Wynne zaps taxpayers with electric car costs

The Ontario government's efforts to get motorists to switch to electric vehicles through public subsidies have been a failure.

So naturally, Premier Kathleen Wynne is doubling down on the idea.

In the latest initiative announced by her Liberal government last week, Ontario is going to spend $20 million to install 500 charging stations for electric vehicles across the province.

There are currently 7,000 electric vehicles on the road in all of Ontario compared to annual car sales of about 284,000.

It's not hard to figure out why.

Electric vehicles are expensive and have limited range, which decreases in cold weather.

That's why they've been a flop in Ontario, even with the Wynne government offering consumers up to $14,000 in subsidies to buy them, plus up to $1,000 to install a home charging system and now, free electricity to charge them overnight at home for four years, beginning in 2017.

Under this subsidy program, as reported by CBC News, Ontario taxpayers recently paid five millionaires an average of $5,538 each towards their purchase of the Porsche 918 Spyder, which retails for about $1.1 million and is one of the most expensive cars ever made.

The government has since limited the subsidy program to electric cars costing up to $150,000, meaning average taxpayers are still subsidizing rich people for buying electric cars most can't afford.

The money for all this is coming from the $1.9 billion annually in new revenue the Liberal government predicts it will take from taxpayers and consumers starting next year, through the imposition of its carbon pricing cap-and-trade plan.

The cap-and-trade market, which buys and sells carbon credits, recently crashed in California and Quebec, delivering only 11% of the revenues those governments expected from their latest auction. Ontario is partnering with California and Quebec in launching cap-and-trade.

Because there are so few electric cars, subsidizing them is an absurdly expensive way of lowering industrial greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change.

The Wynne government is repeating the same mistake that infects so much of its economic policy.

It's using public money to arbitrarily pick winners and losers in the private sector when it comes to its so-called climate change initiatives.

This philosophy led directly to the Liberals' wind and solar power fiasco, which two Ontario auditors general have criticized for adding billions of dollars to the hydro bills of Ontarians for generations to come.

To add insult to injury, wind and solar power haven't replaced coal-fired electricity as the Liberals suggest.

That was achieved by relying on conventional nuclear power, which is emissions free, and natural gas, which burns at about half the carbon intensity of coal.

But there too, the Wynne government keeps doubling down, with our money, on its failed policies of the past.

Source: Wynne zaps taxpayers with electric car costs