Affordability and infrastructure barriers make electric vehicles a tough sell in Canada’s northern and rural communities, where many feel the EV push is deeply out of touch with socio-economic, environmental, and cultural realities on the ground.
These Canadians say EVs cannot be seen as a one-size-fits-all solution to curbing transportation emissions, and that their communities might gain more mobility if policy-makers focused less on cars, found Transportation Shift, a Green Resilience Project (GRP) initiative, after surveying people in the northern provinces and territories, Atlantic Canada, and the Prairies.
[Energy Mix Productions is one of two partner organizations in the Green Resilience Project, along with the Basic Income Canada Network.]
Largely funded by the federal government’s Zero Emission Vehicle Awareness Initiative (ZEVAI), Transportation Shift set out to understand the transportation needs of underserved, rural, and poor communities—and how those needs fit within the wider transition to EVs, which is ramping up across Canada as the federal 2035 zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate looms.
Through community discussions led by local organizers, Transportation Shift asked residents how ZEVs or electric mobility solutions like e-bikes could meet their daily transport needs. The project also sought to uncover common concerns that must be prioritized for an equitable transition away from fossil-fuelled transport.
The initiative’s coordinators shared their findings through a webinar earlier this week, where four community leaders who had organized local conversations over the winter relayed some of the insights they had gained from residents.
GRP Project Manager Janet Patterfung opened the discussion noting that “community members are the experts on the needs of their own communities”—a GRP tenet that the team fulfilled by partnering with local organizations whose mandates lie not in environmental advocacy or transportation policy, but rather in broader community efforts towards equity, justice, housing, and youth outreach.
Affordability, Reliability, Intersectionality
Sharing insights from the conversation he organized in Winnipeg’s inner city, Josh Brandon, a community animator at the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg, put affordability at the top of the list of EV concerns for local participants, the majority of whom identified themselves as low-income earners who do not own cars.
“We found people are already choosing sustainable forms of transportation,” he said, noting they were already cycling or taking the bus. People had concerns like, “if we’re going to be switching to EVs—will we be able to afford them?” Brandon said. “How is that going to affect bus service? Should we be prioritizing investments in people who are already using sustainable transportation?”
“Ambivalence” pretty much describes that community’s attitude to EVs, he added. “Everybody believes that the green transition is really important, but there’s a lot of work that would need to be done to convince people that the emphasis on EVs isn’t just going to make getting around harder or more expensive for them.”
So far, he explained, “most people are relying on inadequate bus service, pothole-filled roads that they’re trying to navigate their bicycles around. Sidewalks aren’t cleared.” So “they’re trying to use sustainable transportation already, and there are just so many barriers in the way of that.”
Brandon added that Manitoba already relies on hydroelectric projects that were built without consultation with local First Peoples, leading to fears that policy-makers could “just replicate past colonialist practices” in the transition to electrified transport.
Affordability was likewise a front-and-centre concern for both the “townies” and the rural people of Newfoundland, said Dan Meades, a long-time anti-poverty advocate who organized two Transportation Shift conversations: one mostly in-person event that drew some 30 people from St. John’s and a few more from rural Newfoundland, and another virtual event that brought together 21 participants in Labrador.
There were “stark differences between the two conversations,” Meades recalled. For Newfoundlanders unable to afford any car at all, a “reliable and affordable public transit system” is what people are longing for, with EVs nowhere in the picture.
And there is a “tension” around the issue of EV subsidies, he added, with participants effectively saying, “If you can afford an EV, maybe you don’t need the subsidy. And if you can’t afford an EV, maybe that’s because you actually need a subsidy for cost-of-living issues.”
While some of the more well-off St. John’s residents expressed a “real interest” in the EV transition, they described the cost as “prohibitive,” particularly at this socio-economic moment. “‘We’re saying, hey, my variable-rate mortgage just got more expensive. I’m really not thinking about a new vehicle right now’,” Meades said, paraphrasing a common thread of argument.
Conversation ‘Doesn’t Feel Relevant’
In Labrador, the EV transition isn’t on anyone’s radar: it’s seen as a part of “conversations that don’t feel relevant” to people’s lives, Meades said. A “striking” though not consistent theme was that for the “very rural” people of Labrador who “live very close to the land and very in tune with the Earth and their communities,” climate change is perceived as real and caused by human activity, but the fault of no one local, given the area’s miniscule per capita carbon footprint.
Other participants pointed to the “huge carbon footprint” generated because “every time any of us need any medical care, we get on a plane or are flown to a hospital,” Meades added.
Labrador’s sense of the irrelevance of the EV transition to local life was shared by the small group of Iqaluit residents who weighed in. “The essence of the conversation” was that EVs “make no sense” in a region that still depends virtually 100% on imported diesel, local conversation organizer Victoria Perron, administrator at Amautiit Nunavut Inuit Women’s Association, told the webinar audience.
There were other concerns too: the high cost of EVs, the absence of infrastructure, the lack of know-how to fix EVs, battery range, and finally, just how well that battery will hold a charge at -50°C—a life-and-death issue for hunters out on the land.
The need to protect the knowledge and value that Elders possess—particularly related to hunting and trapping—emerged as another key concern in Nunavut.
In the online chat during the webinar, several EV specialists chimed in with solutions to some of the cost and technical issues the panelists were raising. But Perron and other panelists stressed the need to listen and open up space for community conversations to come up with solutions that work in different settings and build trust.
“There were real concerns, which may or may not be true, that [due to battery range limits] the EV transition is just another policy that would affect people negatively, and limit their ability to carry out hunting, fishing, trapping, and things like that,” Perron said, adding that food security concerns pile atop this worry.
Some participants at the Iqaluit session seemed to interpret the push for EVs as “possibly another colonialist practice”—something policy-makers should “keep in mind,” Perron said.
Young Canadians Stress Intersectionality
Speaking on behalf of at-risk youth in Yellowknife, local organizer Vincent Ret, recreation coordinator at Homebase Youth Centre, said that while uptake of EVs in the city had been very limited, conversations to build awareness—especially around affordable forms of micro-mobility—had value and should be continued.
Affordability and accessibility were also on the minds of the 18 to 30-year-olds who participated in the two conversations organized by Erika de Torres, impact and development director at Montreal-based Apathy is Boring. “Thinking about how democracy is impacted by transportation or how transportation is impacted by democracy” was a key theme for these conversations, de Torres said.
Awareness of intersectionality was also prominent in the youth conversations. One Montreal youth participant who identified as an Afro-Indigenous person whose home reserve is Six Nations, a six-hour drive away in Ontario, expressed concerns about charging enroute.
“There’s no way this country is going to put charging stations on reserves,” they said.
“Generally speaking, our participants were critical of EVs as a one-size-fits-all solution to reducing emissions, and they have doubts that infrastructure would sufficiently be in place for the 2035 goals to be met, especially in the more rural areas and for those who live in shared housing like apartment buildings,” de Torres reported.
But many of the young people who participated in the conversations organized by de Torres wanted to see increased rebates for e-bikes, along with more pedestrian and cycling infrastructure.
Focus on People, Not Cars
The Transportation Shift talks revealed much common ground, but also great divides in the way Canadians view the EV transition. The sessions spotlighted the need for conversations that are less about cars, of any kind, and more about how people actually live.
“My big takeaway is that folks felt like the transition was necessary but not their obligation,” said Meades. “‘Here I am just trying to live my life, and there’s this really big problem happening in the world and somebody should fix it,’” he said channelling the mix of feelings the discussion sessions seemed to provoke in Newfoundland and Labrador. “‘But also, I gotta get to work, and I can’t afford a new car to do that just because it would be better for the environment—even though it would be better, and I would like to have a new car that would be better, but I gotta go now’.”
He added that, in the two communities where he brought participants together, “people didn’t feel grateful to be participating in the conversation. Instead, they felt like, ‘What do you mean, this is my job? Why isn’t the government fixing this problem? It cannot be up to me to spend more of the little money I have to fix a problem that I didn’t cause.’”
For the youth with Apathy is Boring, the bottom line was “start thinking beyond cars, regardless of what powers them,” and make sure transportation is accessible and affordable. De Torres stressed the need to “reconfigure our infrastructure, our cities, our streets, to make it safer for pedestrians, cyclists,” adding that “these changes themselves are likely to affect how EVs can operate and are received.”
In Winnipeg, the topic needs more engagement, Brandon said. “A lot of times it’s just in the bigger cities that they’re thinking of these issues,” he added. “So it’s really good that we’re having this conversation, but more needs to be done.”
In Nunavut, transportation is very low on the list of concerns. “Most people agreed that their current transportation needs are actually being met,” Perron said. So “the take home would be that residents in Nunavut and in the North in general need to be convinced that EVs are better, more reliable, and useful.”
She added that “any policies will need to take into account how the system has normally interacted with Inuit and Indigenous people in general, and just make sure that whatever policies come into place, they are fair for those individuals experiencing them on the ground.”
