Zero-Emission Vehicles About 10% of All New Registrations: Stats Canada

A charging port is seen on a Mercedes Benz EQC 400 4Matic EV at the Canadian International AutoShow in Toronto in a file photo. (Mark Blinch/Reuters)

About 9.6 percent of all new vehicle registrations in the last quarter of 2022 were zero-emission vehicles, according to data released by Statistics Canada on April 24.

That’s about 33,000 new zero-emission registrations compared to about 24,000 in the same quarter of 2021.

Canada is moving to make all new passenger vehicle sales zero-emission by 2035, with a 20 percent requirement starting in 2026, according to draft regulations published by the federal government in December.

Parliamentary Secretary Julie Dabrusin, said when she announced the proposed regulations that penalties would be “phased in” for automakers if they don’t meet the sales mandates. They are already working under emissions mandates, she said, so “it would be the same system that they have already been working under, but now it’s just going to be applied to sales targets.”

In Quebec and British Columbia, provincial mandates are already in place. In Quebec, about 11,000 zero-emission vehicles were registered in the fourth quarter of 2022. In B.C., about 7,500, and in Ontario, about 12,000.

Alberta did not provide Statistics Canada with vehicle data “due to contractual limitations of the existing data sharing agreement.” The other provinces and territories saw a couple of hundred registrations at most, and usually only dozens.

In the fourth quarter of 2019, about 3 percent of vehicle registrations were zero-emission, compared to the 9.6 percent of 2022.

A federal regulatory impact analysis on the roll-out of current proposed mandates suggest the cost may be about $99 billion by 2050. That includes increased electricity costs, the incremental costs of buying zero-emission vehicles and home chargers, subsidies toward vehicle and battery manufacturers, and more.

The analysis says the emission reductions are estimated to be 430 megatons, “valued at $19.2 billion in avoided global damages.”