The Canadian government has frozen the C$43 million worth of Tesla rebates that were all apparently filed over one weekend after Canada announced that it wouldn’t be refilling the EV incentive program’s budget.
“As soon as I became Transport Minister, I asked the department to stop all payments for Tesla vehicles in order to fully examine each claim individually and determine whether all are eligible and valid. No payments will be made until we are confident that the claims are valid,” said Chrystia Freeland to Global News in an email.
She also clarified that Tesla would be barred from future federal EV incentives in retaliation to the current trade war with the U.S. That said, there is currently no talk of reinstating the federal EV rebate and since the Liberal government under Mark Carney appears to be taking a more fiscal approach to government, I would be surprised to see more green incentives return in the future.
It should also be noted that throughout this investigation, the Toronto Star has also discovered that there was a lot of grey area in the rules governing the rebate leading up to its conclusion in January. The publication says that originally, the rules on the EV rebate website said that all rebates need to be filed before the delivery of the vehicle. Then, at some point, the wording changed after it was revealed Tesla had (maybe?) broken the rules to allow incentives to be added after delivery. It also appears that the section of the page that tracks changes hasn’t been updated even though the writing has been updated.
For those unfamiliar, the federal government announced in mid-January that the EV incentive fund was running out and only had $71 million left. That was on a Friday, and by Monday the government shared that the fund had run dry. Leading out of that, it was discovered that four specific Tesla dealerships had claimed over 60 per cent of the remaining funds over the one weekend.
Since then, there have been theories of mismanaged government funds, Tesla bending the rules to back-date claims and many others.
Source: Global News, Toronto Star
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