The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - How Realistic Is Ontario's Push Toward Electric Vehicles?

Episode Date: May 5, 2026

How realistic is Ontario's push toward electric vehicles, and is the province prepared for what comes next? As places like Norway show what large scale EV adoption can look like, we examine how easy it actually is to buy and drive an electric vehicle in Ontario, whether governments are doing enough to support the transition, and how the market could shift as more Chinese made vehicles arrive. Plug'n Drive president and CEO Cara Clairman and clean mobility expert Lindsay Wiginton of Dunsky Energy and Climate Advisors weigh in. We then turn to a growing political flashpoint, Premier Doug Ford's claim that Chinese EVs are "spy vehicles." What are the real cybersecurity risks drivers should and should not be worried about? David Shipley, CEO and co founder of Beauceron Security, helps separate legitimate threats from fear driven rhetoric.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Nam Kiwanuka, host and producer of mistreated, a podcast on women's health. There just hasn't been a lot of money put into researching women's health issues. If women are in pain, it's hysteria, it's an emotional issue. And this is what you see consistently. Women's health is not taken seriously. How did we get here? Find us wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to check out the video version of the show on the TVO Today YouTube channel. Hope to see you then. surging. In the first quarter of 26, more than half a million new electric cars were registered in Europe. That's up 33% from last year. And leading the pack is Norway. More than 2,000 electric

vehicles were sold there in January, along with just seven gas-powered cars. That's correct, seven. I can count that on two hands. So what about Ontario? Are we ready for an electric future? And do we have the infrastructure to support it? Someone who's not thrilled about more Chinese EVs coming into the province, Premier Doug Ford. I'm concerned about cybersecurity and the threat of China. Is he right to be concerned? We look at the security threats you could face when you get behind the wheel. Welcome to the rundown.

Norway calls itself the electric vehicle capital of the world, and it didn't get there by accident. It offers incentives and has installed more than. 9,000 fast charger across the country. Should this province be doing more? We find out how easy it is to buy and drive an EV in Ontario and what will happen when more Chinese cars hit the market. Kara Claremont is president and CEO of the nonprofit plug and drive. Lindsay Wigington is the co-lead of clean mobility practice at Dunsky Energy and Climate Advisors. Great to have you both in our studio. How are you guys doing? And great. Thank you. Glad to be here. All right. To kick off our conversation, I want to pull up a chart showing the sales roller coaster that zero emission vehicles have taken in Canada recently. So you can see that sales in some months of 2024 were almost 20% of new cars, but they fell off late in the year after rebates disappeared and amid a weaker economy. But by the end of 2025, a little hope there, EVs accounted for roughly 12.5% of new vehicle sales across Canada.

All right. So, if EV sales continue to rebound in Canada, which cars will have the biggest demand? Is it the ones that are being made in China, or are they the ones being made in the West? Karen. Well, I think it'll be the ones made in the West. People have more familiarity. There's still some fear around the Chinese EVs, although they will sell, and once people become more familiar. So I think in future years, we'll see more uptake, but probably in the first year or so, a little less. And when we're talking about cars in the West, what type of brands are we thinking? I mean, all the brands are here. I mean, right now, the most popular brands tend to be GM vehicles,

Hyundai, Kia, Toyota's coming up there. Yeah, we're seeing all the brands. All right, Lindsay, how about you? Now, we should mention that the Chinese EVs don't qualify for the federal rebates. That may have something to do with that as well. But in terms of a price point, there are estimates that they come quite lower. So where do we, where do we think we're going? Are we going Chinese EVs or are we going vehicles made in the West? Maybe I'll answer leaning on some of the numbers. So in 2024, when we were at that 15% level of sales across the country, there were about 200,000 EVs sold in that year.

And about a quarter of those was the 49,000 EVs from China that we were receiving then before those tariffs were applied. So my guess would be that that proportion would look about the same in the coming years. All right. I'm curious about conversations that I'm having with some of my friends and family, about which direction does one go. EVs are usually more expensive than regular vehicles, but that will start to change as we see.

Kara, what kinds of questions do potential buyers ask when trying to figure out not just the initial cost, but the lifeline cost of... Well, that's exactly what I was going to say when you say they cost more. Yes, the sticker price is more, but the total cost of ownership is much, much less. And so a lot of the questions we answer

is to try to help show people that they'll actually save money driving these cars with or without a rebate. The rebates definitely help. But to be honest, the business case is there. Because over time, you're going to save, and especially with the high gas prices right now, I mean, if you're paying $2 a liter, I'm paying about $27. And that's a huge difference. Give me an example of a vehicle when we're looking at an EV.

Gas is one thing, not having to pay for that, but about maintenance. and stuff like that for an electric vehicle. Well, maintenance on average is less because an EV has very few moving parts. A gas car has somewhere in the order of 1,800 to 2,000 moving parts. An EV has many orders of magnitude less, like 20 to 30 moving parts. And so you can just imagine fewer moving parts means less things to break and a lot of systems just not there. and so your maintenance tends to be much, much lower.

And so the overall total cost of ownership is much lower in EV. And in fact, the difference you're going to pay, which is right now around $5,000 if you take into account the rebate, you'll make that back in about two years of driving. Oh, wow. Okay. Lindsay, I'm hoping you can connect the dots between a province, a province, because some don't have it, a zero-mission mandate versus how excited.

accessible EVs are to potential buyers? Sure, yeah. So the policy that's called a zero-emission vehicle mandate is basically a regulation that either the federal government or a provincial government can pass that says automakers need to sell a certain proportion of electric vehicles in each year. And they set a target, and typically that target increases over time. And so up until sort of mid-last year, we did have one of those in place federally. That was paused and recently replaced with a slightly different kind of regulation. the provinces of BC and Quebec have had those ZEV mandates in place for several years now. And so because those automakers are required to sell a certain portion of EVs or else they'll

pay a penalty, that's where the supply goes. And so consumers in BC and Quebec have had a lot more choice over the last five, six years. And it's not that you have to buy a gas car in those places, but you have a lot more choice if you're going to look at fully plug-in or plug-in hybrid options. Ontario's been kind of middle of the pack in terms of supply. you know, we have the advantage of being a big market with a decent amount of purchasing power. So maybe we haven't seen the shortages that some Atlantic provinces have had.

But certainly not having that rebate locally has meant less choice for consumers overall. I imagine waiting longer as well. Definitely. What does that mean? Are we waiting? Is it weeks, months, years? It really fluctuates. My firm has been involved in doing some surveys where we, you know, we call dealerships and we say,

I want to buy this kind of car, how long do I have to wait? And we see those numbers kind of jumping up and down. I mean, I hear stories about people waiting. on the order of something more, like a year or more, you probably hear those stories. Especially during COVID. I mean, the waiting list was for any car was really long. I find it's really brand variable.

And so a lot of times when people want to choose an EV, they have to be a little bit flexible because, and so they tend to look at a few different brands. They're not as brand loyal as people typically are with gas cars. I imagine not just brands as well, but even colors and things like small little details like that. Except what you can get. Okay, noted. Let's talk about infrastructure.

Here in Ontario, what does the charging network look like, whether it's on the road or in your homes? All right. So the important thing to remember is if you live in a single family home or townhouse, really simple to get a charter at home. And that's the way most people prefer to do it. And of course, early adopters, they tended to have more resources. So they tended to be folks who lived in single family homes. and that was like 80% of EV buyers were homeowners,

so they just got a plug at home. And so the public infrastructure was less important. Now that we're moving more into the mainstream, there's more and more people who will be relying on the public charging who might live somewhere where they can't get a charger, a condo or an apartment. I would say, as like a very early adopter, that the infrastructure is actually quite good.

I know that, you know, the news is that it's not that good. For those of us who've been driving a long time, It's so much better than it used to be. Is that because you know where to go now? Yes, and also there's great apps available to see where they are. And so if you live in urban, suburban Canada, the infrastructure is actually quite good. Like more than 40,000 charges across the country. A lot of those are fast chargers.

Where it gets dicey is if you're driving remote. Got it. And, of course, a lot of us are never doing that. But for the folks that are, that's a challenge. And then, of course, the multi-unit challenge. All right. Lindsay? Well, maybe I'll jump on that segue with the multi-unit challenge. So I think one of the biggest gaps, like Ontario has a public funding program for public charging in general.

It's called Charge On. There was a second tranche of funding released recently. So that's helping to build out some of that, you know, on-to-go charging infrastructure. But in a place like Toronto, more than half of people live in a multifamily building. So we definitely need to think about how those folks will have options for charging at home. For existing buildings, you can retrofit, and that will often take some form of public support to be able to do that. But for new buildings, it's actually quite straightforward to put in place a regulation that says, just add the wiring. In the same way that we add wiring for a stove and nowadays for dryers and washers, nobody questions that.

But we are still in many municipalities in Ontario building new condos that don't have wiring to the parking spots. It can be really cost-effective to do, like something like $1,500 a parking spot. and that person then will have the option to easily install a charger and save, you know, 1,600, 2,000 a month going forward when they do switch to an EV. And we call that roughing in. You know, they just need to rough it in. And it's cheapest, of course, to do it when the building's being built. Okay. And a retrofit can be very expensive because then you're drilling through cement and floors and walls.

It's not the chargers that are expensive. It's the civil work that really gets expensive. All right. Lindsay, how would you rate Ontario's support for zero-mission vehicles compared to other province? Touch-on a little bit. We can obviously look at Quebec and BC, but where do we stand here? I'd put us squarely in the middle of the pack. And that's where, you know, we published a scorecard a few years ago.

That's sort of where Ontario landed. So some of the strengths working in our favor are we have some options around electricity rates that are really helpful for both charging operators and EV users and fleets. We do have the investment in public charging that I mentioned. some things we don't have. So we don't have an additional provincial rebate like those other two provinces have. And we, yeah, do not yet have across the board rules

that would require those roughings that Kara speaking about. And in fact, some municipalities have gone so far as to adopt that into their own bylaws. And there's some questions right now about whether the provincial government is going to let that stand in the ways that they're hoping

to sort of manage the development system. So that's a big concern because if people can't charge they're not going to purchase an EV. At West, they've had the requirement to rough in for 10 years at least. And so all multi-unit buildings that have been built in the last 10 years, they're all EV ready, rough-in ready. And, I mean, to me, if you're going to build a building that's going to be around,

hopefully, for 50 years or more, it just seems nonsensical not to rough in for what we know is coming. Okay. Lindsay, you mentioned fleet. So I am curious because we are focusing right now on consumer sales, but what can you tell us about fleet sales of electric vehicles? Our municipalities and businesses buying them up? They are. And, you know, we've been

speaking about what's called light duty vehicles most of this time, so that's like cars, SUVs, and light trucks. So there are fleets that use those kinds of light duty vehicles, and there are also fleets that use heavy duty vehicles like trucks and specialty things like bucket trucks. Across the board, we see a lot of adoption

of EVs. So my firm supports a number of municipalities, utility fleets, and also corporate fleets who have made that choice. And as CARRA highlighted, we're talking fuel costs at orders of magnitude smaller and maintenance costs about half of what a gas fleet costs. And so the challenge there is just making sure that there is a model on the market that matches the duty cycle and the use case of those commercial vehicles. And that's something that we help fleets do that matching exercise and anticipate when those other models are going to be available. All right. I want to talk about something that amongst my friends, we didn't talk about, but once I started to do that.

doing research, I was like, right, we're talking about cars. There's a whole other market of vehicles, not just brand new coming out of dealerships. There's a used market. How big is this market of used EVs? It's huge. The used market is a very good market. And I think the problem that we have is we talked about this, that because EVs are new, people don't think of them as being available.

But we have 15 years now under our belts of EVs being. made in a sort of commercial production. And so many, many make some models available at all price points. And in fact, I think the biggest concern that we hear, as you know, a group that helps people choose an EV, is battery life. Correct. Because they think, oh, if it's used, I don't know the state of the battery. But there's a test that you can do on the battery, and that could give you a lot of

comfort. Plus most of those vehicles, the battery has a warranty of eight years or more. And so if you're really concerned, you can buy it so that the warranty is still in place. And so for a few years of ownership, you know, your battery's under warranty just to give you that confidence that you can choose a used EV. Okay. Lindsay. Yeah. I mean, just over the last three years in Canada, there's been about 600,000 new EVs sold. So all of those become used EVs at some point. And now with the return of the federal rebate, so. for a new EV, you can get up to $5,000. There's going to be more uptake, and those are going to move into the used market as well.

My family actually just earlier this year made a purchase on the used market, and we had a lot of options, and we were able to get something that was much more affordable than buying new. I think that's where organizations like CARAs are super important. You know, I had friends I could text who know stuff about EVs to make sure I was making a good decision, but not everyone has that, and there are things that are a little bit scary, and that, you know, dealerships are not always equipped to answer, and so that's where the kind of education side comes in as well. Well, thanks. Yeah, I mean, we're there just to answer your questions, to help you with test drives, to help get you over the hump, you know, if you're concerned. And it's free, and, you know,

we're non-biased in terms of brand. We support all the brands, and we're not trying to sell you anything, so it's a great way to learn. Well, we'll be in touch then, that's what I'm going to say. Very exciting time for EVs in this province. Lindsay, Cara, I want to thank you so much for all of your insight on this. Great. Thanks for having us. Premier Doug Ford has called Chinese electric vehicles spy vehicles. You know, when you get on your cell phone, it's the Chinese that are going to be listening to your, and I'm not making this stuff up.

They're going to be listening to your telephone conversation. So what should and shouldn't you be worried about when you're in the driver's seat? David Shipley is. the CEO and co-founder of Boceran Security, and he joins us from Frederton, New Brunswick. Hello, David. How are you today? I'm well, thank you. All right. Well, let's talk about Chinese EVs. Do they present more of a security threat than EVs that are being built here in the West, or even, let's say, internet-connected vehicles? Our focus on this discussion with Chinese EVs really centers around the potential hostility of the Chinese

state towards us. But the mistake that legislators and public policymakers are making here is assuming that that hostility could only manifest itself to attacks via Chinese vehicles, which is a huge mistake. And it's about all of these internet connected vehicles, not just Chinese EVs, but cars with traditional gas or diesel engines that also have 24-7 internet connections and are now more rolling computers than they are cars. Well, let's talk about it. Obviously, you know, Chinese EVs, there are some legitimate concerns, as you mentioned, when we talk about the Chinese government. But what is the bigger picture when it comes to these internet-connected vehicles compared to whether or not they're electric or not or whether or not they're built in China or not? So we have known for almost 11 years that there are massive safety as well as privacy issues with cars made by a variety of manufacturers. In 2015, we saw Wired Magazine show a video of hackers over the internet, taking control of a Jeep Cherokee while the reporter drove the vehicle.

And they were able to mess with the vehicles, Entertainment Center, turn the wipers on, blast the AC. And they turned the transmission into a park mode while driving on the highway. And if you watch this video, you can hear Andy Greenberg's panic start in his voice. In a parking lot, they demonstrated how they could remotely disable the brakes and take control of the steering. That was a decade ago. Last year, researchers showed a 2020 Nissan Leaf could be hacked via a Bluetooth connection, establishing the ability to remote back in again over the internet via a cellular modem,

and again could take physical control of the vehicle. And it took Nissan 18 months to fix it. it. That Jeep Cherokee bug, by the way, affected more than just cheap Cherokees. It affected a whole range of Stalantis vehicles. There were about a million cars that had to get a recall to prevent being hacked over the internet. I don't know many people in my life right now who are driving a 1996 Honda Civic, you know, with crank windows. Everyone seems to be connected. Can we get a better sense of how many vehicles are actually connected to the internet? According to my research, about 47% of all cars on Canadian roads today are connected to the internet 24-7.

And you can tell if your car has an app that enables you to remote start, unlock the doors, get vehicle diagnostics, that car is connected to the internet. I had a 2015 Chevrolet Sonic, and it had this 4G cellular connectivity baked into it. And GM was gathering tons of data. So this isn't just about Tesla's. Cars that almost go back a decade have been doing this. 90% of new cars sold in Canada today have this 24-7 internet connection. And there are a variety of business reasons, legitimate, and some not so legitimate from an end customer perspective,

why they're pushing internet connectivity down our throats. Question. Is that something you can turn off on the consumer? If I was concerned, and at the end of the day, we don't want to be alarmist here, but is that something that if I am concerned about, can I turn it off? No. There is no easy way for people to turn off. And that's the fundamental first point I've made to legislators, is that it is not technologically complex to build in the capacity via hardware, not via software, because you can't trust software. Software can lie to you and say, no, no, it's turned off and it's not. So either be a physical switch or a fuse dedicated in the car's fuse box that an owner could easily identify to pull the plug. And there are lots of legitimate reasons why you'd want to do that. First, let's imagine there's a widespread vulnerability. Let's take an example of Canada's own success story, QNX, which is made by Blackberry,

and is the operating system for more than 230 million cars. If it has a critical vulnerability and it's going to take some time to safely patch it and get that recall done, we may want to be in a position where we could put out public news and say, if you own one of the following model cars, here's what you do so you do, you can still drive your car safely. And we don't have that capability. In fact, thanks to U.S. legislation mandating remote kill switches over the internet into car manufacturers, we're actually heading in the exact opposite policy direction where people

don't have the control to do this. And the legislators in tents here are admirable from certain public policy standpoints. So if people haven't paid fines or they're remiss in, say, child support payments, maybe they They can have their car disabled as some kind of a public policy lever, which sounds cool until GM gets hacked by China and seven million cars don't start that day. And if we're thinking this sounds science fictiony. It does. A car security manufacturer in Russia called Delta, which made a security system that could

remotely disable the engine, was hacked by an unknown group. We can probably draw conclusions as to who did it. And cars were not starting, and cars that were driving, drivers reported the engine stopping. So it's already happened. From what I gather, you are less worried about espionage and more worried about bad actors. And that can come in a variety of ways. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? Well, so when it comes to physical safety, this is where people can be killed.

You know, when we saw that Julia Roberts, Marchandale, a fantastic dystopian cyber attack movie, what we leave behind, and all these Teslas slamming into each other, driving themselves, blocking all the exits on an off ramp, I would very much like to leave that in the realm of dramatic science fiction. We are pushing the pedal down to make it real, and that seems like a stupid, dumb idea. And not only that, police forces across this country do not have the capability to do forensic analysis. And even nationally, we don't have the capacity in a lab to do forensic analysis. So we are going to have people killed by intimate partners or others by injecting software bugs into their cars. It's possible. It's plausible.

There's motive. And we wouldn't have the ability to even know what's happening. So if we can reasonably foresee these disasters, why are we doing it? And, you know, if you're listening to this and saying, well, why wouldn't the car manufacturers care about this? Because they care more about other things. And I'll talk about those in a minute. And those touch more on the privacy and consumer rights stuff.

But car manufacturers over their entire modern history have consistently shown us, they will prioritize profits over safety. Remember, these are the folks that brought us the side-mounted gas tank on pickup trucks, that decided that making certain changes to engineering designs for low incremental cost weren't worth it to them, even though they could reasonably anticipate up to a thousand deaths per year. So this industry has shown us that they can't self-regulate in the past. They have that zebra has not changed its stripes. So we do need reasonable government regulation. And it's because the business drivers behind this data are so powerful.

I was talking about power. I do have to ask, you know, what role does? this artificial intelligence play into this. When we're talking about sort of, you give that example of the cheap Jericho, you know, that was quite a while ago. How quickly can people do some of the things that you're saying? So the two researchers behind the Jeep Cherokee hack,

Chris Valasek and I apologize, I can't remember the other gentleman's name, these were experienced, well-educated, professional hackers, ethical hackers who, Charlie Miller, sorry, it was Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek knew exactly what they were doing. Today, we're hearing stories and we're seeing examples of AI models that have distilled that expertise and could make it available to someone who is far less experienced. And that's where the danger blossoms from just being nation states with their elite hacking teams, like China's amazing hacking teams through their Ministry of State Security, to an embittered

17-year-old who's been radicalized by groups of misanthropes. And that's the people that just hate other humans through groups like 764 online and just want to see if they can kill some innocent people. And that's my first point. But legislators, honestly, Jan, they just keep going back to the privacy and the espionage. And honestly, spying's going to happen. It's the great game. And you can be smart about it and say, okay, maybe internet connected vehicles shouldn't be

in sensitive military or. government sites. China did it. Banned Tesla's years ago for good reason. But spying isn't our biggest concern. It's the potential abuse and manipulation of data by corporations and governments in ways that fundamentally harm Canadian rights. With that, does Canada have the security infrastructure and professional personnel to deal with some of what you have mentioned today? Not even remotely close. You know, I listened to a a legislator. I've testified twice in the last two months to parliamentary committees about this issue of internet-connected car safety. And my frustration could not be larger. To hear a politician

talk about our laughedly, pathetically outdated federal privacy laws like it somehow would deter corporations from abusing this data, nope, or that it would somehow deter China's nation-state hackers. Are you kidding me? We have a law that has not been fundamentally updated in 20 plus years that got the most minor of updates in 2015 under the Harper government and that fundamentally positions Canadians and Ontarians today with less rights than Europeans and Californians. How is that? How do we tolerate that? And it's because our politicians aren't motivated by these issues.

But the abuses are huge. And listen, when Texas is leading the human rights, privacy rights charge, and we're lagging behind Texas, we should really shake our heads. And it was Texas's attorney general that caught several automakers illegally taking people's driving data, selling it without their consent to their insurance companies. And then they noticed their insurance rates got jacked. I mean, that's one of the risk factors we talk about this. The other risk factors with these internet connected cars, intimate partner violence. I can tell you, I've had phone calls where I have sadly had to develop a checklist of people fleeing intimate partner violence where the person they're fleeing is technologically sophisticated. And I remember walking someone through this and they had a Subaru.

This was five years ago. And I had to ask them, do you know if your car has this internet connected feature? And they didn't even realize it. And it did. and so their physical location was then compromised. So they didn't just have to really get rid of their computer and their smartphone. They had to ditch their car. David, we are going to leave it there.

This was really, really insightful. It makes me want to get a 1998 Honda Civic or something like that. But some really good information there. I really appreciate your time. You're very welcome. I'm Jan. Thanks for watching The Rundown. Would you ever switch to an EV?

I want to know. Email us at rundown at tvO. or leave us a comment. Until then, I will see you tomorrow. If you're enjoying this series, please consider supporting TVO with a donation to make more insightful and thought-provoking podcast possible. TVO is a registered charity,

and you will receive a tax receipt for your gift. Visit TVO.org slash give TVO to make your donation today.