Toronto accountant Ian Edmonds had thought through all the usual objections to buying an electric vehicle. The range was fine. The cost made sense. That left just one problem: their downtown Toronto condo had nowhere to charge it.
"Not being able to charge at home was a major factor," Edmonds says. "The headache we were going to have trying to find public charging was more than we wanted to deal with."
So they waited, moved into a house with a driveway, and bought two EVs. Now Edmonds charges overnight on a standard wall outlet and estimates it costs him roughly four cents per 100 kilometres to drive. "It's dead simple," he says. "It's just plugging into a wall."
That simplicity — so easy for homeowners, so elusive for condo dwellers — is becoming one of the most significant structural barriers to Canada's EV transition.
While Canada’s target of 100% zero-emission new vehicle sales by 2035 was scrapped this year, the federal government has still committed billions of dollars to building a domestic EV supply chain. But the existence of a domestic EV market assumes something that currently isn't true for a large share of the population: that Canadians can charge where they live. Roughly 30% of Canadians live in condos, apartments, and other multi-unit residential buildings, and the vast majority of those buildings have zero EV charging infrastructure.
Public charging networks don't solve this. They're more expensive, less convenient, and no substitute for waking up every morning with a full battery. "When you have to go somewhere and sit for 20 minutes to charge, it's just not convenient," Edmonds says. But installing chargers in residential buildings — while often technically straightforward — can be a tedious, years-long process of consultations and squabbling.
Neil Betteridge knows this firsthand. He's a board member at a 325-unit, 36-storey condo tower in downtown Toronto. His building started exploring EV charging about five years ago. The first chargers went live in December 2025 — four years later.
"If I could tell myself something before I started," Betteridge says, "I'd say 'buckle up.'"
What followed those first requests was a full organizational project: resident surveys, government grant applications, shifting electrical standards, and repeated explanations to skeptical owners. "Proposing new ideas to condo owners and residents is like any other kind of marketing," he says. "You have to answer the same questions over and over again over several years."
The biggest sticking point was one of fairness. Condo boards are responsible to all owners, many of whom don’t drive EVs and don’t want shared funds spent on infrastructure they won’t use.
“There were concerns from residents about who was going to pay,” Betteridge says.
But even once the board was aligned, the process kept getting derailed.
Complications compounded the delay. The federal ZEVIP grant program — Natural Resources Canada's Zero-Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program, which can cover up to 50% of eligible project costs, depending on charger type and project details — went on hold for over a year while being retooled. When it reopened, the building had to resurvey residents and essentially restart. Tariff uncertainty in early 2025 sent materials costs into flux; contractor quotes were only valid for 24 hours. Chargers previously sourced from China had to be procured from Malaysia instead and rerouted, eventually arriving from Vancouver harbour.
"Having a predictable timeline around grant funding would have made a huge difference," Betteridge says. "We were kept in extended uncertainty — and 1.5 years meant a lot of do-overs."
Many of the technical barriers to installing charging infrastructure in condos and apartments has been solved. Load management software, for example, can distribute available electrical capacity across chargers based on real-time building demand, allowing a typical condo to install three to four times as many chargers without upgrading its infrastructure. Because most EVs charge overnight when the rest of the building draws minimal power, residents get full charges by morning without the building ever exceeding existing capacity.
"Most buildings assume they need a costly electrical overhaul before they can even get started," says Thomas Martin, Director of Sales Engineering at SWTCH, a Toronto-based EV charging company. "In reality, load management means a lot of that existing infrastructure can already support far more charging than people expect. We've seen buildings go from thinking they need a six-figure upgrade to realizing they don't need one at all."
SWTCH operates chargers equipped with load management technology in multifamily buildings across Canada. In one 1980s-era Toronto Condo, implementing intelligent load management leveraged the building's existing energy capacity, enabling them to support up to 40 EV chargers while saving an estimated $24,000 in extensive electrical upgrade costs.
Provincial policy is changing to speed up the charger rollout. Ontario introduced rules in 2018 that give condo owners the right to request EV chargers and limit when boards can reject them. British Columbia has gone further, lowering approval thresholds for some charging-related decisions and requiring strata corporations to plan for EV charging. Quebec is also moving on the issue, through incentives for chargers in multi-unit buildings and new building-code requirements around charging readiness.
Some buildings are moving forward on EV charging despite the roadblocks. Dean McCuaig is board president at Four Winds, a 1968-era condo in Brockville, Ontario, where the board is in the midst of a three year electrical upgrade process with an engineering firm. EV charging is a central part of the upgrade roadmap.
"Every condo has to assess the needs of its owners," McCuaig says. "But we've also got to plan for the future." He's noticed younger residents asking about charging access. He thinks about resale value — even for himself. "I'm 64, and I'd want a charger for my own parking spot just for what it does to the value of the unit."
His advice to other boards is blunt: don't survey owners only about what they need today. Think about what they'll need in two years, or what the next owner may want. Don't wait for someone to demand it. "My advice to any condo corporation is to start now," McCuaig says. "If you haven't started a plan, it's almost too late — but start.”
