Ontario premier Doug Ford says the province will not bring back EV rabates, despite a lag in sales in the province. “I’m not going to give rebates to guys that are buying $100,000 cars — millionaires,” he told the CBC this week.
But that notion has been hurting EV sales in Ontario. When Ford took office in 2018, one of his PC government’s first actions was to erase the $14,000 EV rebate brought in by the previous Liberal government. And since then, according to a new study by IHS Markit, electric vehicle sales in Ontario have fallen behind those of other provinces offering incentives up to the third quarter of 2021.
Of all the provinces with EV incentives, British Columbia leads the country with 13 per cent market share, with Quebec just behind at 9.9 per cent. Yukon has 4.7 per cent and Prince Edward Island has 4.1 per cent. Ontario, once a leader in BEV market share when it offered the incentive, is last with just 3.1 per cent.
The study finds that overall Canadian market share of BEVs is at 5.3 per cent through the first three quarters of this year. And comparing Q3 this year to the same time in 2020, BEV registrations jumped by 18,055, a 67 per cent increase in sales. When it comes to individual cities, Vancouver echos its province’s lead with a 15.6 market share, while Montreal has 10.9 per cent adoption of EVs. Toronto has just 4 per cent market share of all vehicles registered.
