Electric vehicles are proven to be reliable, consistent and efficient in our cold weather, with many Yukoners using their electric vehicles year-round without issues.” 

The strategy sets in motion work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the territory by 30 per cent from 2010 levels. This includes a goal of ramping up electricity derived from renewable energy sources to 97 per cent from roughly 90 per cent — primarily hydroelectric. For off-grid communities, the strategy proposes to reduce diesel consumption for electricity by 30 per cent below 2010 levels. All of this is to ensure electricity powering green vehicles, among other things, is clean. 

After snowpack hits near-historic low, Yukon Energy looks to diversify hydro-heavy grid

The strategy notes that only roughly 24 per cent of all energy in Yukon right now comes from renewables. That’s when heating is factored in, as well as diesel-fuelled electricity in off-grid communities. 

The strategy also includes energy efficiency programs for homes, shoring up infrastructure to the effects of climate change and setting intensity-based targets, or reductions based on production levels rather than a general cap, for mining operations in 2022.

The Yukon government, with the help of Ottawa, is projected to spend more than $500 million to fully implement the strategy.

How rebates can help tackle greenhouse gas emissions

Transportation is the heavyweight in territorial emissions. According to the strategy, 54 per cent of Yukon’s total emissions came from vehicles, while an additional seven per cent came from aviation in 2017.

The plan aims to reduce road transportation emissions by at least 30 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030, the strategy says. 

The rebate of up to $5,000 for purchasers of an electric vehicle applies to cars, trucks snowmobiles, motorcycles and electric bicycles, Pillai said, noting that there are also rebates for the associated shipping costs for the vehicles, as it’s expected many are to be imported.

Yukon’s Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources Ranj Pillai on Sept. 14, unveiling the territory’s new climate change strategy. Photo: Julien Gignac / The Narwhal

Rebates can be claimed for fully electric vehicles and certain plug-in hybrids. To be eligible for the full rebate, hybrids must have a battery capacity of 15 kilowatt hours or more. A smaller rebate of $3,000 is available for hybrids that have battery capacity below this.

According to the strategy, the Yukon government will work with local dealerships and manufacturers to ensure electric models make up 10 per cent of light duty vehicles sales by 2025, and 30 per cent by 2030.

Half of new cars purchased for the government’s fleet will also be electric.

These rebates can be paired with a similar incentive by the federal government, which, since 2019, has offered upward of $5,000 for fully electric or long-range hybrid vehicles. 

The government’s plan to power electric vehicles

There were only three electric vehicle charging stations in Yukon in 2018. Now there are 13 between Dawson City in the north and Watson Lake in the south. Two more are slated to be installed this year.

“In two short years, we have witnessed exponential growth in electric vehicle infrastructure,” Pillai said. 

The strategy says that by 2027 it will be possible to travel to all road-accessible communities in Yukon using an electric vehicle, adding that the Yukon government is working with counterparts in Alaska, British Columbia and the Northwest Territories to create a cross-border network of charging stations. 

Asked how many charging stations are required to adequately power upward of 5,000 electric vehicles, Brigitte Parker, a spokesperson with Energy, Mines and Resources, said in an email to The Narwhal that the total number hasn’t been determined yet. However, she added, it’s expected that two fast-charging stations are to be installed every year across the territory from now until 2027.

White River First Nation forges ahead with largest solar project in Yukon

Installing charging stations on stretches of highway is but one piece of the equation. Shane Andre, director of the energy branch, a wing of Energy, Mines and Resources, said 90 per cent of electric vehicle charging happens at home.

“That’s where we know most of the charging is going to take place,” he said. “That leaves a gap.”

To address this, starting this year, the Yukon government, in partnership with Yukon’s public utilities, is rolling out rebates to support charging stations installed at residences, commercial or institutional buildings, the strategy says. Residents who install a charging station at home can get a rebate of $750; businesses or institutions can get upward of $4,000 per charger. 

In 2024, legislation will be drafted to make it possible for businesses to sell electricity for electric vehicle charging, the strategy says.

Blended fuels to pick up the emissions reduction slack

Having more electric vehicles on the road doesn’t go far enough to meet the government’s targets for emissions reductions though. Over the next decade, electric vehicles will lower emissions by 13 kilotonnes, the strategy says, while the overall target is to lower emissions by 263 kilotonnes.

According to the 2019 National Inventory Report conducted by the federal government for the United Nations, vehicles that use heavy duty diesel fuel accounted for the highest concentration of greenhouse gas production in Yukon, with 195 kilotonnes of emissions generated in 2017. Light duty gasoline vehicles were the second highest emitters at 92 kilotonnes.

But some modes of transportation — semi-trucks, for instance, which bring food and other supplies up from the south — can’t be made electric, as technology hasn’t advanced to that degree yet, said Aletta Leitch, senior project manager of the Yukon government’s climate change secretariat.

“It’s simply that the technological solutions and the options for reducing emissions are very different in that sector,” she said.

This makes blended fuels a critical piece of the strategy, as they reduce the carbon intensity of traditional fuels. Mixing ethanol and renewable diesel — fuels produced from certain plant oils and agricultural waste — with gasoline or diesel produces lower greenhouse gas emissions when burned, the strategy says. 

Regular vehicles can use a certain percentage of blended fuels without issue, Parker said.

In 2025, all diesel sold in Yukon for transportation will have a biodiesel and renewable diesel content of roughly 20 per cent, the strategy says; all gasoline sold in the territory will have an ethanol content of about 10 per cent.

Taken together, blended fuels are projected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70 kilotonnes in the next decade. 

The case for lowering greenhouse gas emissions in Yukon

Temperatures in the North have increased by 2.3 C since 1948, the strategy states, noting that this is most acute in Yukon and the Northwest Territories. 

“This is close to three times the rate at which global temperatures are rising,” the strategy says.

And with that warming comes a long list of impacts, including continued permafrost thaw — which can damage buildings, roads and ecosystems — flooding and more severe forest fires, it says. Food insecurity is another problem, with changes to weather disrupting access to country food.

Greenhouse gas emissions in Yukon account for 0.1 per cent of Canada’s emissions overall, the strategy says. While a small percentage in the bigger picture, for a territory of roughly 42,000 people, “our per person emissions of around 18 tonnes per person are the sixth highest in Canada and higher than many other countries,” it continues.

And emissions are increasing. In 2017, 624 kilotonnes of greenhouse gases were emitted in the territory, a growth of 32 kilotonnes over a seven-year period, it states. “Based on modelling, we anticipate that Yukon’s emissions, excluding mining emissions, could increase to 678 kilotonnes in 2030 if we do not take action,” the strategy says.

Road transportation emissions alone increased from 220 kilotonnes in 1990 to 373 kilotonnes in 2017, according to the national inventory.

The actions outlined in Yukon’s strategy account for 75 per cent of the Yukon government’s emissions reduction goal. Over the next decade, these actions will be updated, in 2024 and 2027, it says, “based on progress and new information that has emerged.”

The government will report on the strategy’s implementation annually, including the status and progress of each action item, and greenhouse gas emissions forecasts for the territory.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This story was originally published in 2019. Go here for our explainer on what the 2021 election results mean for environment and climate policy.

Well, well, well, the dust has settled (kind of) and Canada has a Liberal minority government.

Wait, what exactly is a minority government?

Here’s how it works: there are 338 seats in Canada’s House of Commons. To govern unilaterally, a party needs to win 170 seats. That’s what we Canucks call a majority government.

If no party wins more than 170 seats, you have what we call a minority government. That means the party that forms government will need the support of other parties to pass any legislation. It also means they can face a non-confidence vote at any moment, so they better keep themselves in the good graces of some allies.

Who those allies will be is the big, unanswered question at this hour.

What we know is this: the Liberals need 13 extra seats to stay in power. As of Tuesday morning, the Conservatives won 121 seats, the NDP won 24 seats, the Bloc Quebecois won 32 seats and the Greens won three seats.

The Liberals could work with either the NDP or the Bloc Quebecois (or some combination thereof) and remain in power.

Both the NDP and the Bloc have strong environmental platforms — arguably stronger than the Liberals — so if anything the Liberals can be expected to take a stronger stance on environmental issues.

There’s much we don’t know, but here are a few things we can reasonably expect to happen on the environment file.

1) The carbon tax will stay in place

An escalating price on carbon has been the cornerstone of the Liberals climate plan and they’ll have plenty of support to keep the carbon tax in place. The NDP also promised a carbon tax, but vowed to take it a step further by removing exemptions for heavy polluters.

Meanwhile, the Bloc Quebecois proposed that Ottawa impose a carbon tax in provinces where greenhouse gas emissions per capita are higher than average and that the proceeds be paid to provinces where emissions are lower, creating a form of green equalization. Trudeau will almost certainly be concerned about Albertan alienation, so he’ll avoid getting involved in that plan.

2) About those fossil fuel subsidies …

Back in 2015, the Liberals promised to phase out fossil fuel subsidies over the “medium term,” but Environmental Defence estimates the federal and provincial governments are still handing out $3.3 billion a year to the fossil fuel industry. A September 2018 report found that although there has been some progress on fossil fuel subsidy reform in Canada in recent years, there is still a significant amount of work to be done for Canada to meet a G7 country promise to end all “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies” by 2025.

The NDP and the Bloc Quebecois campaigned on a promise to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies — a policy that enjoys tremendous public support. With the parties needing to work together, we should expect this phase out to happen sooner rather than later.

3) The Trans Mountain pipeline debate is unlikely to be re-opened in Parliament, unless …

While many of the opposition parties might want to re-open this debate, it’s hard to see an opening for them to do so given the pipeline is already approved. Even if the NDP, Greens and Bloc Quebecois wanted to force a confidence vote on it, the Conservatives would side with the Liberals on this one.

However, the Liberals still need to find $10 to $15 billion to build the pipeline.

“The public financing of the project does seem to present a bit of a pickle,” said Kai Nagata of Dogwood, a B.C. democracy group. “It doesn’t seem likely the NDP/Bloc/Greens could vote for a budget with pipeline construction funds, but the Conservative party probably couldn’t stomach voting for everything else.”

Nagata added: “Even the Conservatives should be philosophically uncomfortable with borrowing money, in a deficit, to spend on corporate welfare.”

4) Buh-buy single-use plastics

The Liberals promised to start phasing out single-use plastics starting around 2021. The NDP, meanwhile, wants to intensify that approach by straight-up banning single-use plastics by 2022. Any which way, single-use plastics such as bags and straws are likely going the way of the dodo.

5) Full steam ahead on conservation

The Trudeau government has made significant progress toward meeting its Aichi Biodiversity targets: it pledged to protect at least 17 per cent of terrestrial area and inland waters, and 10 per cent of its oceans, by 2020. A flurry of big new protected areas has moved that along.

The Liberals have also committed to conserving 25 per cent of Canada’s land, freshwater and ocean by 2025 and to working toward conserving 30 per cent by 2030. They also plan to advocate for countries around the world to set a 30 per cent conservation goal.

Additionally, the Liberals have identified the opportunity to reduce emissions by 30 megatonnes by 2030 using natural climate solutions that support efforts to better manage, conserve and restore forests, grasslands, agricultural lands, wetlands and coastal areas — as well ad by planting two billion trees.

The NDP and Greens have also committed to the goal of conserving 30 per cent of land, freshwater and oceans by 2030.

So, watch for more Indigenous protected areas, national parks and marine protected areas.

6) Expect more electric vehicles

The Liberals have set a target of 30 per cent of all light-duty vehicles on the road being electric by 2030. The Bloc Quebecois also support measures to require manufacturers to sell more electric vehicles. And the NDP support maintaining the $5,000 federal incentive for electric vehicle purchases while eliminating federal sales tax on them. One way or another, electric vehicle incentives are here to stay.

7) A lot of Albertans are going to be outraged

With Conservatives winning a higher percentage of the popular vote than the Liberals nationwide, and winning every seat in Alberta and Saskatchewan except for one, Westerners are rightly going to be upset about ending up with so little say in Ottawa. How that will manifest is yet to be seen, but I’d wager a bet it ain’t gonna be pretty.

8) Will electoral reform have its moment in the sun?

The NDP and Greens have long supported a move to proportional representation — an electoral system that would ensure the allocation of seats is more in line with the popular vote than our current first-past-the-post system. With the Conservatives being the latest losers under the first-past-the-post system, one has to wonder if there might be a cross-party push for a referendum on modernizing our electoral system.

Much more will become clear over the coming weeks and months, but for now what we know is that the Liberals will have to work with some combination of the NDP and Bloc Quebecois — and that means that if anything, they’ll have a stronger mandate to take bold action on the climate crisis.

Updated Oct. 22, 2019, at 10 a.m. to include updated seat counts.

Updated Oct. 22, 2019, at 2:45 p.m. to add further comment regarding the Trans Mountain pipeline and to provide further detail about conservation promises. 

Updated Oct. 24, 2019, at 11:40 a.m. to correct an error regarding the source of fossil fuel subsidies. The $3.3 billion a year in subsidies are from both the federal and provincial governments, not just the federal government.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The British Columbia government is introducing new legislation to phase out gas-powered vehicles that, if passed, will require the sale of all new light-duty cars and trucks to be zero-emission vehicles by 2040.

Sixteen countries, including China, India, France, Japan and the U.K., have already set targets to eliminate the sale of gas-powered vehicles — but B.C. will become the first jurisdiction in North America to set such a target.

The legislation will also make zero-emissions vehicles more available for British Columbians, with requirements for automakers to reach a zero emissions vehicle sales target of 10 per cent by 2025, 30 per cent by  2030 and 100 per cent by 2040.

“It’s a win-win for commuters, but British Columbians have had a tough time finding electric cars on dealership lots and often had to go on long waiting lists,” said Dan Woynillowicz, policy director for Clean Energy Canada, a climate and clean energy think tank based at Simon Fraser University.

“This legislation will help ensure supply keeps up with demand . . . If you want an electric car, you should be able to drive one home from the lot, same as any car.”

In June and July of 2018, Clean Energy Canada called all 322 dealerships in B.C. that qualify for the province’s electric vehicle rebate program and found that only 40 per cent of them have electric cars on their lots available to purchase. Most said the wait for an electric car would be three months to a year.

The province of B.C. offers a rebate of $5,000 on electric cars, and the federal government announced in last month’s budget that it will offer a $5,000 rebate on electric vehicles under $45,000 — meaning a car buyer in B.C. can qualify for up to $10,000 back. B.C.’s Scrap-It program also offers up to an additional $6,000 back if you’re trading in an older model gas vehicle.

Andrew Weaver, leader of the B.C. Green caucus, applauded the proposed legislation as a critical step toward a low-carbon economy — but said it is “deeply counterproductive” to advance such important policy the week after passing legislation that locks in subsidies for B.C.’s emissions-intensive liquefied natural gas industry.

“After the B.C. NDP just doubled down on the crisis by adding 3.45 million tonnes of emissions from the first phase of LNG alone, we must do everything we can to decrease our emissions elsewhere,” Weaver said.

Weaver also emphasized the need for electric vehicle charging infrastructure, particularly in rural areas.

Transportation accounts for 40 per cent of B.C.’s household emissions. A report released last week found Canada is warming at twice the global average due to climate change.

B.C. has the highest per capita adoption of zero-emission vehicles in Canada, with more than 17,000 electric vehicles on the road, averaging four per cent of new light-duty vehicle sales in 2018.

A 2018 study by BC Hydro found one in three British Columbians expect their next car to be electric. The same study found that fuel costs for electric car owners are a quarter of what drivers spend on gas and maintenance.

Woynillowicz says the proposed legislation is a promising sign.

“It’s a return to the kind of leadership that we haven’t had since a decade ago, when the first suite of climate policies were brought in by Gordon Campbell,” he told The Narwhal.

You might also like: The definitive guide to buying an electric car in Canada

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

You’ve seen them around. They used to look ridiculous, but now they’re starting to look kind of cool. Electric vehicles are getting better all the time and represent the mostly undisputed future of motorized transportation.

But should you get one? Like, right now? Or never? Or should you wait?

If you can easily afford $75,000 to $125,000 on a Tesla Model S or Model X, then I’ll make this easy for you: yes, you should obviously buy a magical space car.

For the rest of us, it’s harder to decide.

Having owned an electric car for a couple of years, I’ll help you come at this from three angles.

First, we’ll explore what kind of car person you are — what do you really want out of a vehicle? Second, we’ll wrestle with the most common concerns of going electric. And last but not least, we’ll run through the current options and costs.

First, ask yourself

When you’re at the movies, suffering through 20 minutes of ads at the beginning, does a little piece of you want to be that person driving their Jeep over giant rocks on the way to a mountaintop sunset? Or would you prefer to be with those hip young people driving their sensible-but-sporty Toyotas, blasting beats on their way to the club?

When it comes to this whole electric car question, who do you think you are?  

Eco-warrior

If your number one motivator is a desire to not unnecessarily contribute to harmful air pollution and climate change, you drive relatively often, you can manage $300 to $500 monthly payments, and there’s some semblance of a charging network where you live, then there’s little reason left not to get an electric car.

Weekend warrior

If you want a vehicle to go adventuring with, are blessed with reasonable quick-charging infrastructure in your neck of the woods, can afford payments on a $30,000 to $45,000 car tricked out with good tires, chains and gear storage, you can make it work.

But you’ll need to cultivate some serenity now as you experience anticipated and unanticipated delays … especially while the rest of your friends effortlessly cruise up gnarly back roads in their sweet late-’90s 4Runners.

Daily commuter

If you just need a car to get to work and run some errands, the good news is that for years most electric vehicles have had plenty of range to handle that. The savings on fuel and maintenance can add up fast —  some estimates peg it at about $3,000 per year compared to a conventional car. If you have access to a wall outlet or dedicated charger at home or at work, going electric starts to feel kind of obvious.  

Tech junky

If you upgrade your phone every year, follow Elon Musk on Twitter and have informed opinions about cryptocurrencies and AI, then you’ve probably been holding off until you can get a Tesla — the undisputed champions of electric vehicle style and wizardry. Now that the company’s much-anticipated mass market Model 3 is rolling off assembly lines, your torturous wait may be over. Why haven’t you sold a kidney and ordered one?

Penny pincher

If your main concern is owning the cheapest possible vehicle, then a lot will depend on your specific situation, including key variables like availability of local rebates, gasoline and electricity costs, and how much you intend to use the car. Spreadsheet time!

There are some smoking deals out there on used models, and you’ll definitely save on fuel and annual maintenance, but may risk higher depreciation costs and/or a costly battery replacement after the typical five to eight-year warranties expire.

If you’re not interested in spreadsheets and want things to be dead obvious — like, you walk into a showroom and the electric vehicles are cheaper — you might have to wait till 2025.  

Driving nut

If you love the feeling of near-instant acceleration, smooth handling and think it would be cool to hear birds while driving on those winding country roads (no seriously, that happens), you’ll probably find electric cars super fun.

Addressing your electric vehicle anxieties

Okay, so we’ve explored your innermost motivations, but what about …

Are electric vehicles really green?

Let’s be real, personal vehicles of any kind aren’t super green. They take lots of resources to manufacture, they take up space, contribute to sprawl, etc.

It would be better if we could walk, bike and take clean public transit everywhere. Or at least car share.

But, for now, those options aren’t always practical — which is why you might be thinking about getting an electric car.

In which case, it’s helpful to break the “is it green” question down into two parts: greenhouse gas emissions, and everything else.

When it comes to greenhouse gases, there are two big considerations: (1) how your local electricity is generated, and (2) the carbon dioxide produced manufacturing the fancy battery cells.

The most recent analysis shows that even if you live in Alberta — which currently gets two-thirds of its electricity from coal — by going electric you’ll still cut your greenhouse gas emission by an average of 25 per cent over the life of the car, compared to a conventional vehicle, even taking into account battery manufacturing.

That same analysis reveals that overall, Canada has seven of the top 10 best locations in North America for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by driving an electric vehicle. In other words: many Canadian jurisdictions have relatively low-carbon electricity sources.

The “everything else” of green includes harmful tailpipe emissions (none for an electric vehicle), and the mining of rare earth minerals (arguably the biggest problem with electric vehicles).

If you’re concerned about mining,  it’s helpful to remember that every drop of oil is essentially mined from the earth before being processed into fuel for your car, with myriad detrimental impacts that go beyond carbon emissions.

In short, yeah, in most provinces electric vehicles are definitely greener.

What about range?

This is many peoples’ number one concern, and for good reason. On road trips — when range truly becomes an issue — I can tell you the anxiety sweat is real.

Tip number one is to figure out how much range you actually need. If you’re going to use it as daily commuter/grocery getter, even old school electric vehicles probably have you covered (e.g. a 2013 Nissan Leaf gets you more than 100 km), especially if you can charge at home or at work (using a normal wall outlet or dedicated charger).

But if you’re gonna road trip with this thing, here’s the deal:

• With many models it’s totally doable, so if you’re like 40 per cent of people and worry about range on longer trips, don’t let this stop you. In fact, the forced-scenic routes and charging downtime can actually make it way more fun than mind-numbing uninterrupted highway driving.
• That said, until Fast Chargers (which can charge a battery in 30-60 minutes) are as ubiquitous as gas stations, you’re probably going to want as much range as you can afford.
• The latest EVs under $50,000 (more on them in a minute) have ranges up to 383 km on a single charge.
• Go to Plugshare.com and start looking for orange balloons (Fast Chargers) between your home and some road trip destinations. Ideally you have enough range to get between orange balloons with a good 20 to 25 per cent wiggle room. You can use green balloons — Level 2 chargers that will take several hours to fully charge your battery — and creative use of downtime to get you through a desolate stretch.
• Range significantly drops when you start pushing 100 to 120 km/hr, and plummets when you’re climbing steep hills (though it averages out on the way back down). Just know to give yourself lots of wiggle when you’re trying a trip for the first time.  
• Sometimes you’ll pull up to a Fast Charger and it’ll be broken, and there’ll be nothing you can do about it except plug-in to a nearby Level 2 and chill.   
• Even if you’ve got lots of orange balloons between you and the family cabin, some batteries will overheat after a certain number back-to-back fast charges. Our 2016 Nissan Leaf (171 km on a single charge) gets too hot after about three fast charges, for a maximum “daily range” of about 400 to 500 km.
• That whole concept of “daily range” isn’t much talked about, but it’s super important if you plan to push your electric vehicle’s limits. Probe your dealer about it, and ask about battery cooling systems (passively cooled = lowest daily range; actively cooled = highest daily range). A big downside of all Nissan Leafs (including 2018 models) is they rely on passive cooling.

Is this thing going to be obsolete?

Maybe. The fast-changing nature of the industry is one reason why 80 per cent of electric vehicles in the U.S. are leased. People don’t want to be stuck with antiquated tech.

But keep in mind that charging infrastructure is improving all the time, too, making it more attractive and cost-effective to stick with the electric vehicle you’ve got vs. getting all iPhone about it.

And also keep in mind that the economics of leasing vs. buying will vary from province to province and from year to year. If you do plan on ditching your electric vehicle after a few years, you’ll just have to do the math to see which option makes the most sense.

Your current electric car options in Canada

Now that we’ve explored your fears, let’s check out the current options. For simplicity I’ll stick to all-electric models, but there are an increasing number of hybrid options, including badass pickup trucks.  

If you’re looking for an affordable all-electric vehicle in 2018 you’ll be looking at small to midsize cars and motorcycles — with the exception of a small number of limited-range Toyota Rav4 conversions and other rare finds.  

• Cheapest: You can find something like an early model Nissan Leaf for as little as  $10,000 (e.g. 2011) or about $15,000 (e.g. 2013/2014). These can be a smoking deal if the battery is in good shape, but beware if it’s not. With about 100 km of range, most road trips would be a significant challenge (make sure to check if used models have fast-charge capability), but this could be a good low maintenance car for short commutes and running errands.
• Average: You can find a two- to three-year-old Nissan Leaf or equivalent in the $20,000 to $25,000 range, with slight range and battery improvements over earlier models that add a degree of comfort and convenience.
• New: 2018 marks a step change for electric vehicles, with the Chevy Bolt, Tesla Model 3, next generation Nissan Leaf and others achieving 50 to 100 per cent more range than previous years at comparable price points. These will run you anywhere from $36,000 for 2018 Nissan Leaf (243 km range) to $43,000 to $45,000 for base models of the Chevy Bolt (383 km range) or Tesla Model 3 (354 km range), before rebates.

Rebates

There aren’t rebates from the federal government on electric vehicles yet, but several provinces do offer rebates. Incentives in Ontario range from $5,000 to $14,000, in B.C. the rebate is $5,000 and in Quebec the rebate is up to $8,000.

Your near-future options

Who wants an affordable, all-electric SUV with long range? Everyone.

And it looks like everyone will have to wait until about 2020 before several manufacturers start releasing their first attempts, with “affordable” likely meaning somewhere in the range of $40,000 to $45,000 (cough).  

Over the next two years we’ll see an explosion in variety of electric vehicles on the market, but the variety will mostly be in style rather than substance.

Into the sunset

Sooner than we probably think, gasoline and diesel vehicles will drive off into the sunset, becoming the exception rather than the rule. For example, India, France, Britain and Norway have already set targets to eliminate their sale by between 2025 to 2040.  

How long you want to hang on is up to you, but for many people — from eco-warriors to penny pinchers, the choice to go electric is getting clearer by the day.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

It feels like an eternity since federal NDP leader Thomas Mulcair received the boot from delegates at the party convention in April 2016.

The lengthy leadership race hasn’t exactly helped that feeling.

Most candidates launched their campaigns in February. Nine debates were held between March and September. But we’re almost at the end of the tunnel. Voting for the first ballot, via both mail-in ballots and online, commenced on Sept. 18 and concludes on Oct. 1. If needed, second and third ballots will be collected by Oct. 8 and Oct. 15.

While there are only four candidates left in the race — Guy Caron, Jagmeet Singh, Charlie Angus and Niki Ashton — there are an enormous number of combined proposals related to energy, climate and environmental policies (especially compared to what was discussed during the federal Conservative leadership race).

Let’s take a look at what’s on offer from the NDP candidates.

Moving Past the Pipeline Debate

A central theme throughout the race has been the need to “move past” the pipeline debate.

Sounds easy!

In June, Ontario MP Charlie Angus — previously dubbed “the most pipeline-friendly candidate” by the Hill Times — said that “the only discussion we’ve had on the environment is ‘this pipeline versus that pipeline.’”

Similarly, Ontario MPP and deputy leader Jagmeet Singh states in his platform that “it’s no secret that there are people who would like to narrow our discussions on climate change to a debate about pipelines alone in an attempt to divide Canadians.”

It’s probably a fair point. But the pressure has, at the very least, required candidates to quickly clarify their position on the subject.

Both Manitoba MP Niki Ashton and Quebec MP Guy Caron have indicated that they’re against the country’s major projects: Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain and TransCanada’s Energy East. Enbridge’s controversial Line 3, which received federal approval alongside Trans Mountain, is left unaddressed.

Singh was late to the pipeline party — something Ashton publicly noted.

During a debate in St. John’s in June, Singh stated a desire to communicate with NDP leaders in Alberta and B.C. before declaring a firm decision on the matter.

Surprisingly, Singh’s climate plan dropped only a week later, fully opposing Trans Mountain and Energy East due to conflicts with emissions targets and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP).

Angus arguably left the most room open for future projects, often deploying the Alberta government’s language of “social license” and threat of oil-by-rail.

In addition, he suggested that “industry understands that they need social license on the ground” and that government hasn’t sufficiently been “at the table.”

Four’s Company: Where @NDP Leadership Candidates Stand on #Energy and #Climate Policy https://t.co/jDi9nVJnRC #NDPldr #cdnpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 27, 2017

Emissions Targets and Carbon Pricing

Every candidate but Angus has specifically committed to accelerating Canada’s reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in order to meet international climate targets.

Specifically, the trio of Caron, Singh and Ashton have all committed to cutting the country’s emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2025. That’s a full five years earlier than the Liberal government’s current plan — which seeks to hit that number by 2030 — and only six years after an NDP government could conceivably attain power.

That won’t be easy.

To achieve that both Ashton and Angus stated that he will create a five-year “national carbon budget.”

Emissions targets help but the country needs actual mechanisms, like regulations or carbon pricing, to get there.

So far Caron is the sole candidate to propose adjusting the national price on carbon. Currently, the Liberal government requires every province to institute a price on carbon — either via a carbon tax or cap-and-trade framework — that will reach $50/tonne by 2022.

Caron proposed upping that requirement to $50/tonne by 2020, to $100/tonne by 2025 and $150/tonne by 2030.

That’s still below what Mark Jaccard and his research team at Simon Fraser University have calculated would be required if carbon pricing was exclusively relied on to hit Paris Agreement targets: $200/tonne by 2030.

It’s still significantly more specific than anything being offered by any other candidate.

Ushering in a Green Future

Aston, Angus and Singh have each proposed the creation of new government positions or agencies to help Canada usher in a new sustainable economy.

For Ashton, that includes the co-creation of a Crown corporation called Green Canada and a public investment bank. Together, the two institutions would help fund green housing projects, public transit, renewable tech, upskilling jobs in “sunset” industries, national retrofit program and a “young green job guarantee.”

Ashton’s plan for a publicly funded infrastructure bank is a big departure from the Liberal government’s controversial support of private investment in Canada’s $35-billion Infrastructure Bank.

Ashton noted there is a potential for 700,000 clean jobs in the construction and operation of renewable energy by 2050. To foster that potential, Ashton proposed the creation of four new Green Canada Advisory Boards to focus on forestry, agriculture, fishing and energy.

Angus also proposed an alternative to Canada’s Infrastructure Bank in the form of a new Crown corporation designed to facilitate “sustainable development” in energy, transit and “municipal redesigns.”

Meanwhile, Singh pledged to establish a climate change advisory group as well as a climate change action officer to keep track of progress on emissions.

Big Spenders

Only Ashton and Caron mention specific figures when it comes to funding of green programs.

Ashton dedicated a massive $10 billion per year to build 40,000 units of green public housing, amounting to over 150,000 houses in her first mandate.

She noted that she would pay for that and other programs with increased taxation on high-income earners and corporations, as well as deficit spending given low interest rates.

Caron also threw out a $10 billion figure to spur investment into electric high-speed rail in the revered Calgary-Edmonton and Quebec City-Windsor corridors over a 10-year period.

The amount won’t be enough to cover all the expected costs of such a project, however. Estimates for the corridors come in at $6 to $10 billion and $20 billion, respectively.

Caron would also dedicate $18 billion to public transit expenditures over a decade, $4.7 billion to clean drinking water in Indigenous communities and $32 billion in renewable investments (it’s unclear if the latter would be direct investments or grants/subsidies).

Possibly the most extravagant of all, Caron pledged to rebate up to $8,000 per electric vehicle up to a value of $40,000, and a huge $50,000 when purchasing medium- and heavy-duty electric buses or trucks.

Both Angus and Singh were significantly lighter on the details.

Singh has pitched ideas like a national public transit strategy to provide “long-term and predictable funding” and providing tax rebates for zero-emission vehicle purchases. But no particular dollar figures have been assigned to these ideas.

Same goes for his proposal to implement nationwide energy efficiency measures, kick off a renewable heating program and construct a much-needed east-west supergrid to share excess low-carbon electricity to neighbouring provinces.

Meanwhile, Angus provided a mere four bullet points in his climate platform, but one, notably, aims at eliminating Canada’s estimated $3.3 billion in annual subsidies for the oil and gas industry.

The other three priorities are develop a national carbon budget, a carbon budget council and, as mentioned above, a new Crown corporation to spurn sustainable development.

Driving the Electric Car Market

There’s also a fairly consistent support of a transition to electric vehicles among all four candidates.

Ashton stated that her government will phase-out gasoline- and diesel-fueled vehicles by 2040.

That’s exactly in line with recent commitments by the U.K. and France, and well behind Norway’s pledge to phase out by 2025. Her platform also indicated support for low-income households with interest-free loans to buy electric vehicles in the push to 2040.

Singh announced he will introduce a zero-emission vehicle agenda for Canada, including a levy on high-emitting vehicles and a tax rebate for electric vehicle purchases.

Zero-emission regulations were also promised by Caron in order to help facilitate a push for half of all vehicles on roads to be electric by 2041. His platform added that a regulatory regime would be implemented two years after he reaches office, combined with investments into R&D for ensuring that rare earth minerals and lithium are secured for manufacturing the vehicles.

None of the candidates have yet mentioned a zero-emission vehicle mandate as successfully deployed in jurisdictions like California or Quebec.

Broader, More Specific Policies Needed

Once all the ballots have been counted, there will be another two years for the new leader to refine their platform and mobilize support for the next federal election.

Giving an idea of what’s to come, most candidates have a few extra policies worth mentioning.

Singh shouted out the need to accelerate methane regulations, emphasize carbon price rebates for low-income families and protect Canadian pensions, savings and RRSPs by requiring fossil fuel companies to disclose climate risk.

Ashton advocated the need to “green” data storage and invest more in the international Green Climate Fund in the form of grants rather than loans.

Caron brought up the need to address climate justice, suggesting Canada ease migration barriers for those leaving their homes due to climate impacts. In addition, Caron plans to implement a carbon tariff on imports from other countries that have lower carbon prices, diverting revenue to companies that are impacted because of lower prices.

There are certainly broader questions to be answered around the influence of the oil and gas industry, recognizing the rights of indigenous peoples, especially when it comes to the assessment and approval of major projects and Canada’s larger transition to a sustainable, renewable energy economy.

Ballot results will be announced between October 1 and 15.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.