I find these kind of stories alarmist like the whole gas tax thing is going to collapse "next year" or something.
The issue is the BC registered vehicle fleet size is huge at ~2.67 million (source:
ICBC *) but the number of new vehicles sold ~190k per year in BC is not so big (source:
StatsCan). And of that less than 20% of that ~190k are EV's.
For 2021 data shows 2,673,127 registered vehicles in BC of which 58,973 were electric. 2022 stats aren't out yet but I've seen a 80,000 figure. So as a percentage of the total fleet size EV's went from ~2.2% to ~3%.
The percentage of new vehicles being EV is increasing but it will still take many years to refresh the fleet with EV's. We might not even be at 10% of the fleet being EV in 5 years.
I heartily support EV's, but four out of five cars sold in BC are still gas powered. So more must be done. Much more.
It seems likely to me that the government will simply continue what they must have been doing over the last few years when EV's grew from 0% to 3% of the fleet. And that is increasing the gas tax to make up the difference that this low-single digit % of the fleet made. Obviously they can't continue doing that forever, however, it shouldn't be a problem continuing to follow this strategy and kicking the "what do we do with the tax" can down the road for the next five years or even longer.
* ICBC has some great open data sets on their website about registered cars in BC. You can drill down by vehicle year, make, fuel type, municipality, calendar year, etc. All sorts of filters. Link:
ICBC Open Data web page
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