The following is a guest post from Dale Leier. Dale is the Chief Revenue Officer for DPL Consulting in Surrey, B.C.

B.C.’s clean-vehicle subsidy program hits the ditch at a high rate of speed. Thank goodness.  

This wasn’t a headline in any major newspaper, but it should have been.

In a sop to tree-leaning voters who will never vote B.C. Liberal under any circumstances anyway, the Liberals have promised to subsidize anyone foolish enough to buy a supposedly cleaner, yet uneconomical and impractical, “green” machine.

For those who haven’t been following this particular case of fiscal mismanagement closely, a brief primer is in order:

1. Hybrid and electric vehicles do not have inherently lower carbon footprints, once the total life-cycle of the product is factored in. This is especially the case in B.C., where we frequently purchase surplus power from Alberta generated by coal—often coal mined in B.C. itself.
2. Even if these vehicles did have lower lifetime emissions, the program is a canard. This is because it consists of collecting money from taxpayers who have neither the need, desire, or budget to afford a new “clean fuel” vehicle, and forcing them to subsidize the purchases by other taxpayers busily one-upping the Joneses. 

Cue the hue and cry from the social engineers who decry all those ignoramuses for constantly exercising their democratic freedoms in making “wrong decisions.” The fact is that if clean vehicles were such great ideas, there would be no need to incentivize buyers with subsidies to offset the obvious inadequacies of these vehicles. 

So, why in the world would any government trying to get re-elected try such a cynical approach to bribing voters? As always, it’s the part of the iceberg you don’t see that matters. Consider this: when the B.C. New Car Dealers Association starts crying the blues, you know it’s the loss of green that is making their faces turn red. According to the Association, consumers simply need more time to change their errant ways, in effect admitting the $5,000 subsidy being handed out to every hybrid buyer is not enough to bridge the perceived deficiency in value. 

Maybe the Association is overlooking something many B.C. taxpayers already know. There is something worse than rubbing your neighbours’ noses in the fact that you can afford a newer car and they can’t: the fact that your new car was partly paid for by taxes on the tips earned by a single mother holding down two waitressing jobs.