Conrad Black: Coercing Customers to Buy EVs Goes Against the Realities of the Market

Commentary As the colossal fear-mongering operation that has accompanied the obsessive preoccupation with climate change is abandoned by former adherents—an operation that strains credulity with the uneventful passage of time—Canada’s commitment to electric vehicles appears more and more absurd. But we seem at least to have spared ourselves the billions committed in the United States to set up new charging stations for road vehicles, which has so far resulted in only a handful being opened. Meanwhile, many automakers are scaling back their electric vehicle manufacturing plans. Canada’s initial plan was to force and incentivize the entire country into electrically fuelled vehicles with inadequate thought to who would provide the nickel for the batteries, how the batteries would be rendered safe in the event of fires or flooding, how the entire country would be adequately served by the huge numbers of charging stations that would be required, who would be manufacturing these vehicles, and what would happen to the many thousands of auto workers whom it was proposed simply to disemploy as a result of this headlong lunge into a substantially untested form of mass transport....