Federal Budget: Green Car Rebate
March 2nd, 2008 by PotatoThe big news making the rounds from the budget announcement has been the tax free savings account, which does sound kind of neat, but has been covered in incredible detail elsewhere. Hidden behind that newsmaker was the announcement that the green car feebate program, barely a year old, was going to be scrapped. That seems like a dumb idea to me, especially since the program looked to have just started working. While there are (and were) issues with a discrete cut-off like this, it was enough to encourage some manufacturers to make just enough of a change to drop down a tier. It was enough to get people to think about fuel efficiency. And, for those buying a hybrid, it was enough of an incentive to buy it in Canada rather than cross the border to take advantage of the strong Loonie (or escape the fleecing of local auto pricing). After the initial pangs of administering a new program from scratch, it sounds like the rebates had just started to flow smoothly from the government coffers.
It’s doubly stupid to cancel it now because it was really the only piece of effective environmental action the Cons have put out there…