UCP should park the Ottawa insults and support renewable energy, NDP suggests after Carney announcement

By George Lee, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Published on Sep 07, 2025 at 12:08

The UCP should trade badmouthing Ottawa for building a future with more electric vehicles and renewable energy, the NDP’s environment critic said Friday.

Sarah Elmeligi said the Alberta government is locking its focus on a current snapshot of the EV and zero-emission situation. Instead, it should make decisions now that set the province and its workforce up for success in an evolving industry characterized by rapid technological improvement.

“Rather than imagining and being creative about the future for Alberta and embracing all the potential economic development opportunities, we have a government that just wants to say no to Ottawa all the time and kick up a stink about whatever it has to say,” said Elmeligi, the member for Banff-Kananaskis and the NDP’s shadow minister of environment and protected areas.

“And I don’t think that’s really serving Albertans.” 

Elmeligi spoke with The Macleod Gazette just hours after the prime minister announced a re-examination of the electric vehicle availability standard. Commonly referred to as the EV mandate, it called for zero-emission new vehicle sales in Canada to reach 20 per cent in 2026, 60 per cent in 2030 and 100 per cent in 2035.

Zero-emission vehicles, or ZEVs, are a category of EV that encompasses plug-in hybrids, even though ZEVs do generate emissions when not in electric mode.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and her minister of environment and protected areas, Rebecca Schulz, have both called upon the feds to scrap the mandate. Smith renewed that position Friday after Mark Carney said that the 2026 requirement is delayed and that the whole mandate is paused for a 60-day review.

A response from the premier distributed to media outlets said: “Although I’m encouraged by Prime Minister Mark Carney’s decision today to pause the federal government’s unrealistic and ill-fated EV mandate, it’s not enough — the EV mandate must be scrapped entirely along with the other bad laws that are holding our country back. Today’s decision is the first of many that must be made to create the investor certainty we need to unleash Canada’s economic potential.”

Smith said Alberta has for years called on the federal government “to get rid of their eco-radical policies including the EV mandate.” In recent months, premiers and industry leaders from across the country “have joined our call” to end the requirement.

The federal government “should not be dictating what cars Canadians can and cannot drive,” the premier said, adding that “this kind of market interference will only drive up costs for everyday Albertans and Canadians.”

Elmeligi said federal caution and review are fine with her. She acknowledged that Ottawa is discussing the impact of the mandate with multiple stakeholders in auto manufacturing and other industries, which encompass a range of voices she’s not hearing from directly.

“There have been concerns about the EV mandate from the very beginning from stakeholders. If the Carney government wants to take a pause and consider how it’s implemented, that’s great,” said Elmeligi.

“I think any time a government takes more time to talk to stakeholders and consider the implications of their decisions, that’s a good thing for Canadians and for Albertans. I wish the UCP would do that a little bit more actually.”

In a video released last month, Schulz painted the picture of Albertans being forced to drive expensive and impractical cars they don’t want under “an unworkable, one-size-fits-all mandate.” 

Also stalling Albertans’ ability to get around in EVs is an electrical grid without the capacity to meet drivers’ needs, a limited charging network and reduced battery capacity in cold weather.

“This is just another Ottawa plan that ignores reality and punishes Canadians, just like the carbon tax (did),” she said in the video. “It’s all pain and no gain. It will drive up costs. It will limit how far you can travel. It will make winter driving unreliable and potentially unsafe, and it will leave Canadians stuck in traffic, in lineups and in debt.”

Schulz, the member for Calgary-Shaw, said EV sales in Canada have “fallen off a cliff” and major automakers have warned that the mandate will “kill jobs and investment.”

Sales of new ZEVs tracked upwards in Canada until January when a national rebate program of up to $5,000 ran out of funding.  A Transport Canada analysis said sales reached 8.9 per cent of the market share in 2022 and 11.7 per cent in 2023.

ZEVs accounted for 15 per cent of all new motor vehicle registrations in Canada 2024, the Canadian Energy Regulator website says. (Registrations are a proxy for actual sales.)

But Statistics Canada has reported that sales of ZEVs were down 35.2 per cent in June 2025 over the same month last year and 32.3 per cent in May.

Schulz was unavailable for comment Friday.

Elmeligi said the province shouldn’t accept the current market as a script for the future. She’s hearing first-hand from stakeholders about how rapidly EV technology is evolving.

“It feels to me like the government just has this incredible block against any other kind of energy production (than fossil fuels) and that’s a shame, because there are a lot of opportunities that rest in the space to diversify energy production, diversify our economy, provide hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs for Albertans and really create a new future,” she said.

“The reality is Alberta is being left behind when it comes to EVs.”

The world is “a very short time period away” from companies having the technology to make less expensive EVs, she said, noting that travel distances on a single charge are increasing, charging times are decreasing and the network of charging stations is growing.

Alberta had 255 EV chargers around the province at the beginning of 2022, according to Electric Autonomy Canada, which bills itself as an independent media and events company. Transport Canada pegged the number at 1,892 public chargers at the end of the first quarter of 2025.

Elmeligi said some of the problems today in the Alberta economy track from a six-month moratorium on renewable development approvals that the UCP instituted two years ago. Jobs and projects disappeared because of the government move, she said.

The pause, which lasted until February 2024, was in part to look at municipality and landowner concerns about the impacts of wind and solar farms on viewscapes and agriculture.

Another step backwards, Elmeligi said, is a $200 annual tax on battery electric vehicles instituted by the Alberta government in 2025. The charge attached to vehicle registrations is designed to recover fuel taxes that help pay for road maintenance.