(Ottawa) New audit from the environment commissioner finds the federal electric vehicle charging station program is too concentrated in a small number of provinces and has no data showing where its largest are gaps.
This audit report is one of 10 documents tabled Tuesday in the House of Commons by Jerry DeMarco, Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development. The good news, according to him, is that Natural Resources Canada “is on track to achieve its goal of installing 33,500 charging points by 2026.”
As of last July, the Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program had approved and funded 33,887 charging points across the country. About 13% of them were already operational and the rest were expected to be operational by March 2026, DeMarco said.
On the other hand, nearly nine out of ten funded ports were in Ontario, Quebec or British Columbia.
According to the audit, no targets were set to identify areas of greatest need, or to ensure that low-income communities and rural and remote areas were served by the charging station program.
It is essential that Canadians know that charging stations are available so that they can confidently transition to electric vehicles, argued Mr. DeMarco.
Since Canada now requires all new passenger vehicles sold to be electric by 2035, all Canadians will be affected by charging infrastructure, or the lack of it, the commissioner noted.
Mr. DeMarco also points out that the program does not monitor the proper functioning of charging stations after they are installed.
In another audit report, the commissioner also indicates that the federal government has set ambitious objectives to convert its own vehicle fleets to electric, but that the ministries with the most vehicles are not doing this. transition quite quickly.
Mr. DeMarco recalls that Ottawa wants eight out of ten vehicles in its fleet to be electric by 2030. However, as of March 2022, only 586 of the more than 17,000 vehicles had been replaced by electric models.
The audit indicates that at the rate Canada is transitioning its fleet to electric vehicles, only 13%, not 80%, will be electric by 2030.
Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson indicated Tuesday that he agreed with all of Commissioner DeMarco’s recommendations.
“A number of improvements have been made or are underway to perfect the program,” he said, particularly regarding the reliability of charging stations and “underserved” regions.