Ottawa freezes Tesla’s $43-million rebate payments, bars it from future rebates because of tariffs
Ottawa freezes Tesla’s $43-million rebate payments, bars it from future rebates because of tariffs
www.thestar.com
Canada freezes Tesla’s $43-million rebate payments, bars it from future rebates because of tariffs
Archive is currently down so paywall bypass link unavailable.
That's the critical part. Tesla is being investigated for fraud and for allegedly abusing the EV rebate program, costing taxpayers millions of dollars.
They shouldn't be given a penny because of that. But also, because Canada doesn't support Nazis anyway 🤭
Somebody should be going to prison... Local "Business leaders" 🤡
Collaborators
We dislike Nazis so much we even renamed Berlin, Ontario to Windsor
You mean Kitchener
If I'm not mistaken the program had a set budget so the money would have been spent either way, it's just that Tesla had tons of claims pending and they submitted all of them at once when dealers were told the program would end.
That's my understanding of the situation anyway...
The OP article is paywalled, so I can't read it, but this one expands more on the issue.
For instance, "four Tesla stores claimed roughly 8,600 sales in one weekend from January 10 through 12, just hours after the feds announced the rebate program would be paused when it ran out of money."
Red flag.
"Speaking as a person who once toiled in the dealership environment, this author will say it is not unheard of for the business office to backdate an occasional deal in order to make some sort of quota or qualify for a volume bonus. One or two machines recorded for yesterday instead of today isn’t generally the end of the world.
But the level of alleged chicanery on display at these Tesla stores seems egregious, particularly since it involves massive amounts of money from the public purse."
Very questionable, indeed.
Why would those stores wait to submit those claims, assuming that's the explanation? They risked not getting the rebates at all, and it makes no sense to hold on to thousands of claims like that, regardless.
Then you get this report:
“Keep in mind that Tesla is struggling when it comes to sales in Canada right now,” Carscoops writes. “According to the National Post, deliveries nosedived some 70 percent between December 2024 and January 2025. When the Canadian government announced that it would soon end electric vehicle subsidies, it was expected that Tesla would see a small bump up in sales. However, a giant spike like this is a different ballgame altogether.”
How many red flags do we need?
I hope the findings of the investigation are made available to the public.
No they claimed thousands of sales in one weekend.
Does Tesla have independent dealers in Canada, or is it company owned showrooms like in the US?
If it's the latter like I recall, then that would indicate that Tesla was sitting on them (not random local dealers) and only submitted them at the last moment.
That's their claim, yes. I'm skeptical personally, but that's what the investigation is for.
Dealerships are commission environments. They don't pay their people until that rebate comes through.
At times they'll hold back one or two sales to apply for the rebate at the beginning of the next month. This happens when a dealership has had a particularly good month and has already hit its quota to get its incentive bonus from Ford/Chrysler/Etc... so they might as well bank them for the next month.
But never in a million years would they hold back $56000 in rebates. Their salesmen would riot.
Source: Slogged in that hellpit of a career for two years before getting out.
Assuming it was fraudulent of course.
From the info I saw posted a few days after this whole something started with actual info... The same situation could also be explained by Tesla not submitting claims as they come, instead submitting them as a group after there were comments about the funding starting to end, therefore putting a deadline on submissions. Which would also make sense. Large companies paying and submitting claims for things in bulk on longer cycles like quarterly is very common.
I haven't specifically looked up more info recently though, so there may be new stuff that came out that slipped through my feed.
Yes, that's possible. That's why there's an ongoing investigation.
These are not large companies, these are car dealerships. They operate and submit those independently from each other. And when they submit the form, they state when the sale was made. That's how the investigation came to be, because they stated a surge of sales.
The simplest explanation is they registered sales that they intended to make later, just to get the rebates while it was still possible, which is fraud.
When you defend criminal behaviour then back-track with an "I'm just askin'", let me ask you - have you stopped beating your spouse? I'm just askin'.
When you start trying to find excuses and possible explanations, a Nazi salute may as well be a high 5...
Don't try to find a way out for them. Let them do the work.
I think you missed the point. Because of how they submitted these claims ("by the book" or not), they screwed over all other local dealers as a result.
"This left more than 200 independently owned Canadian auto dealers out of pocket approximately $10 million after they fronted rebates to customers and were not able to file for reimbursement. The Star spoke with four dealers who were all out more than $100,000 and were considering layoffs as a result."
And then you read...
"Tesla has been the biggest recipient of Canadian EV rebates, claiming $713 million since 2019."
No more subsidizing this asshole. They want to talk about Canada being subsidized by the States? He's the one being subsidized!