In addition to tackling climate change and improving health outcomes, the EV standard also delivers gains for business and the broader economy.

When an asthma attack results in an emergency room visit, pollution from gas cars isn’t always top of mind. But the connection is striking. One in seven premature deaths in Canada is attributable to air pollution, and tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks are the leading source.

That’s why the federal Electric Vehicle Availability Standard is one of the most important pieces of regulation we’ll see in our generation.

Failing to advance the standard will cost $90-billion in health benefits over 25 years. But what’s most important about that number is the staggering human toll it represents. It’s inexcusable that opponents of the new standard are overstating its cost, and asking us to lose sight of its benefits.

Here’s what’s at stake.

The standard, announced in mid-December by Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault, would require automakers and importers to meet phased-in zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) sales targets, reaching 100 per cent by 2035. According to Guilbeault’s department, the standard would eliminate more than 430 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, reduce frustratingly long customer wait times for new electric vehicles, boost Canada’s ZEV supply chains, and help the country keep up with major trading partners that are speeding in this direction.

Every day, nurses and doctors see the cascade of human suffering due to preventable hospitalizations, heart disease, lung cancer, asthma, dementia, and other chronic respiratory conditions, including 11,000 premature deaths. That can be avoided just by switching from gasoline to electric light-duty personal vehicles. The impacts often fall heaviest on low-income, racialized, and marginalized communities.

The Atmospheric Fund’s conservative $90-billion estimate of the spectacular health and economic benefits is based on meeting ZEV sales targets in two of Canada’s biggest metropolitan areas. The future anticipated federal regulations for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles—such as large trucks—will deliver even greater improvements in air quality and health.

Dr. Sehjal Bhargava, left, Dr. Doris Grinspun, and Julia Langer. Handout photographs

That’s why it’s so egregious to see this value to people in Canada left out of the conversation about the Electric Vehicle Availability Standard. The pushback also disregards the new businesses that are already building a new sector around decarbonized, electric mobility, delivering jobs, innovation, and productivity that will help the economy for decades to come.

Nor can we allow opponents of the EV Availability Standard to sidestep responsibility for the devastating human, ecological, and economic impacts that we are already experiencing across the country as the climate emergency deepens. The Canadian Climate Institute estimates that drought, wildfires, severe storms, floods, atmospheric rivers, heat domes, permafrost thawing, and other climate disasters will cost Canadian households $25-billion per year by 2025, and up to $101-billion per year by 2050, and that doesn’t count the disruption to lives and livelihoods, depending on future greenhouse gas emissions.

We’ve seen this movie before. Ontario burned its last lump of coal for electricity in 2017, and Toronto hasn’t had a smog day (unrelated to wildfires) since. We’re saving an estimated $4.4-billion per year in health, environmental, and financial costs because the Ontario Medical Association, the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario, and environmentalists fought a tough fight side by side, and kept at this non-partisan effort (started by the Conservatives, and finalized by the Liberals).

The coal phaseout was an obvious, clean win for people across Ontario. It prevented a business crisis by averting 190,000 person-days of lost productivity due to air pollution. Yet it was still met with a wave of misinformation aimed at slowing down a decision that was good for public health, the economy, and the planet.

We’re now seeing the same misleading tactics in response to the EV Availability Standard, the federal government’s Clean Electricity Regulations, its oil and gas emissions cap, and other measures to address climate change—the defining crisis of our lifetimes.

Vested interests consistently overstate the cost of investing in innovation, even though the new federal rules deliver the long-term policy certainty that industry craves when governments carve out necessary new policy directions.

The EV Availability Standard is in the public’s best interest. In addition to tackling climate change and improving health outcomes, it also delivers gains for business and the broader economy. It’s time for everyone to jump onboard this electric bus, and get this regulation done.

Dr. Sehjal Bhargava is a public health and preventive medicine and family medicine resident physician at the University of Ottawa, and a board member of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. Dr. Doris Grinspun is CEO of the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario. Julia Langer is CEO of The Atmospheric Fund.