Quebec Has About Half of Canada's EV Charging. A Tour of Autoroute 20 Shows Why.

Quebec is not usually mentioned in the same sentence as Norway when EV infrastructure maturity comes up. It probably should be. The province hosts roughly half of all EV charging stations in Canada, a figure that includes both Level 2 and DC fast charging. The conditions that produced this are straightforward: cheap hydroelectric power at around 10 cents Canadian per kWh at home, early political will to fund the buildout, and a provincial utility with both the mandate and the budget to make it happen. Out of Spec Roaming's host Greg, based in Montreal, takes an F-150 Lightning along Autoroute 20 between Montreal and Quebec City to document what a genuinely mature charging corridor looks like, including the largest charging site in Canada and pull-through infrastructure for trucks and trailers at rest areas.

The dominant network is Circuit Electric, owned by Hydro-Quebec. It runs ABB Terra 184 hardware throughout most of its network, a power-split setup that delivers up to 90 kW per handle and serves multiple vehicles simultaneously. Pricing is tiered by power draw and works out to around 50 cents Canadian per kWh across most sessions. Plug-and-charge is supported on most Level 3 equipment, meaning link the vehicle once and it authorizes automatically on arrival. Tesla remains the cheapest public option at 26 cents Canadian per kWh on subscription, or roughly 47 cents ad hoc, which still undercuts Circuit Electric's tiered rates. Several other networks compete at major Autoroute 20 stops: Parkland under the Mare Express brand, Kushtar (the Circle K parent, headquartered in Laval), Filgo as a Shell franchisee, and smaller regional players including Sprint and Avenue. Flow, a Quebec-based manufacturer, now produces a 320 kW charger appearing at newer Circuit Electric installations.

The tour includes two historically significant stops. The first is a rest area near St-Louis-de-Blandford, currently the largest EV charging site in Canada, with 44 chargers across Tesla Supercharger V3 equipment and Circuit Electric ABB units, including pull-through bays with 180 kW available for trucks and trailers. The second is the Madrid rest area, the original mega-charging site in Quebec, where the province's first large-scale charging buildout began about 15 years ago in partnership with a local restaurant chain. Both sites are consistently busy. The Ontario comparison runs throughout the video: Autoroute 401, one of the busiest highways in North America, remains significantly harder to road trip in an EV. Even the stretch from Montreal to Ottawa, Greg notes, has no charging infrastructure at all. The gap is not technical; it reflects how differently the two provinces have prioritized the problem.

Bottom line: This is what a province looks like after it decided to build charging rather than wait for the market to. Quebec's advantages are real, cheap power and political will, and Ontario's disadvantages are equally real. If you are planning a Canadian EV road trip, your experience on the Quebec portion will be dramatically different from anything else in the country. That gap should close eventually. It has not yet.