Friday, July 17, 2009 2:56 PM
He looked green, all right
Adam Radwanski
The reaction to the Ontario government's subsidy for electric cars has been, to put it mildly, less than euphoric. That may have been inevitable - a lot of people don't like this level of government intervention in the market - but it also owes to an unusually sloppy roll-out by Dalton McGuinty.
Whatever his other merits, McGuinty is normally about as disciplined as politicians get. But in this instance, he evidently didn't do the necessary advance work with auto manufacturers not named General Motors, which meant a seething reaction from Toyota and Honda. He was also weirdly vague about his commitment, giving the impression that the province would be offering rebates on electric cars indefinitely. As a result, industry analysis quickly popped up pegging the eventual cost at $3-billion - a prohibitively large sum.
It now looks like the rebate won't cost anything near that. According to the Premier's office, the rebate will end at 10,000 vehicles or in 2015 - whichever comes first. That means the maximum cost of the rebate will be $100,000,000 - much less of a prohibitive sum. But it's the $3-billion number that got out first, and created early impressions that will be hard to shake.
Those early impressions were hindered even further by the government's lack of success in communicating why it's offering the rebate. Very few of the reports have noted that very similar funds are offered by the British, American and Quebec governments - a point McGuinty should have been stressing to make clear that Ontario needs to be competitive.
Finally, there was the staging of the announcement itself. By doing it at a GM dealership, McGuinty only added to the impression that he was playing favourites with a company the government has invested in, raising a great deal of skepticism about the government's claim to be motivated by environmental and broader economic aims.
Granted, it's the middle of summer, and nobody's totally on their game this time of year. But considering that this policy - by the government's own account - is largely about sending a message, you'd think more care would have been taken with how that message was delivered.
