Reality check: 49,000 Chinese EVs won’t come close to getting Canada back on track

Feb. 5, 2026

Last year, Canadian politicians lowered the cost of new fossil-fuel burning passenger vehicles by thousands of dollars by scrapping the carbon price. Unsurprisingly, sales of these high-emissions cars and trucks surged by 135,000 to reach 1.8 million in 2025. If we want to avoid a full-blown climate crisis this number needs to be zero. 

Compounding the climate threat, Canadian politicians also raised the cost of new electric vehicles (EVs) by thousands of dollars. Sure enough, sales of these critical zero-emission alternatives plunged – from 18 per cent of new passenger vehicles in Canada, to just nine per cent. 

Canada’s latest EV policy announcement will do little to fill that hole. In exchange for China reducing tariffs on canola grown in Canada, our government has agreed to remove its 100 per cent blocking tariff from a small annual quota of 49,000 EVs made in China. 

While 49,000 might sound like a lot, as we will see in the charts and details below, it’s nowhere near enough to fill the huge hole created last year. And it is trivial compared to what Canadians need in the race for a safe-and-sane climate future.

Canada’s self-inflicted EV collapse was far larger

The damage done to Canadian EV sales last year can be seen in the chart below. The green line shows the EV percentage of new passenger car and truck sales during the last several years. Note: in this article “EV” refers to both battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids because Statistics Canada lumps them together in its data.

Notice how Canadian EV sales had been accelerating upwards year after year – hitting 18 per cent of new passenger vehicle sales by the end of 2024. As a bonus, Canadians were on track to easily meet our 2026 target (green bullseye.)

All that momentum ended abruptly at the start of 2025, when Canadian policy makers breakers axed a suite of major climate policies. This drove EV sales off a cliff, falling to just nine per cent. Canadian policy makers need to re-fill that hole somehow.

Unfortunately, the newly announced policy limits the number of affordable EVs from China to a fraction of what’s needed to fill that hole. The 49,000 quota represents just two to three per cent of new passenger vehicle sales in Canada. You can see on the chart how little this is compared to what is needed. 

It’s also tiny compared to what the Europeans and British are making available to their citizens. Both already import EVs from China at 10 per cent of their new car market. And, unlike Canada, they aren’t setting fixed limits on them, so their share continues to rise rapidly.

This rapid embrace of China-made EVs is happening around the world, in both wealthy nations and developing economies. That’s because these inexpensive, well-reviewed EVs deliver a huge range of benefits. They are much cheaper to fuel, can be powered by locally produced energy, make cities quieter and the air cleaner, are easier to maintain and more fun to drive and they pass along far less climate damage to future generations.

The widespread adoption of affordable EVs from China is helping drive global EV sales to record levels — hitting 26 per cent of new passenger vehicles sales worldwide last year. That’s shown by the dashed grey line on the chart above. 

You can see how Canadians were keeping pace with this rapidly rising global average under our previous climate policies. Not anymore, though. We’ve retreated. Our gap is growing dauntingly wide. And our government’s decision to limit Canadians to much fewer China-made EVs than many of our peer nations will leave us even farther behind.

Failing to address the climate wreckers: ICE

The unshakable reality is that climate breakdown will keep growing ever more dangerous until everyone stops burning fossil fuels. That includes ending all the burning of gasoline and diesel in our cars and trucks. The race to climate stability requires switching all our new vehicle sales to zero-emitting EVs. 

My next chart lets you see the scale of that challenge for Canadians, and how our recent climate policy bonfire is turbo-charging the problem. The big bar on the chart shows sales of new passenger vehicles that can’t be fueled with Canada’s clean electricity. These cars that only burn fossil fuels are known as internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.

Last year, Canadians bought around 1.8 million new ICE passenger vehicles. This was 135,000 more than the year before, as indicated by the top brown bar. We are literally driving away from climate stability.

Compare those large numbers of new ICE vehicle sales to the tiny EV quota Canada is allowing in from China. I’ve highlighted this quota in yellow, so you don’t miss it. 

This clean vehicle quota is clearly much too small to deal with last year’s surge in dirty ICE vehicles. 

More importantly, this quota is trivial compared to what Canadians need to replace all new ICE car sales. To replace the 1.8 million ICE passenger vehicle sales each year, Canadians will need access to 30 to 40 times more affordable EVs than this new policy makes available.  

Where are all these affordable zero-emissions cars going to come from? 

Our legacy car makers are cutting back EV production and yanking factories out of Canada. Our government is restricting access to these EVs even more by eliminating thousands of dollars in rebates and incentives. 

In contrast, Chinese automakers are cranking out huge numbers of EVs that are more affordable even without rebates. But our government is restricting access to these as well.  

So, what are Canadians supposed to do? Buy lots more climate hammering ICE vehicles instead?

As a reminder, Canadian tailpipes are one of our nation’s largest and most out of control sources of climate pollution. The average new ICE passenger vehicle in Canada will emit 62 tonnes of CO2 out of its tailpipe. Collectively we have already dumped billions of tonnes of climate-destabilizing pollutants out of our tailpipes. And we are on track to emit billions of tonnes more at the rate we are buying new ICE vehicles now. 

Adding to the urgency is the fact that the new cars and trucks we buy now will last a long time. It will take another decade or two after we stop buying new ICE vehicles before our millions of remaining tailpipes stop pumping out greenhouse gases. If we want to reach zero emissions by 2050, we need to end ICE vehicles sales in the next 10 or 15 years. 

Impossible? As we will see next, Norway has already done it and a rapidly growing pack of diverse nations is headed their way. 

Canada’s position in the global EV race

My final chart shows where Canada is now in the global EV race. This chart shows the EV sales share in 50 of the world’s major car markets. Green arrows indicate nations that increased EV sales share last year. That’s most of them. The orange line is the current global average of 26 per cent.

Canada is the only one on this chart with a red arrow indicating a significant drop in EV sales last year. I’ve extended this red arrow to show the size of our drop last year – from 18 per cent at the end of 2024 to around nine per cent now. 

I’ve also added Canada’s new limit of 49,000 China-made EVs (highlighted in yellow.) What do you think? Are we there yet?

Clearly, an extra 49,000 EVs isn’t going to move us very far forward. It’s a one-time increase of two to three per cent. 

If we just want to catch up to the current global average, Canadians will need access to six times the quota this year — an additional 300,000 affordable EVs per year. That rises to a million more affordable EVs each year before we can get to where leading nations as diverse as China, Sweden and Ethiopia are today. 

These global leaders certainly aren’t waiting there; they’re racing for the finish line. For example, six years ago Norway’s sales were 50 per cent EVs. Now they are up to 98 per cent for pure battery electric vehicles. Less than one per cent of new sales are ICE vehicles. 

Six years ago, China had an EV share of only five per cent. Back then, Canada wasn’t far behind them. Now China, which is the world’s largest new car market, is about to blow past the 60 per cent EV mark. They are six times farther ahead of us in the global race and have the finish line coming into sight. That’s just passenger cars. As Bloomberg reports, 20 per cent of China’s new medium-duty and heavy-duty commercial trucks are also EVs. In other words, China is twice as far ahead in the global EV race with industrial trucks as Canadians are with passenger cars. It’s turning into a Road Runner vs Wile E. Coyote wipeout. 

In contrast to these nations sprinting toward climate safety, Canadian politicians drove us backwards last year and have done nothing meaningful to restore our position and momentum. Unblocking so few EVs from China won’t either. 

Many might argue that it will at least get us moving in the right direction. At this point, I disagree. 

I disagree because nearly everything I’ve read about it presents it as a significant step forward in Canadian EV policy. It clearly isn’t. Even with this quota our EV policy is a mess that has reduced Canadians’ access to affordable EVs. When such undersized climate policies get overhyped, it lulls the public and politicians into complacency and inaction. We’ve seen this hype-and-ignore-the-problem cycle play out repeatedly. It has enabled decades of failure to reduce our sky-high emissions in Canada. 

Now we are doing the hype-and-ignore cycle again with our new car purchases. Canadians are buying fossil-burning cars and trucks in surging numbers. Ignoring this doesn’t make it go away, it makes it worse. 

Our kids and future generations really need us to act now to prevent them ending up trapped in a dangerously destabilized climate. The late climate scientist Wallace Broecker warned decades ago, “the climate system is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks.” The beast has started to wake up and lash out. And one of the biggest sticks we keep jabbing it with is our millions of tailpipes. 

This has to stop. To do that, Canadians need access to hundreds of thousands more affordable EVs — now — and millions more soon.

[Top: Illustration by Aja Otani]