Electric vehicle rebate among staff proposals to speed up Toronto’s target to become a carbon neutral city, but not within the current fiscal plan, a senior city official said today.
“We’ve already started the process of going from an electric vehicle purchase tax to a full carbon and vehicle efficiency rebate program and we look forward to continuing to drive down emissions and driving down emissions costs with the rebate program,” said Mayor John Tory. “Our focus is on the goal of a zero emissions city by 2050, and that’s the main reason why we’ve set down targets. But we’re not just going from a zero emissions city to a 100% zero emissions city. We’re going on a path to decarbonize our transportation system from a zero emissions transportation system to a 100% zero emissions transportation system.”
Tory said at the same time that Toronto has a long way to go before its 2020 goal of zero emissions is attained. “We’re going to put Toronto on a zero emissions growth trajectory through a combination of the vehicle efficiency rebate program and the vehicle purchase tax and a whole bunch of other things that we’re doing,” Tory said.
The vehicle purchase tax, which is currently proposed to rise to $23 per week in 2020, would be expected to help the city meet its target of becoming a zero-emissions city by 2050. Currently, about 28 per cent of Toronto’s greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to road transportation at a cost of $23.45 million a year, according to Toronto-based Ryerson University.
The rebate will be allocated on a per vehicle basis.
City staff are looking to allocate the first $1.4 million per vehicle. That would mean about 2,950 zero-emissions vehicles have been purchased so far. About three-quarters of the rebate will be distributed through the vehicle purchase tax.
Tory said that the rebate won’t have any impact on the City of Toronto’s current vehicle purchasing budget, which is set to top out at $3 billion by 2020.
“I think we all accept that in order to achieve that goal, we’ve gotta do a whole bunch of other things as well,” Tory said. “The vehicle purchase tax is just one of those things, one of those pieces that we’ve laid out that, while