Liberals cut Drive Clean fee

(Update)

Ontario’s drive clean program is going to change, slightly. The province announcing Tuesday it will soon reduce the fee for emissions testing by five dollars. But many say the government shouldn’t cut the cost, but instead scrap the program altogether.

It was meant to curb emissions, some say that drive clean is just blowing smoke.

Jason Hunt at Beech Motorworks completes several tests per week. Their shop was the first garage in Ontario to implement drive clean back in 1999. They say that it was effective back then, but now it’s taking time away from more important work: “I personally think it should be just thrown out the window really.”

Clint Giles is the Manager: “I think it did a lot of good in the first 2 or 3 years, and in the last 10, whatever it’s been, very little.”

The program does make money for the government. It is supposed to be non-profit, but drive clean will have an estimated $50 million dollar surplus by 2018. Tuesday at Queen’s Park Environment Minister Jim Badley announced that they would reduce the fee from $35 dollars down to $30 per test by April first, ending the surplus but not the revenue: “You pay HST on top of everything, bizzare as it might seem.”

The Minster said they will not scrap the program because it is effective in curbing pollution. In December of last year, then Auditor General Jim McCarter said that better cars and cleaner fuel are more responsible for the reduction of pollution over the past 15 years.

It’s actually gotten to the point where 95% of cars who are tested in Ontario pass easily and those who do fail its usually because the check engine light is on, not because of what’s coming out of the tail pipe.

Tests of more recent vehicles are showing emissions far better than drive clean standards.

Giles said: “A lot of the vehicles were coming up zero’s across the board. They’re running that clean that there’s zero emissions coming out of the car.”

In the past year Beech has been forced to install new drive clean equipment or risk losing business. In recent months, British Columbia and 6 regions in the U.S. have each decided to scrap their versions of drive clean, but here in Ontario, the contract goes until at least 2020.