What a fly-in First Nation in northern Manitoba understands about EV charging that the rest of the industry is still learning
At an EV forum in 2024, a man named Ron stood up. He lived in Nelson House, about 100 kilometres north of Thompson, Manitoba. He’d just learned about electric vehicles – the cost savings, the performance, the emissions reduction – and he was convinced. He wanted to buy one and drive it home.
He couldn’t. There were no chargers on the route.
Kent Heinrich, founder of the MB/ON Free Ride EV Education Program, was in the room. “Well, now I have a goal,” he thought. “Now, let’s make it so Ron can get an EV.”
The answer turned out to be simpler than the industry has made it. Three charging stations. 761 kilometres of corridor opened. First Nations communities suddenly able to participate in the EV transition they’d been locked out of, not because they didn’t want electric vehicles, but because the infrastructure wasn’t built for them.
This is the story the EV charging industry should be studying. Not because it’s heartwarming, though it is, but because it reveals what happens when you build infrastructure with communities instead of at them: when you align charging with where people actually live, work, sleep, and travel, and the goal is enabling transportation, not extracting revenue.
The Infrastructure Gap Nobody Talks About
Indigenous communities have long endured boil water advisories, fragile electricity, and challenging access. The disparity isn’t new. What’s new is the risk that the EV transition recreates the same pattern: urban-focused, extraction-oriented, controlled by external operators who profit from communities without serving them.
The conventional model would put DC fast chargers on Highway 6 between Winnipeg and Thompson, charge premium prices, require app downloads and account creation and payment processing, extract data, and optimize revenue per session building infrastructure that communities depend on but don’t control.
Heinrich and his partners, including Chief Raymond Flett from St. Theresa Point First Nation, took a different approach. The Northern Gateway Project installed three charging stations along the 761-kilometre route on Provincial Trunk Highway 6, at Fairford, Grand Rapids, and Wabowden, all on First Nations lands. Not premium DC fast charging designed for 15-minute stops. Level 2 charging at community locations with existing electrical service; places people already visit for reasons other than charging, because that’s the entire point of activity-aligned infrastructure.
What St. Theresa Point Figured Out
St. Theresa Point is a fly-in community in northern Manitoba with no road access. If the conventional wisdom were correct, that EVs only work with extensive highway networks and urban density, it should be the last place to implement electric transportation. Instead, it became one of the first, installing EV chargers and operating a community EV transit system.
The community didn’t wait for a private network to decide their market was profitable. They built infrastructure that serves members where they live and move. This is activity-aligned charging in its purest form: vehicles charge where they’re stored, and the infrastructure serves the community’s actual transportation patterns rather than a pattern imposed by external operators trying to maximize extraction.
And it works. As Heinrich noted, the idea was met with skepticism at first, but after relationship building and knowledge sharing, adoption began. The skepticism wasn’t about technology. It was about trust, about whether this transition would be done to communities or with them, whether the infrastructure would serve people or surveil them.
The Education Model That Should Be Standard
The MB/ON Free Ride EV Education Program isn’t a marketing campaign. It’s capacity building. The program developed Indigenous-language EV teaching materials for elementary-aged children, including an electric car colouring book written in Cree, Dakota, Anishininew, and Ojibwe. It created a digital hub to help First Nations access funding, organized conferences where community members could interact with different EV models, and provides administrative support for complex funding applications.
This matters because access to infrastructure isn’t just about physical charging stations. It’s about access to information, to capital, to the knowledge required to make informed decisions about energy transition. The dominant industry model treats information as leverage: pricing is opaque, data collection is hidden in privacy policies, and the technology is positioned as complex, requiring expert intermediaries. The community-focused model treats information as a public good: knowledge is shared, funding pathways are demystified, and the technology is made accessible through education in languages people actually speak.
The program partnered with Heinrich and Chief Flett to empower First Nations Elders, Chiefs and Councils, committee members, educators, and Indigenous peoples broadly. The word choice matters: empower, not sell to. This is infrastructure development that increases community capacity and control, not dependence on external operators.
Why Remote Communities Prove the Model
If activity-aligned charging works in fly-in communities with fragile electrical grids, it works everywhere. The challenges are greater in remote regions: higher infrastructure costs, limited electrical capacity, smaller populations to amortize investment, extreme weather, supply chain complexity. If the model pencils out there, and it does, then the barriers in urban and suburban markets are mostly artificial. Urban drivers already have home, workplace, and destination charging options the industry pretends don’t exist because they’re harder to monetize than captive roadside fast charging. The electrical service exists. The dwell time is already happening. The question isn’t technical feasibility. It’s business model alignment.
Three chargers opened 761 kilometres because of range. Modern EVs don’t need charging every 100 kilometres; they need it at logical stopping points where people were already planning to be. Fairford, Grand Rapids, and Wabowden aren’t arbitrary points on a map. They’re communities with services, amenities, and reasons to stop beyond plugging in. The industry obsession with DC fast charging assumes people want to minimize charging time at dedicated stops, but that’s only true if charging is a dedicated stop. If it happens at breakfast, at the hotel overnight, at the community centre during a meeting, speed becomes less relevant than convenience and cost.
Compare three chargers and a modest investment to the hundreds of millions poured into urban DC fast-charging networks that sit underutilized because drivers with 500+ km of range charge at home overnight or at destinations during daily activities. The remote communities aren’t behind. They’re ahead. They skipped the extractive infrastructure phase and went straight to the model that actually serves people.
The Expansion Already Happening
The Misipawistik Cree Nation, Pinaymootang First Nation, and Pimicikamak Cree Nation have also installed DC fast chargers, further enabling EV travel between Winnipeg and Thompson. The model is replicating not because Heinrich is selling franchises or licensing technology, but because communities see it working and adapt it to their contexts. Some install Level 2. Some install DC fast charging where the use case justifies it. The common thread is community control: infrastructure that serves local transportation needs rather than optimizing extraction from travelers passing through.
This is what equitable deployment looks like. Not a private operator deciding which markets are profitable enough to serve, but communities determining their own infrastructure priorities and accessing the resources to implement them. The program’s focus on funding-application support and administrative capacity matters precisely because infrastructure access shouldn’t depend on navigating complex bureaucracy without help. Information asymmetry is a barrier. Eliminating it is infrastructure.
What the Industry Is Still Missing
One profile cast Heinrich as part tourist, part evangelist on a road trip west from Winnipeg. The framing is revealing. Evangelism suggests converting non-believers, but the communities Heinrich works with aren’t resistant to EVs. They’re resistant to being exploited by EV infrastructure operators.
The industry measures success in utilization rates, revenue per charger, network size. The community model measures success in access, autonomy, and alignment with actual needs. Both build infrastructure. Only one builds capacity.
The Carbon Credit Connection
There’s a business model that aligns with this approach: monetize the environmental benefit, not the consumer. Canada’s Clean Fuel Regulations create credit value from emissions displacement, and EV charging generates those credits. The revenue comes from carbon markets, not from maximizing what each driver can be convinced to pay at the point of transaction.
This changes incentives completely. In a consumer-extraction model, the operator profits by charging more, which creates pressure to identify when drivers are desperate and extract accordingly. In a carbon-credit model, the operator profits by enabling more charging, which creates pressure to make charging as accessible and frictionless as possible. Free charging funded by carbon credits eliminates the surveillance infrastructure entirely: no payment processing, no account creation, no data harvesting, no algorithmic pricing optimizing extraction based on inferred desperation.
This is the model Plunk EV operates on, and it’s structurally similar to what community-controlled infrastructure achieves. The communities building EV infrastructure through the program aren’t doing it to profit from travelers. They’re doing it to give their members access to cleaner, cheaper transportation. The incentive structure already aligns with access over extraction.
The Transition We Should Be Building
The conventional narrative goes: build DC fast-charging corridors first, fill in destination charging later as a convenience amenity. Urban before rural. High-traffic before low-traffic. Profitable before equitable. The Northern Gateway corridor flips this. Build destination and community infrastructure first. Enable the 90% of driving that isn’t long-distance highway travel. Let people charge where they already spend time. Then, where it’s actually needed, add corridor fast charging for the remaining use cases.
This isn’t slower. It’s smarter. Level 2 costs a fraction of DC fast charging, requires minimal electrical upgrades, and can be deployed at thousands of locations for the capital cost of dozens of DC fast chargers. It serves the use case that actually matters for mass adoption: daily, routine, incidental charging aligned with normal activities. The industry is still building infrastructure for yesterday’s problem of 200 km range and range anxiety. The communities are building for today’s reality of 600+ km range and the need for charging that fits seamlessly into daily life.
Free turns out to be honest. Activity-aligned turns out to be effective. Community-controlled turns out to be equitable. Ron from Nelson House should be able to buy an EV and drive it home … not because a private network decided his route was profitable, but because his community and the communities along the route built infrastructure that serves their members. He can drive his car home now. That’s the transition we should be building. Everywhere.
