The Canadian government is asking a new advisory group to decide how to get more zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) on the road, but Transport Minister Marc Garneau has already ruled out the kind of mandatory minimum sales targets that are in place in Quebec.
“The job of the new 22-member panel, which includes industry and other stakeholders, is to come up with options by next year for addressing the barriers to zero-emission vehicles (ZEV), including vehicle supply, cost, infrastructure readiness, and public awareness,” iPolitics reports.
But “we just decided that instead of giving ourselves a specific number, what we would do is try to make the conditions more favourable for people to buy zero-emissions vehicles,” Garneau told CP, during an interview at an electric vehicle show.
Ahead of Friday’s announcement, the Globe and Mail reported that “the auto industry and environmental groups are already at odds about whether federal policy should require that a certain percentage of annual new vehicle sales consist of ZEVs. Such a requirement is strongly opposed by the auto sector.” But “some environmental groups are urging governments to adopt aggressive regulations that would require half the vehicles sold in 2025 to be zero-emission, a goal the auto industry rejects as wildly optimistic.”
While Quebec Natural Resources Minister Pierre Arcand called for a national rebate to boost ZEV sales, Garneau wouldn’t commit to that approach. “These are questions that we are going to look at in the course of the next year as this advisory council comes back to us and tells us what are the winning conditions to increase sales of zero-emissions vehicles,” he said.
