The cancellation of the Cap…

The cancellation of the Cap and Trade program also unfortunately has side effects of ending the Ontario Electric and Hydrogen Vehicle Incentive Program (EHVIP) and the Green Ontario Fund which help Ontarians make their home more energy-efficient and acquire vehicle that pollute the environment less and improve the health of Ontarians from lower air pollution. If the Cap and Trade program is ended, alternate funding solutions need to be found in order to keep these important programs running.

Ending the Cap and Trade program which has also ended the EHVIP program in favour of lowering gas prices by 10 cents a litre will only promote more use of gasoline based vehicles which will in turn pollute more and cause more health issues for Ontarians. By making electric vehicles more affordable however, Ontarian consumers will save up to ten times the cost of gasoline by using electricity at low peak rates. My family will go from paying $350/month for gasoline ($1.25/L) to $32/month in electricity ($0.065/kWh) to drive 24,000 km a year. This translates into roughly $20,000 in savings over an 8 year life-span of the vehicle compared to gasoline, much more than reducing the cost of gas by $0.10/litre which only saves $1500 over the same 8 year time period. If the Ontario government really cared about Ontario consumers saving money on transportation, they would help people transition to electric vehicles.

The ending of the EHVIP due to cancelling the Cap and Trade program has had a major financial impact on my family. Premier Ford stated there would be an orderly shutdown to these programs and that contracts already in place would be honoured. It seems neither of these statements was true. We ordered our electric vehicle before the government even took power and before the cancellation of the EHVIP was announced so we expected our contract to honoured and be able to submit our rebate. Yet a very short period of 2 months to receive your vehicle and have it registered and plated was imposed after which people could not submit their rebate requests, even though vehicle manufacturers at the time had 3-6 month wait times before they could deliver vehicles already ordered. The Premier and Minister of Transportation should honour contracts that were made before the July 11th announcement of the shutdown of the rebate program for all manufacturers. That would be the fair and proper thing to do. The safety of Ontario consumers should also be of the upmost importance to the Ontario Government and the government should also allow manufacturers who had models that would have qualified for the rebate and meet all the requirements of the rebate program that were available for order before July 11th (such as models already listed on the eligible vehicle list that are identical except that have All-Wheel-Drive (AWD) for additional safety in Canadian winters) to have those models added to the eligible vehicle list. People like myself do have contracts to purchase such vehicles before the shutdown of the program was announced on July 11th but the MTO hadn't had time to add it to the eligible vehicle list before it was frozen.

Please do the right thing and honour contracts people already had in place for the EHVIP program to provide at least 1 year to register and plate their vehicles, and allow the Ministry of Transportation (MTO) to add vehicles to the eligible vehicle list that could be ordered before the July 11th shutdown. Find new funding sources to continue both the EHVIP program and Green Ontario Fund to help improve the health of both Ontarians but also the environment in which we all live.