Gasoline demand in Canada levelled off in 2024, with sales increasing a slight 0.5 per cent over the previous year—a trend partly driven by the rise in electric vehicles, the country’s statistics agency said Monday.
The Statistics Canada data goes back to 1987 and helps the federal government make equalization payments to provinces. In 2020, gasoline sales plummeted with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Since then, demand has grown year-over-year as more vehicles were added to the road.
Gross sales of gasoline climbed 2.7 per cent year-over-year in 2023, before slowing down last year. StatCan noted the amount of gasoline used in Canada is still below pre-pandemic 2019 level.
Jonn Axsen, the director of Simon Fraser University’s Sustainable Transportation Action Research Team, said the levelling off of demand was likely due to a number of climate policies ratcheting up at the same time.
“We’re at this kind of turning point,” he said. “We just killed carbon policy nationally and provincially. That’s not going to help this levelling off in demand.”
“If we continue to chip away at our climate policy mix, then the gasoline demand will continue to climb.”
Trevor Melanson, a spokesperson with Clean Energy Canada, said that while the data is evidence that increased electric vehicle adoption reduces fuel demand, that impact takes time to scale up.
“The full impact of EVs taking over is very significant,” he said, pointing to the scale of China’s electric vehicle adoption. “It starts to bend the curve of oil production.”
Electric vehicle sales drop as governments roll back incentives
Canada's rising gasoline demand appears to be largely driven by new vehicle registrations, with the number of passenger cars, pickup trucks, multi-purpose vehicles and vans increasing by eight per cent in 2024.
The largest increases in gasoline consumption were found in Alberta and Ontario, which saw 3.6 and 2.7 per cent increases, respectively.
The largest declines in gasoline sales were found in Quebec, where demand dropped 3.5 per cent over in 2024, and B.C., which saw a 1.6 per cent drop. Both provinces have provided the strongest incentives to encourage EV adoption, though they have weakened over the past year.
This year, the federal and B.C. governments eliminated their carbon taxes and paused several programs that incentivize people to buy an electric car.
Ottawa and B.C. paused rebate programs that provided thousands of dollars to buy an electric vehicle.
Melanson pointed to recent polling the green think tank did that found almost half of British Columbians said they would wait for the federal rebates to come back before buying an electric vehicle.
“If you think a version of that could come back, are you going to buy an EV now or wait until that incentive comes back,” he said.
“It’s the opposite of an inventive ... It’s a disincentive to buy an EV.”
In August, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government paused its electric vehicle sales mandate for at least a year, pending the results of a 60-day review.
The policy had required that 26 per cent of passenger vehicles sold by 2026 be either electric or plug-in hybrids, a threshold that rises to 100 per cent by 2035. Automakers can be penalized $20,000 per vehicle for failing to meet that target.
Earlier this month, B.C. Minister of Energy and Climate Solutions Adrian Dix said the province was still in talks with auto manufacturers and was not ready to pause its own mandate, which mirrors federal targets.
Carney, for his part, did not commit to fully repealing the mandate, as the larger car manufacturers have recommended.
The combined effects of the policy roll-backs appears to have stalled the popularity of electric and other zero-emission vehicles. Electric vehicles sales retreated to about eight per cent in the first two quarters of 2025, a level similar to 2022.
“To what extent that will impact fuel demand, we’ll see,” said Werner Antweiler, an energy economist at the University of British Columbia. “The big changes I expect to see in 2025.”
Canadians taking more trips, return to commuting
The slight rise in gasoline sales last year came as Canadian residents took 292.1 million domestic trips, a 2.5 per cent increase from 2023.
The number of people commuting in cars also increased to 16.5 million by May 2024, climbing 3.7 per cent over 12 months. The upward trend follows notable declines in 2020 and 2021.
While the number of commuters has largely bounced back, Antweiler said there appears to be a lasting impact from the pandemic.
“The effect on people telecommunicating seems to be somewhat permanent,” said Antweiler. “Many employers have found having people work one or two days at home is advantageous. People still get their work done.”
In May, the economist carried out his own analysis of Canada’s transportation emissions.
The clear result, he found, was a growing population was putting more new cars on the road, but per capita fuel consumption remains on downward trend in Canada.
To stay on that path, Antweiler recommended the best outcomes would likely come through policies that back:
- strengthened biofuels mandates to provide less carbon intensive fuel;
- re-invest in incentives to adopt electric vehicles;
- and continue to provide better public transportation infrastructure.
While now at a five-year high, net gasoline sales in Canada remain 3.3 per cent below 2019 levels, found StatCan.
The demand for some fossil fuels saw even steeper declines.
Net sales of diesel were found to drop 5.1 per cent to 17.1 billion litres in 2024 compared to the previous year, the lowest volume since 2020. And liquefied petroleum gas—a family of fuels which include propane and butane—fell 5.9 per cent year-over-year to 517.0 million litres in 2024.
Antweiler suggested the drop in demand could point to more delivery fleets transitioning to electric or natural gas motors. He said more data was needed to see the full picture.
“The overarching question here is not what’s going on in the fuel data, but what’s going on in the economy overall,” he said. “There’s more to the story here than meets the eye.”