That's actually a pretty terrible article on the issue. It parrots the findings of the think tank article and does nothing to actually fully explore the claims. It is also tying two very separate issues together, which are unrelated.
Subsidies for buying electric vehicles is not related to the amount of GHG they reduce. Those subsidies are there to force adoption of a new technology in an attempt to gain public acceptance and establish critical mass where the product is purchased without said subsidy. Even the article states we have achieved that goal.
If the article was fair, they would look at actual subsidies paid to the various industries associated with the cost of building vehicles, building the infrastructure for them, and then the fuel for each of them. If they went down that rabbit hole I'm sure they would find a very different outcome than the one this "think tank" paper has to share, and would correct many of the inaccuracies (check the citations and references). I can't speak to the Canadian government and what they pay out in subsidies so I'll have to look at the US, where the numbers are little easier to come by. For example, three companies of interest to this issue, General Motors has received $3.5B in subsidies from the US government (that is 250,000 $14,000 EV subsidies), Royal Dutch Shell received 2.04B in subsidies (147,417 EVs), Dow Chemical received 1.4B in subsidies (100,000 EVs). Consider the top subsidy in the US is $7,500, and you can see an even larger scale of magnitude shift in those numbers.
Like the climate change issue, there is a cottage industry whose job it is to make sure that you keep buying the same products from the same companies you have been for decades. They have all the money and the power to pay for these think tanks to create information that muddies the facts. Its been going on for decades and with different industries. Cigarettes don't cause cancer and kill you! Doctors are just trying to deprive you of your lifestyle! There is no link between cigarettes and anything but good clean fun. Now light up that Marlboro and show what a man you are! Same game plan, just different causes now.
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