Will Carney’s serious loosening of regulations on big business really set up Canada for the rest of the 21st Century? Or will it push us back to the point when we ignored the environment except to create National Parks? Is he more inline with the disastrous rhetoric of Danielle Smith or will he recognize that what she asks for is based upon environmental denial? And are Canadians ready to forget environmental degradation in order to build an even more destructive standard of living? A ‘canary in a coal mine’ is a warning of danger. For a measure of social belief in climate change danger my ‘canary’ is the truck.
In 2024 Canadians purchased 1,918,861 new vehicles of which 1,671,656 were classified as ‘trucks’ and 247,205 classified as ‘passenger cars’. This represents a continuing decline in passenger car sales, so much so that Ford around 2019 stopped North American manufacture of all passenger cars except for the Mustang—if you believe that’s a family car. And no one asks why; they assume we individually decided we really, really want trucks. But that’s not why cars are no longer popular. The reason is one that Terry O’Reilly on the CBC’s Under the Influence answers every week, you are a willing victim of advertising. Now I, like everyone, else know for certain that I am never influenced by advertising but the evidence of such influence, as Terry demonstrates every week, is overwhelming whether we admit it or not. But why trucks? Well, back in the 70’s and 80’s when the Germans and Japanese demonstrated how to build better cars and complaints about shoddy American workmanship were rife, our car manufacturers, GM, Ford and Chrysler of the time, could have decided to compete as their free market beliefs demanded. But they didn’t. They saw an interfering government attempting to set safety and emission standards which would add to the cost of construction and they saw Ralph Nader attacking their products and policies. So they reached for a vehicle they could make that would be too costly for foreigners to manufacture—the truck. Why the truck? Because back in 1964 in retaliation for European tariffs on the importation of American chickens Lyndon Johnson passed a 25% tariff on pickup trucks built outside of North America, about 10 times higher than any then current American tariff and a tariff still in effect that quite possibly was inspiration for Trump’s weapon. Then in the 70’s the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) emissions standards were passed but gave business a break with lower standards for pickups, now renamed as Light Trucks, which it was argued, were largely used by commercial owners. The lower standards meant lower costs and bigger profits on trucks than passenger cars; a GM exec estimated a decade ago that the average profit on a car was around 7% whereas profit on a truck could be as high as 35%.
And so the light dawned. If all vehicles are classified as Light Trucks our costs go down and our profits go up. Today Ford, GM and Ram account for 90% or more of current pickup sales, proving the wisdom of eschewing real competition by using the government to keep foreigners out of our market—an early example of MAGA. Canada, of course, harmonized with the U.S. standards. Pickups, crew cabs, SUVs, Crossovers, and vans; manufacturers classified them all as Light Trucks and then sold them to you by excluding the moderately more virtuous passenger cars from their advertising, presenting trucks as able to traverse any landscape—particularly one without any other vehicles in it—and shouting about the impossibility of electric vehicles matching the convenience of gas powered ones. What you don’t see, you won’t buy. Of total truck sales 68% are now purchased as passenger vehicles; trucks are now used to bring the children to school, to do the shopping at the mall, to take you to visit with friends which are all activities perfectly serviced by a passenger car or a station wagon. The box out behind the crew cab remains empty most of the time but every once in a while you will dump a bunch of camp chairs, paddle boards, blow up floating gadgets, coolers, bicycles into the back of your half, three-quarter, or full ton and bring it all to Denman and Hornby for a fun week.
Équiterre is a Quebec based, sustainable farm management non-profit with over 100 farms under its direction. Is is certified by both the Quebec and Federal governments to conduct energy audits and has a staff to do so. In a comprehensive report published in 2021 it was noted that between 2009 and 2018 greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from light trucks rose 156% adding a 20.9% increase in emissions for all vehicles. They further note that there has been a decided increase in the average size of all vehicles; 25% in mass, wheelbase up 7.4%, length up 5%. And as to the classification of vehicles that is left entirely up to the manufactures and is a byzantine morass. A much smaller Hyndai Kona with significantly better efficiency measures is in the same category as a Lincoln Navigator—as of 2025 the curb weights of these two respectively are 3340 lbs and 6045 lbs. In conjunction with the Suzuki Foundation Équiterre’s latest report for 2024-25 states: ‘Between 2010 and 2022, the average per vehicle fuel consumption in Canada was reduced because of improvements in engine efficiency. But unfortunately, more than 80% of this reduction in average fuel consumption has been cancelled out by the increasing size of the vehicles on our roads across the country. . .’ Even when the engineers succeed the consumer isn’t buying.
And what to canaries have to do with it? Just as the coal mine canary announces danger for humans when it keels over, the massive increase in truck sales indicates danger for humans when it helps the climate keel over. Truckers may well agree that Danielle Steele gets a few things right as she continues to increase the venting of CO2 and announces the ever-coming carbon neutral production of her favourite resource. But she completely ignores the very real dinosaur in the room, to what use customers put her Alberta oil. But that’s not Danielle’s problem; it is a problem for the buyers of trucks who obviously are paying little attention to it while their dollars flow back to the corporations in the Alberta oil patch.
