Did Trudeau regime do its homework on EV rebates?
If the current Trudeau regime has proven anything, it’s that the acorn really doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Ballooning deficits? Check. Self-centred smugness? Oh, yes! A certain fondness for tossing Alberta’s economy under the bus? It almost seems programmed into their DNA.
But what I like best about the Trudeaus — pere et fils — is how their unbridled totalitarianism manages to engender such interesting — but one assumes unintended — social experiments.
The elder, for instance, gave us the only peacetime implementation of the War Measures Act.
Not to be outdone, Trudeau the younger has blessed us with the Wilson-Raybould debacle, which will tell us, come October this year, whether voters care more about virtue signalling — i.e. claiming to be pro-women and Indigenous peoples — or actual policy. And now I have a few questions about some unintended consequences of the recent budget, the part that proposes Canada’s first nationwide rebate/ subsidy/call-it-whatever-youlike on electric vehicles. It may finally answer the question that has long dogged pro- and anti-EV protagonists alike: Can EVs ever survive on their own merit?
Previous provincial governments, as everyone knows, ladled huge incentives on the EV purchaser, offering consumers as much as $13,000 for buying an electric vehicle.
Premier Doug Ford, to much fanfare/controversy/outright derision, nixed all that.
Predictably, the dissolution of the incentives hollowed out the EV market. What had grown, at its peak, to more than two per cent of Ontario’s new-car marketplace, was instantly reduced by some 80 per cent.
The question now is: With the return of the incentive — albeit now federally administered and much reduced — will sales return to the previous breakneck pace? If so, there may yet be legs to this electric vehicle revolution. If not, it will be further proof Ontarians were never actually shopping EVs, just the big rebates on offer.
If the Ginsu knives and Bowflex home gyms languishing in all our garages teach us anything, it’s that Canadians would probably buy coal-powered cars were they eligible for a $13,000 rebate.
What’s perhaps even more interesting is the Liberals’ choice of $45,000 as the break point for this subsidy. It’s horribly obvious that no one in the Liberal finance department spent even a minute researching the actual price of electric vehicles. If they had, they would have quickly determined that $45,000 was a particularly unfortunate/inconvenient/market-altering cut-off.
While some of the new major players — Nissan’s Leaf and the Chevrolet Bolt, for instance — have base MSRPs just below $45,000, their popular trim levels are all well above that. And pity poor Hyundai. The Kona Electric — hardly a “luxury” vehicle — starts at $45,599 and will not be eligible for the new federal rebate.
Do the Liberals expect automakers to reduce the price of their EVs? Unlikely. Do they hope more Canadians will buy base-model Bolts? Even more unlikely. Or did they simply not do their homework and are unaware so many popular EVs lie just outside the $45,000 cap?
Pretty much everyone agrees the cars we need to get off the road first are aging, high-emissions gas-guzzlers. And who owns said gas-guzzlers? Why, the very lower-income Canadians the Liberals purport to represent.
Perhaps if Trudeau were less concerned about virtue signalling and more with actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions, he might have incentivized low-income Canadians to trade in their rusting Chevy Impalas and Ford Crown Victorias on something far less polluting — like, say, a five-year-old Honda Civic. But methinks that might have been a social experiment too far.