Staley: Poilievre is right, EV mandates will end rural life

By: Greg Staley

Written On: 2025-08-20

I write this as someone who lives in rural Saskatchewan and relies on a 21-year-old Toyota with 370,000 kilometers. Pierre Poilievre is right: the Liberal government’s EV mandates, which would end the sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035, threaten rural life. If these policies proceed, many rural Canadians like me could lose the ability to live and work outside urban centers.

I have never owned a new car or financed one. I haven’t been able to afford that luxury. I have a wife and 5 kids and so to put it simply, money is always tight. What the Liberals gas vehicle ban will do is destroy my ability to live where I do. There is no LRT out here. There’s no taxi service or Ubers we can call – we have to drive 30 minutes to the nearest Wal-Mart.

I have spent my whole life buying vehicles that I could afford. Almost every single vehicle I have ever owned has been at least 10 years old. Have you ever looked online to see how many and how much used electric vehicles cost?

Recently, I did just this and searched for all available EVs for sale in all of Saskatchewan on the website CarGurus. You know how many results came back? Only 16 vehicles in the entire province! The number increased when I went to AutoTrader, which gave me 169 electric vehicles for sale in the province. The cheapest of those vehicles was roughly $16,000. How can someone like me afford that? For comparison, I paid $3000 for my Toyota and did the work it needed myself to save thousands.

Now I’m sure Liberal die-hard supporters will say that the prices on used EVs will come down as more EVs enter the market and age, and that is true; however, it doesn’t mean they are a viable option for many families. This is because the replacement price of an EV battery is so expensive that it is often akin to purchasing another vehicle entirely.

According to The Drive, replacement costs for a car like the Nissan Leaf is roughly $15k, Chevy Bolt’s and Tesla S & X models are just under 30k, and some Hyundai and Kia models will run you a steep $45k.

So I’ll end with a novel idea here. Why doesn’t the Canadian government leave rural Canadians alone and let the market determine what consumers want for a change? Rural Canadians can’t afford what the Liberals are forcing our auto companies to sell. Canada needs to let the market work without interference. They need to let Canadians decide who the winners will be.

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