Canada transports about 2 million to school in a diesel bus each day, concerning several environmental, health, and educational entities about the well-being of those riders.

Yesterday, the Canadian Electric School Bus Alliance (CESBA) released its first-ever Electric School Bus Report Card, which raises the alarm over the slow and uneven progress to electrify these buses. The report calls for dedicated federal funding to accelerate investment in electric buses aimed at improving the county's health and economy. 

“More than 30,000 school buses in Canada are approaching end of life and need replacement in the next two to seven years,” said Valérie Tremblay, lead of Sustainable Mobility at Green Communities Canada and coordinator of CESBA. “It is not in our best interest to continue importing diesel school buses from south of the border when we can manufacture electric buses right here in Canada.”

The report ranks provinces across four key areas: fleet electrification, policy commitments, funding, and charging infrastructure. Three factors separate leading provinces from lagging ones: clear policy targets, predictable federal funding, and charging infrastructure readiness. The report highlights major disparities across the country.

• Prince Edward Island leads with 33% of its school bus fleet electrified. P.E.I.’s strengths are its centralized fleet management, clear targets, and early procurement investments. 
• Québec is second with 15% of its fleet electrified. With over 1,600 electric school buses, Québec boasts the largest electric school bus fleet in the country. Québec’s transition has been supported by robust incentives and clear targets. 
• British Columbia ranks third with 5% of its fleet electrified, B.C. stands out for its innovation (including Canada’s first vehicle-to-grid pilot with electric school buses) and its charging infrastructure. 
• New Brunswick is in fourth place, showing leadership with a target to electrify fleets by 2035, but is still early in its transition with only 1% of school buses being electric.
• Failing for now: Ontario and Alberta have the largest fleets in Canada, and both provinces bring up the rear with less than 1% of their fleets electrified and no clear targets or funding.

There are 1,980 electric school buses in the country currently, according to CESBA, representing just 3.8% of the total Canadian school bus fleet. Electric school bus adoption is a strategic opportunity to reinforce Canada’s industrial autonomy by anchoring domestic manufacturing and scaling homegrown technologies, the organization said in a media release. They added that in Québec, full fleet electrification could improve the provincial trade balance by $50–100 million annually. In Ontario, electrifying 65% of the fleet by 2030 could generate over 10,800 jobs and $1.5 billion in gross domestic product, with additional gains from charging infrastructure.

“We cannot simply hope that the school bus fleet will electrify by magic," said Henri Chevalier, lead author of the report and sustainable mobility advisor at Équiterre. "That a new electric model costs 2.6 times as much as a diesel model is an undeniable reality, but so is political inertia. This report card shows that, where governments decide to act with clear goals, electric buses hit the roads. Now more than ever, we need clear financial commitments from the federal government.”

Companies like Girardin Blue Bird, Lion, and Thomas Built Buses manufacture parts of their electric school buses in Canada, while many of the diesel bus manufacturers serving the Canadian market are based in the United States. But a recent announcement from New Flyer unveiled a new facility in Winnipeg set to manufacture Canadian-built electric transit buses.

Until 2025, most provinces could rely on the Federal Zero-Emission Transit Fund (ZETF) to finance the purchase of electric school buses, though ZETF did not have a stream dedicated exclusively to electric school buses and only a small portion of the ZETF was invested in electric school buses, CESBA explained in its release. Future federal investment in electric school buses is in limbo, it added: "Everyone is waiting in uncertainty to learn how much – if any – of the previously announced CPTF will be dedicated to electric school buses. This lack of clarity, along with a history of insufficient funding, undermines and delays transition planning."