Jamie Sarkonak: Electric buses are a disaster for every Canadian city that tries them

Regina’s adoption of electric buses has been a disaster for the public. It’s the latest Canadian city to find this out the hard way.

The news slipped out during Regina city council’s Monday budget hearing, when transit union president Sukhwinder Singh was whether electric buses have impacted costs.

Aside from being more expensive to run — defeating their original purpose of saving on gas money — Singh said they were “not for the Saskatchewan weather.” He added that four buses had to be pulled off the line and re-charged the previous Friday, as they had fallen to 15 per cent battery. “I’m not in favour of electric buses at all,” he said.

“For the winter, their battery dies very quickly, and they can just run for two, three hours, that’s all,” he said. The buses weren’t good for the summer either, because the charge couldn’t reliably last.

This was always a predictable outcome, particularly since Edmonton already wasted millions on the same kind of failed project. In 2018, back when climate was the issue du jour, the city came up with a plan to spend $43 million on electric buses. Half of the funds came from the federal government, with the province of Alberta and the city of Edmonton covering a quarter each. The deal was announced by Don Iveson, then-mayor, and Amerjeet Sohi, the Liberal transport minister at the time who would go on to succeed Iveson as Edmonton mayor.

Iveson boasted that the switch would “produce a more reliable bus for our operators” and that their purchase was “absolutely critical to our city’s accelerated leadership on energy and climate.”

Fast forward to today and Edmonton has 60 of these buses in its fleet of 1,000. In December 2023, it was reported that only one quarter of these were in working order due to a range of problems. The company that built them, Proterra, filed for bankruptcy. Edmonton joined in on the bankruptcy proceedings, claiming that it was owed $82 million for the bus fiasco. Edmonton lawyers claimed that “None of the buses have ever achieved 328 km on a single charge,” and that “On average, the bus range has been approximately 165 km in the winter and, at best, 250 km in warmer weather.”

In 2024, Proterra was bought out and exited bankruptcy, but the faulty buses remain in Edmonton.

Directly to the north of Edmonton, the suburb of St. Albert ran another costly experiment with electric buses made by the Chinese EV company BYD. It acquired seven units in 2017 and 2018 and received a number of awards for its environmental efforts. The reality was less glamorous: three units needed battery replacements within the first five years of service; they travelled roughly half the distance in a month compared to their diesel counterparts; they were initially estimated to have a daily driving range of 233 kilometres but only reached 110 in the winter; their lifespan was downgraded to 12 years from 18.

Regina would go on to announce its own plan to electrify the fleet despite these problems. On a public FAQ page, it dismissed fears of an Edmonton-like incident. Edmonton purchased its buses from Proterra; Regina was going with the company Novabus, which “has a long history of success in Canadian cities.”

And so, the Regina transit began using electric buses in 2025 as part of a bigger greenhouse gas reduction strategy, starting with seven. Another 13 are planned for delivery by mid-2026. So, when Singh reports that four of these buses needed to be pulled from the middle of their routes to charge, he’s talking about more than half of the electric fleet.

All in all, it was a $52 million endeavour, with half of that money coming from the federal government — as was the case in Edmonton. But at very least, Regina has mustered the courage to pivot to hybrid buses going forward.

These same lessons are learned again and again. In 2022, the feds and the government of Manitoba helped Winnipeg purchase 40 electric buses, which the city claimed would drive for “10 to 15 hours.” Earlier trials in Winnipeg showed that heating the cabin resulted in “performance losses”; adding a diesel heater limited those losses to 20 per cent or less. The city’s first electric buses began operating over the summer; it remains to be reported how their first winter is going.

And over in Saskatoon, city council has been trying to grow the electric fleet. It’s unclear why: city staff have warned that electric buses can’t last a full day of service on one charge, and that it takes 1.2 electric buses to replace a single diesel bus.

Finally, Toronto, which also started its electric bus journey in 2017, is also reporting failure. A city report from July buries the unflattering figures under a deluge of emissions-reduction statistics: from the beginning, these buses had shorter ranges than diesel units, which renders them unusable for many existing bus routes. And because of their finicky charging requirements and limited range, the electric buses “face challenges in responding to emergency subway closures, route diversions, and other unexpected events.”

In July, Toronto announced that it had 100 electric buses in service (the number was supposed to be more than twice that, but delivery delays have slowed the rollout). This is a small fraction of the mostly diesel and hybrid fleet, so for now, the many weaknesses of the electric bus haven’t overwhelmed the transit system. But the plan is to be majority-electric by 2031 — a problem that will make for an expensive logistical challenge.

Many of these electric bus trials have been supported by the federal Zero Emission Transit Fund. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to be logging these problems: regarding the Regina buses, “no performance issues were reported in progress meetings” between the city and the infrastructure department. Indeed, across all of its electric bus projects, the department “has not been made aware of any performance issues related to weather conditions.”

If electric buses were really a better deal, there would be no issue in switching to them. But that’s absolutely not been the case. When it comes to transit, prioritizing climate benchmarks means punishing civilian transit users. It’s time these city councils put people first.

National Post