This roundtable was conducted by the Green Resilience Project, a continuing series of community listening sessions on the links between income security, local resilience, and climate solutions, co-convened by Energy Mix Productions and the Basic Income Canada Network. Panelists reported on a series of a dozen dialogues on electric vehicles and local mobility options, funded primarily by Natural Resources Canada.
While electric vehicles are an obvious choice in many parts of Canada, they’re often a very bad fit in more rural, northern, and isolated parts of the country and for households and communities that can’t afford any car, much less a new one, according to participants in a series of community listening sessions hosted by the Transportation Shift initiative.
The conversations in a dozen different communities, organized by the Green Resilience Project, highlighted some key challenges the country must address to achieve its goal of becoming a global leader in zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs).
[Energy Mix Productions is one of two partner organizations in the Green Resilience Project, along with the Basic Income Canada Network.]
While some session participants said they would embrace electric vehicles if they had the means to own one, the thought of using an EV drew apprehension in Nunavut, where participants saw freezing temperatures as a deterrent and transport is anyhow low on the priority list. Participants in more southern urban centres had mixed feelings about EVs as a climate solution amid larger equity and justice issues, while others argued that rather than solving problems, car-centric cities tend to breed “transportation poverty.”
Following a virtual roundtable in mid-March, The Energy Mix talked to community members in Iqaluit, Sackville, New Brunswick, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, and St. John’s, Newfoundland to get a wider picture of their transportation needs—and how or whether they could ever see EVs in the picture.
Iqaluit, Nunavut: Transportation Is Barely on the Radar
In Iqaluit, “participants were united in the perspective that Nunavut is not ready for battery-powered vehicles,” concludes the Amautiit Nunavut Inuit Women’s Association (Amautiit), in a report detailing a community conversation in February. All 25 of the territory’s communities are almost entirely powered by carbon-intensive diesel, so the region would first need a clean energy source to bear any sort of EV charging load.
“Another big concern was the care of batteries in cold weather and the effects on batteries when all cars need to warm up in the winter, and do not have very far to travel to recharge the battery,” Amautiit writes.
EVs are also “prohibitively expensive” for almost everyone who lives in Nunavut, the report adds.
But above all, Nunavut is “not ready” for EVs because it has several urgent problems that must be fixed before transportation, which isn’t even perceived as broken, receives attention.
The territory lacks in energy, food, water, housing, and income security, and finding solutions to these pressing problems must take priority, Amautiit President Madeleine Redfern, a former mayor of Iqaluit, told The Energy Mix in an interview.
Unlike many communities in southern parts of Canada, transportation doesn’t register as a problem to be solved for most residents in Nunavut, participants said. Transportation in Iqaluit includes walking, snowmobiling, ATVs, cars, and taxis, which together “meet the needs of the community acceptably,” says the report. The sense was that the transportation scene in Nunavut is pretty much as good as it gets, given the climate and the terrain.
Participants also pointed out that going all-in on EVs would mean using more of the dirty fuel, a concern that Redfern echoed to The Mix, saying that EVs are “extremely premature” in Nunavut considering it is more or less 100% dependent on diesel for its electricity. (Rebates on EV purchases made available last year by the Northwest Territories government require that applicants “live in a community ordinarily powered by hydro.”)
Some Iqaluit residents expressed fears about battery waste, or having a battery die completely and being unable to replace it until the spring, while others foresaw EVs disrupting traditional hunting and trapping activity, with impacts on food security.
Some participants expressed middling interest in the idea of electric snowmobiles for use in town. Hunting or trapping out on the land, however, will continue to require what locals see as the reliable workhorse of a combustion engine.
The absence of capacity and infrastructure to ensure that EVs keep humming along is another stumbling block. “We don’t have specialized mechanics,” said Redfern. “We don’t have stores where you can get vehicle parts—you have to order them.”
So “most mechanical work is done by local people who have become very good at fixing things through long practice.”
Redfern dismissed electric snowmobiles as an option for the North, expressing the commonly-held concern that EV batteries aren’t up to the kind of cold experienced during Nunavut winters.
She made a sharp distinction between southern modes of EV travel (on established highways) and the highly variable journeys made by hunters across the trackless and unforgiving Arctic tundra, concluding that EV travel in a Northern winter could be “extreme risky”. And even if a user could get a snowmobile battery to start at -50°C, that would only answer the first of many questions: Is the idea really to have charging stations every 50 kilometres out on the land? What if a hunter misses the station? What if the charging station itself freezes over?
That’s a “hyper-vulnerable” situation that the people of Nunavut aren’t going to sign up for, Redfern said.
Especially when Nunavut’s ongoing struggles with energy, water, food, housing, and income security put transportation low on the list of community concerns.
With 10 of Nunavut’s 25 communities dependent on diesel generators that are “at or past their operating life,” she added, securing a clean, sustainable source of electricity for businesses, homes, and heating must be a priority for the territory, coming in “far, far ahead” of any electrification of transport.
“When we solve that, then we can begin to have conversations about electrified vehicles,” she said. Until then, people in Nunavut are sticking with the devil they know.
“I honestly can’t think of a single person in Nunavut who would actually proceed with purchasing an EV,” Redfern said. “We don’t have the charging stations and we don’t have the spare electricity.”
So “even if the government could come up with some kind of equitable rebate program, no one is going to take it, because an EV is just not a feasible option.”
Sackville, New Brunswick: EVs Won’t Solve Transportation
Participants in Sackville, New Brunswick, put transportation high on their list of concerns, linking their inability to get around reliably and affordably to a spectrum of economic and social woes.
“Overall, there was consensus that the conversation about EVs was premature and would only be replacing one vehicle for another within an inadequate transportation system that itself requires revamping,” says the report produced by the Sackville-based Aster Group, which organized the Sackville meetings.
The session also picked up a sense that communities have been abandoned by their leaders to muddle through their transportation needs as best they can.
“No one in (municipal or provincial) government is working on transportation,” said one participant.
Aster lead consultant, community educator, and former Sackville councillor Margaret Tsuz-King said New Brunswick has been failed twice over by local and provincial authorities who for decades have abdicated their responsibility to provide reliable, accessible public transit. The current federal focus on EVs is a kind of transportation intervention, she told The Mix, but it is being perceived as a conversation for the wealthy that leaves out fundamentals like affordability and equitable access to charging.
These fundamentals are becoming acute as the province faces the “ongoing movement of basic services (e.g. healthcare, schooling) into larger centres,” a shift that, in the absence of public transit outside city centres, requires that people in smaller towns or rural areas either have their own vehicles, or find someone who does, Tsuz-King said.
If policy-makers want to help, Sackville participants suggested introducing a basic income and providing “incentives and programs to help people share cars, instead of privately owning them,” the report says.
Participants in Canada’s poorest province linked the consolidation of services, transportation, and poverty: “Low and fixed incomes mean that cars (even used ones) are priced out of reach,” said one local resident. “I am poor and have a low credit score, so I will never have a car.” “Poverty is big,” said another group member. ”It’s not an issue of choice; I can’t afford any car, let alone an EV.”
While everyone in New Brunswick needs to be talking about transportation, “we can’t just talk about transportation, behaving as if one size fits all,” Tsuz-King added. “We need to talk about the rural, we need to talk about access to services, and above all, we need to talk about poverty.”
New Brunswickers also want to hear more about issues like battery safety, and to be reassured that EVs don’t “simply exchange one environmental problem (fossil fuels) for another environmental problem (mining minerals, battery waste),” the Sackville report states.
Winnipeg, Manitoba: Put Equity, Justice in the Driver’s Seat
Affordability and equity were top of mind for the 25 mostly inner-city and low-income attendees at the Transportation Shift conversation hosted by the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg (SPCW) in early February. Of the 25 who took part, seven identified as Indigenous and six identified as persons of colour.
“Most participants already are using sustainable transportation, including public transit, cycling and walking, and for most, “private automobiles are already out of reach,” says the summary report. Most attendees “want to make a difference in creating an equitable, environmental transportation system,” but they are “concerned that too many people will be left behind in the transportation shift, if needs of low-income households are not explicitly considered.”
Winnipeg participants stressed that while mobility gaps are a serious problem, conversations about transportation need to extend beyond EV rebates and charging stations to “basic income needs” like the cost of food and housing. “Government consultations with low-income people need to be integrated, not siloed,” said one participant.
Overall, the Winnipeg conversation revealed “mixed feelings about EVs as a climate solution,” the SPCW reports. Many participants said EVs will do nothing to solve the problem of pedestrian-unfriendly urban planning. Others connected the swathes of asphalt in car-centric cities with the urban heat island effect.
SPCW community animator Josh Brandon told The Mix the outsized electoral strength of suburban boroughs as well as the power wielded by developers mean Winnipeg continues to “double down on urban sprawl.” This has left “a lot of the inner city suffering from yet more urban divestment and decay” in areas that “have the highest child poverty rate of any city, of any urban neighbourhood, in Canada.”
EVs will have a critical role to play in the energy transition, given the need to reduce emissions, Brandon said. “The question is, should that be the first step that we’re taking?” he added.
“There’s so much other work that we can do to create more sustainable transportation options for people that are more equitable, that people living in the communities that we’re working with will have access to, people who are struggling to pay rent, to put food on the table.” For those households, “the idea of a $60,000 electric vehicle is pretty far off on the horizon.”
The disconnect between policy and people will not end well, Brandon said.
“To the extent that we do focus exclusively on these technical solutions that don’t challenge the overall status quo of our transportation system and other systems in our society, we’re going to alienate a lot of the people that we need to bring onboard,” he warned. And that, in turn, will cause everyone to miss out on “the power we have when we act collectively.”
Winnipeg, and Manitoba in general, are rich in resources ready to be harnessed to the collective, equitable good, Brandon said, pointing out that the provincial capital is home to e-bus builder New Flyer, “one of the most important EV companies on the continent.”
Manitoba is also rich in “important hydroelectric assets,” He added. So “if we can build partnerships based on reconciliation and justice with the northern First Nations communities that live along our waterways, then we have the capacity to provide more environmentally sustainable power, to create energy justice in our communities, and to be a leader in electric transportation.”
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Car-Centric City Breeds ‘Transportation Poverty’
Saskatoon’s transportation offerings are “diverse, but deeply inadequate”, and EVs alone will do little to fix the problem, participants agreed during a conversation hosted in Saskatchewan’s largest city by the Saskatoon Poverty Reduction Partnership (SPRP).
Several participants described being forced to buy a car they could ill afford because public transit is too infrequent to be relied upon, especially for shift workers who ride outside peak hours and core areas.
They pointed to inadequate snow removal and pedestrian unfriendly roads as major obstacles to active transportation modes like walking and biking, especially for people who already have mobility concerns.
“I’m not a fan of cars, but I had to get a driver’s licence because Saskatoon is so car-centric,” said one participant.
Across Saskatoon in particular and Saskatchewan in general, “we are accustomed to driving long distances, even just to do recreational things,” SPRP coordinator Colleen Christopherson-Cote told The Mix. “I would think nothing of driving from my rural community to Saskatoon, over 400 kilometers and back, just for supper. I wouldn’t think anything of it.”
“It is just the way the Prairies are built.”
But she added that freedom is afforded only to those with access to a car, recalling the devastating impact of Greyhound’s decision to pull out of all Western provinces in the summer of 2018.
The degree of wider “transportation poverty” is perceptible everywhere in Saskatoon, Christopherson-Cote said: in sidewalks with inaccessible curbs, bus routes that take an hour to travel seven kilometres, and the absence of bus service in neighbourhoods least likely to be able to afford private vehicles.
For many of these “already marginalized, already vulnerable” people, transportation poverty goes hand in hand with the energy poverty of draughty homes, expressed by unpaid power bills, she added. “What are the actual implications of EV adoption for people who are already mobility and transportation poor?” Christopherson-Cote asked. “I suspect that as with most pieces of public policy, those folks will be an afterthought.”
To secure more buy-in from residents who can afford an EV, the SPRP report recommends “more accessible, plain language information that can resonate with a broader audience, as well as public education to dispel politically charged myths about EVs, myths that seem to have quite a bit of traction in the province.”
But even in the absence of outright myth-making, resistance to the energy transition remains strong in the province, Christopherson-Cote said. That skepticism showed up indirectly, in the surprised appreciation expressed by those participants learned that some funding support for the Transportation Shift conversations had been provided by Iron & Earth, a non-profit working to build an effective transition for workers and communities that rely on fossil fuels. The organization’s background presence helped some Saskatoon participants who were leery of the energy transition to “recognize opportunities, particularly for those with low incomes,” writes the SPRP.
But Christopherson-Cote stressed that the EV rollout must move ahead with low-income Canadians front and centre.
“It’s not just about people getting access to cars,” she explained. “It is fundamentally about the way we build infrastructure in communities, and how infrastructure has historically, and disproportionately, favoured folks of affluence.”
Canada’s ZEV mandate can’t become “just one more thing that will further marginalize people who are living in poverty,” she added.
St. John’s, Newfoundland: Doubts and Fears About ‘Inevitable’ EVs
St. John’s is a car-centric city thanks partly to poor walkability (especially in winter) and an unreliable, inconvenient bus system. The 35 participants who attended the Transportation Shift conversation hosted by the Transition House Association of Newfoundland and Labrador generally viewed EVs as “making a lot of sense and as seeming inevitable in the long term, but not in the short term,” the summary report states.
Upfront costs were a dominant concern. “It’s fine for the government to say that we need to stop using gas engines, but people cannot afford groceries right now or rent,” said one participant. ”How are they supposed to afford a car that costs 10 or 15 grand more than the normal car would?” “It makes more sense to me to get as many years as I can out of the hybrid I have, instead of going out to buy a new electric car,” said another.
The group also heard concerns about charging stations and battery life, especially in winter. “Participants felt that a universal change to ZEVs would be an absolute positive, but that individual choices did not make that big an impact on the environment as a whole,” the Transition House Association states. “If every car on the streets of St. John’s was electric, would it be better? Of course, it would. Would it stop climate change? Of course, it wouldn’t,” said one attendee.
One participant commented that riding bikes in the roadway is “socially unacceptable”.
Dan Meades, provincial coordinator at the Transition House Association, said the impulse to preserve the status quo was a clear presence in St. John’s listening session.
“I think it is natural and understandable for people to fear change, especially when the stakes are so high and their perceived personal impact is so low,” he said. That so much appears to be disintegrating around them is not helping matters, he added.
“I think people in this province see their health care system failing them, see crumbling infrastructure, a social safety net that is full of holes, and a housing sector that is in crisis,” Meades explained. “Those challenges feel more urgent than climate change, and when governments do not seem capable of addressing those issues, the larger issue of climate change feels intractable.”
Labrador: Are EVs Possible At All?
During the online roundtable in mid-March, Meades noted that while Newfoundland “townies” seemed “really eager to make the transition, but say they can’t afford it,” the 21 Labradorians who gathered virtually to reflect on EV adoption made it clear the conversation “didn’t feel relevant to their lives.” The consensus was that “the problems being solved by ZEVs were someone else’s, and the solutions would need to be found elsewhere as a result,” Meades wrote in his summary of the Labrador conversation.
Echoing their peers in Nunavut, participants in Labrador “really wanted it to be known that the reliance on gasoline engines was absolute in the North, and that the consequences of changing that without a real plan and the proper technology were life-and-death when it is -30°C outside.” While residents did express concern about “the quality of the roads between communities and the state of repair of the trans-Labrador highway,” public transit was a non-starter. “Imagine a bus in Rigolet; where would it go?” said one participant.
Overall, residents worried that any shift away from gas-powered vehicles would bring “less reliable and more dangerous” travel. “I can understand that with climate change and everything, we need to change our ways, all of us do, but in Labrador, I just do not see how it is possible at all,” said one participant. “We are so few people, and it’s hard enough to live here as it is.”
