Electric vehicle owners protest new tax, call for consultation
In the four years since Jerilyn Nixon first bought an electric vehicle, she has never regretted her decision.
The newly implemented electric vehicle (EV) tax, introduced in the 2021-2022 provincial budget on Tuesday, certainly isn't enough to make her wish for a regular vehicle. But she fears it may dissuade others from making the switch to cleaner energy.
“To tax when we're just starting to see more EVS coming to the province is kind of disheartening,” said Nixon, who is a board member with the Saskatchewan Electric Vehicle Association (SEVA). “It seems to put almost a damper on anything green.”
Nixon was one of around a dozen people who gathered in a physically distant manner near the Legislative Building Saturday afternoon with their EVS, quietly protesting the EV tax.
The tax is $150 per year for each passenger EV — a tax Joel Murray, vice president of the Tesla Owners Club of Saskatchewan, said the province's EV owners were not consulted about.
When the tax was first introduced, Finance Minister Donna Harpauer defended it as a way for the province to make sure both EV drivers and drivers of internal-combustion vehicles are paying to support highway maintenance. Most drivers already pay for this through a tax on fuel.
Murray is not even necessarily against the tax, although he said it does feel a little early in the game for such a move. Rather, he wants government to consult with EV owners instead of just making a decision to keep or axe the tax.
“We're happy to pay for our fair share of the road, but there's a lot of highways that we actually can't get to because there's no fast chargers to get us there, so we're all willing to pay, but we want to be able to actually get to the highways they're charging us to use,” Murray said.
“If they're very set on creating a new tax, we would like it to go toward infrastructure that electric vehicles can use.”
At the same time, around 10 people drove their EVS through Saskatoon's downtown in a rally organized by SEVA to raise awareness of the tax.
Jason Cruickshank, the organization's president, is also concerned the tax will discourage people from switching their current vehicles for electric ones, and would prefer to see the province introduce an incentive for EVS.
“It's important to bring attention to the fact that this is the first EV tax in Canada, and that's really the opposite of the direction that we want to be moving in here in Saskatchewan,” he said.
“We're seeing so many other provinces have incentives for EV adoption, or having utilities, adding EV fast charging infrastructure to their provincial highways and roads so that EV drivers can actually make use of them.”
Cruickshank said he wants to see the province work with Saskpower to build more fast charging stations throughout the province, giving EV owners more access to smaller communities and rural areas. He said other provinces have already been working with their own power companies to make this happen.