Death to Drive Clean

Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prizewinning economist once said, “nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

That sentiment can be perfectly applied to Ontario’s controversial Drive Clean program. Introduced in 1999, Drive Clean was to be a temporary program aimed to get the worst-polluting vehicles off the road.

But here we are, nearly 20 years later and Drive Clean is still forcing everyone with a car that’s more than a few years old to drive to an emissions-testing facility in order to renew their licence plates. (And usually right around their birthday, just to make it even more of a drag.)

That is, until Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced a smart, evidence-based decision to cancel Drive Clean for light-duty vehicles last week.

From 1999 to 2010, the percentage of vehicles that failed emissions testing in Ontario had dropped from 16 per cent to five per cent.

And that’s where we are today. Virtually every lightduty vehicle on the road — 95 per cent — passes the emissions test. Mission accomplished, I’d say.

In 2014, British Columbia eliminated its mandatory emissions-testing regime, citing better emission-control technology and steadily falling failure rates. At the time, eight per cent of vehicles on the road in B.C. were failing the test.

In 2012, Ontario’s thenauditor general, Jim McCarter, reported that Drive Clean’s impact on reducing vehicle emissions was dwindling. He said:

“Vehicle emissions have declined significantly since Drive Clean’s inception in 1999, to the point that they are no longer among the major domestic contributors to smog in Ontario. As well, Ministry estimates show that more than 75 per cent of the reduction in vehicle emissions is actually due to things like better manufacturing standards for emission-control equipment and federal requirements for cleaner fuel.”

The auditor general also reported the Liberal government of the day was coming close to making Drive Clean an “unlawful tax.” That’s because the test fee collected by Drive Clean is a user fee. However a 1998 Supreme Court of Canada decision ruled that such fees “cannot exceed the cost to the government of providing the service.” If that were the case with Drive Clean, and a court deemed it so, the auditor general believed that the Drive Clean surplus could be considered an illegal tax and would be “therefore repayable.”

In 2014, things went from bad to worse.

The auditor general’s followup report on Drive Clean said “At the time of our followup, we found that the Ministry still had not established quantifiable targets and performance measures for all four of its key goals” which include:

Reducing vehicle-related emissions of smog-causing pollutants;

Attaining a high degree of public acceptance;

Achieve revenue neutrality over the program’s lifespan, with full cost recovery via test fees; and

Maintaining business integrity (zero tolerance for fraud).

It is clear what’s happened over time. Drive Clean went from cleaning the environment to cleaning out taxpayers’ wallets.

Too often in government, nothing changes because “that’s the way we’ve always done it.”

Thankfully, Premier Ford has chosen not to follow this predictable thinking and has instead chosen to permanently retire Drive Clean. Doing so will save time and money for everyone.

IT WENT FROM CLEANING THE ENVIRONMENT TO CLEANING OUT TAXPAYERS.