Another school year has begun, and thousands of polluting yellow buses are rolling out across the country — producing almost 300 million cigarettes worth of emissions annually in Ontario alone

It’s a typical mid-week morning: a nonstop scramble to get the kids, pets and yourself ready for the day.

Lunches are made, bags are packed and everyone is at the bus stop or in the school parking lot.

You’ve made a last minute swipe to smooth someone’s bedhead or scrape milk off a sticky lip when the telltale rumble of the school bus approaches.

Brakes squealing, it stops alongside your children and, tailpipe level with their faces, belches out a toxic cloud of nitrogen dioxide, fine particulate matter and carcinogenic emissions.

For two million children in Canada, this is the twice-a-day, Monday-to-Friday routine for 10 months of the year. Experts say inaction from government and industry around transitioning school buses to zero-emission vehicles is putting kids in danger.

“Traffic-related air pollution from sources like diesel exhaust has been linked to asthma, impeding the development of children’s lungs, and in some cases, premature death,” reads a 2023 report by the Canadian Electric School Bus Alliance, Pathways for Canadian Electric School Bus Adoption.

“School bus passengers are particularly susceptible to the harmful effects of diesel exhaust as levels of air pollution are typically higher inside the bus than they are outside.”

Yet despite this reality, today there are only about 1,300 electric school buses on the road in Canada out of a fleet of over 50,000, according to Équiterre.

“That’s less than 1 per cent of the total existing fleet,” reads a 2023 press release from the Quebec-based environmental activism organization.

Ambition spotty, programs ineffective

Why are we stuck here?

Unlike some jurisdictions in North America, the Canadian government has not set a specific target to transition combustion school buses to zero-emission vehicles.

At a provincial level, only Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island (PEI) and Quebec have set adoption targets:

• Quebec wants to electrify 65 per cent of its school bus fleet by 2030;
• Newfoundland wants to transition up to 326 school buses;
• Nova Scotia up to 1,300;
• New Brunswick up to 1,250 school buses; and
• PEI has been directed to only purchase electric school buses (it already has just over 100 in its fleet out of 300), but, this year, it chose to replace 30 aging buses with new diesel ones because the funding for electric school busses did not materialize from the federal government’s ZETF.

Josipa Petrunic, president and CEO of the Canadian Urban Transit Research & Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC), wants provinces, which oversee education and public health, to do more.

“There is a role for all provinces to step into their education departments and declare that school buses are a source of emissions — and not just polluting, but health-damaging emissions,” says Petrunic.

“The reality is the amount of lung cancer and shortened lives and all of the myriad problems that come from breathing in smog…If you actually add up those health care costs, it would be astronomical.”

(This year Harvard released new research estimating that each bus transitioned to zero emissions could result in US$207,200 savings in health benefits.)

To date, most of the impetus for electric school bus adoption has come through federal programs — but with limited success.

In 2021, for example, the federal government pledged to have 5,000 zero-emission buses on the road by 2026 — including school buses. To facilitate this, $2.4 billion in federal funding is available through the Zero Emission Transit Fund (ZETF) to support fleets looking to transition.

But, so far, little of the ZETF funding has gone towards electric school buses, while transit authorities are receiving billions of dollars to transition to zero-emission buses.

(Electric Autonomy contacted ZETF for specific information on how much money had been given to electric school bus projects, but did not receive a response in time for publication.)

But Patrick Gervais, vice president of truck and commercial development in Canada at Quebec-based electric school bus manufacturer, Lion Electric, believes the ZETF issues are down to a structural problem with the fund that makes it unfriendly to school bus fleets.

“It was built for transit…and it’s not working out because it’s taking too long. The approach is different. [School bus operators] need predictability, visibility. They need to know what’s going to be the amount of money that they’re going to get.”

CIB having some success

The other major federal player on this front is the Canada Infrastructure Bank. It says it is working “in close partnership” with the ZETF as it, too, supports the adoption of zero-emission buses with its own $1.5-billion fund.

“Diesel buses significantly contribute to carbon emissions across the country and there is an important opportunity to transform the school bus market to electric,” reads a statement from Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB) CEO, Ehren Corey, earlier this year.

This commitment from leadership seems to be making a difference. In an email to Electric Autonomy, the agency reports that, so far, it has contributed $495 million in repayable loans for over 4,400 electric school buses.

Most recently, in June, the CIB reached an agreement for a $22.4-million investment into Langs Bus Lines Ltd. to help it procure 200 electric school buses to deploy in southwestern Ontario by 2026.

Langs operates buses, vans and mobility accessible vehicles for student transportation in London, Sarnia, Chatham-Kent and Woodstock.

And, in May, the CIB pledged up to $50 million in a loan to Highland Electric Fleets, a turnkey electric school bus provider, to buy 500 electric school buses. Highland will lease electric buses to school transportation providers and school boards across the country.

Before that, in 2022, the CIB invested $400 million into electric school bus adoption in Quebec as part of a 3,500 zero-emission school bus purchase.

Ontario’s school bus fleet

Among the provinces, Ontario is the elephant in the room. Its school bus fleet represents 40 per cent of Canada’s total. Yet uptake of electric school buses in the province is minuscule, according to data gathered exclusively by Electric Autonomy.

This is due to a number of factors says, Miriam Ponette, sustainable mobility lead at the Canadian Electric School Bus Alliance (CESBA), in an email to Electric Autonomy. One of the primary ones is fragmentation in way the school bus system operates in the province.

“There are approximately 150 private fleet operators under contract to the school boards who operate 99 per cent of Ontario’s school buses, ranging from small, family-run operations to large companies,” says Ponette.

“On average, each STB [Student Transportation Board] contracts the services of 28 different operators, with some STBs hiring as few as four firms while others hire as many as 81 different firms.”

There are roughly 20,833 diesel and gas school buses in Ontario’s school bus fleet.

Petrunic says, based on emissions estimates, that the total Ontario fleet is responsible for approximately 400,000 tonnes of emissions each year.

At the individual vehicle level that equates to 19.2 tonnes of emissions per school bus, per year in Ontario.

For scale, the average cigarette produces 1.39 grams of emissions. If a single school bus’s emissions for the year were represented in cigarettes smoked it would reach nearly 14 million.

For the entire Ontario fleet, that number balloons to nearly 300 billion cigarettes.

“One thing government could do, that we’re certainly trying to do at CUTRIC now, is to put a price tag on what I call the dead babies number,” says Petrunic.

“How many dead babies, how many infertile women, how many heart attacks, how much asthma comes directly from…not altering transportation?”

On the back foot

While there is pressure on the province to lead by example, government and school transportation providers remain on the back foot when it comes to adopting zero-emission school buses.

“I’ve always said that the success of electrification comes with legislation, incentives and the development of the supply chain, but most of all, the fourth point, is speed,” says Gervais.

“Ontario doesn’t have any of these things.”

Earlier this year, Electric Autonomy submitted an access to information request about “Any reports and/or studies commissioned by or submitted to the Ministry of Education between 2018/01/01 and 2024/04/11 regarding the health impacts of diesel/internal combustion engine school buses and/or regarding the adoption of zero-emission school buses in Ontario as well as any recommendations related to the report/study.”

The response from the Ministry of Education (the provincial ministry responsible for student transportation) was that no records exist.

However, in 2023, environmental organization Pollution Probe released a report titled, “An Electric School Bus Strategy for Ontario.”

In the report, researchers lay out a series of recommendations to the government to advance adoption. The report states: “Some contaminants in diesel exhaust, such as fine particulate matter (PM2.5) have no safe level of exposure…sensitive groups such as children, the elderly, and asthmatics are at much greater risk. Diesel exhaust is a human carcinogen.”

Cedric Smith is the director of transportation at Pollution Probe. He was involved in the study and believes the report was submitted to some departments in the government and agrees that, despite some obvious benefits, when it comes to electric school bus uptake in Ontario, there has been “less activity” than other provinces.

“A lot of people aren’t really willing to learn about them. I would agree that there’s urgency to it, but I think there’s also challenges,” says Smith, in an interview with Electric Autonomy.

“It’s a sector that makes sense to tackle earlier on in the transition and then a lot of the lessons learned…can be applied to long haul and the more difficult to electrify segments. But that doesn’t mean it’s a walk in the park either.”

Industry response

Electric Autonomy reached out to all 36 school board transportation consortiums — the bodies responsible for awarding contracts and coordinating student transportation between multiple school boards — in the province.

The consortiums answered questions about their experiences with and efforts to integrate electric school buses into their fleets.

The findings paint a bleak picture of adoption in the province with just four of the 36 consortiums ever having electric buses — often no more than one as part of a 2018 pilot — in their fleet.

When asked about concerns or challenges regarding electric school bus adoption, consortium representatives pointed to high purchase costs and doubt that electric buses would be able to perform to the same level as their combustion counterparts.

“There’s not enough Canada pilots that are being done that generate the information that fleet owners and operators need,” says Smith.

“The importance of continuing to have pilots of these vehicles across Canada [is] making sure that any difficulties or issues that come up can get fixed. Through fixing those difficulties you start building up a knowledge bank.”

Actions to take

Dan Rutabingwa Gakire is the climate program coordinator at Ecology Ottawa. He spends much of his time liaising with government to try and push forward electric bus uptake.

His message about combustion buses is simple: “It’s a death trap for school kids.”

Last year, Rutabingwa Gakire was part of a team monitoring air quality in dozens of locations around Ottawa, including around schools.

“We really got some bad measurements from there. It’s concerning,” says Rutabingwa Gakire. “I feel outraged.”

Ecology Ottawa has, like Pollution Probe, made a number of recommendations to government including conducting more electric school bus pilots, improving public transportation generally and providing more funding to support adoption.

From his perspective, the efforts have not yielded many results in Ontario.

“The government is just not supportive. I don’t know why,” says Rutabingwa Gakire.

Even from the grassroots advocacy groups there appear to be few voices pushing for electrification.

“In Canada, we don’t have [many] groups of parents that are mobilizing themselves. If parents would support more and parents would support and it would certainly have an impact,” says Gervais.

“But to me when you want people to follow it needs to come from the government. I think the government should should set the goals and at least educate and let people know the reason they are doing it.”

Smith, Petrunic and Ponette all share similar views to Rutabingwa Gakire with respect to what the government must do to incentivize and accelerate electric school bus adoption for willing operators.

“I’m pretty sure that most school bus operators, if they could have electric buses tomorrow, they would in principle,” says Petrunic.

Gervais agrees, saying in his experience, “There’s a willingness to go electric. They do want it.”

But it comes down to money and a chicken-and-egg problem: do governments keep funding the ever-increasing effect of pollutants or do they shift funds from short-term solutions to a long-term plan to treat a cause?

“We’re talking about the kind of transition that would start to compete, over time, with the kind of money we spend on healthcare,” says Petrunic.

“There is a role for all provinces to step into their education departments and declare that school buses are a source of emissions, and particularly not just polluting, but health-damaging emissions. Will it cost a lot of money? Absolutely. It is a political choice and a substantial generational choice.”