Canada is long overdue for lemon law for consumers

Dealers will also benefit if requirements are clearly laid out, Lorraine Sommerfeld says.

Does Canada need a lemon law? What’s the actual number of cars sold that are lemons? Who knows?

Cars aren’t toasters or refrigerators. We’ve come to accept the planned obsolescence of appliances that once used to last for decades. Cars, on the other hand, have improved in both reliability and efficiency, and we rightly expect them to perform long past their warranty date.

Buying a new car shouldn’t be a gamble, but as a British Columbia woman recently found out, even if you buy a popular model from a major manufacturer, it’s no guarantee you won’t be faced with some unique challenges.

Sarah Timmins bought a new 2018 Ford Escape Titanium not long ago, and has experienced a string of problems.

With just 14,000 kilometres on the vehicle, it has been in the shop for four straight months. She’s calling for a lemon law. “Warranty law is a provincial area of responsibility under our constitution. No province has a lemon law,” explains George Iny, president of the Automobile Protection Association (APA). He mentions that in the past, both Ontario and British Columbia had drafts of lemon laws made, but nothing got out of the blocks.

Iny believes dealers shot themselves in the foot when they pushed back against establishing a lemon law. Buyers sometimes forget that although they may buy from a dealer, their warranty is with the manufacturer.

When everything is going well, that line is hazy and rarely questioned. But when something slides off the rails, it devolves into a game of who did what, when, so sorry, not my problem.

Dealers should want a lemon law so they can effectively, definitively and quickly help their customers.

If you write to me asking for direction with a car you’re having issues with, looking to CAMVAP is one of the few things I can tell you to do. I also know as I say it how difficult it will be to get satisfactory results. The Canadian Motor Vehicle Arbitration Plan sounds promising, but it’s no panacea for several reasons.

CAMVAP is supposed to provide a fair sounding board for a consumer who believes they have a lemon, to have it bought back or to otherwise be made whole by the manufacturer.

Their results show about

30 per cent of their outcomes result in a buyback (adjusted for depreciation), another 30 per cent result in further repairs or recompense for previous repairs, and the balance the manufacturers win, so the complainant goes home empty-handed.

Manufacturers opt into the program, and money paid out for repairs or buybacks comes from that group fund. Mitsubishi, BMW and Mini are not part of the program, so CAMVAP is not an option for those owners.

“CAMVAP is not a secure option for returning a defective vehicle, precisely because it lacks a definition of what a lemon is,” Iny says. “CAMVAP is a good place to ask for a car repair.”

If you opt to go to CAMVAP for arbitration, you give up your right to sue in court.

CAMVAP is a federal program, and the obvious place from which to start the ball rolling on a lemon law for Canada.

“A lemon definition at CAMVAP could go a long way to addressing the existing unequal bargaining power,” he says.

What’s a reasonable number of times for a manufacturer to try to rectify the same problem? What’s an unreasonable length of time for an owner to be without their car? A clearly defined law, laying all these requirements out, would go a long way to helping consumers and dealers alike.

Canada needs a lemon law.