The answer is not giving people 83 dollar monthly rebates vs 250 dollar quarterly rebates.
What are you more likely to notice and remember from your bank statement, a monthly deposit or a quarterly deposit? My family got $213.5 every quarter last year. I'd rather they take $3 for transaction fees and paid us $52.63 per month.
The issue is you have to make electric vehicles cheaper for the public, and build out the charging infrastructure.
EV development is entirely up to industry. The Liberals should have come out of the gate early with mandates, to force supply, and should have had larger rebates with drawdown dates. $5k was just too little when new EVs were averaging $70k and had a year long wait. They also did almost nothing on the infrastructure.
What they should have done:
-GST/HST holiday till 2035 on all electrified transport, from E-bikes to EVs to hybrids.
-$8k rebate in 2022 that goes down by $1k per year to $0 in 2030.
-Partnership with large grocery chains forv lots of fast chargers at grocery stores and malls. Everybody uses grocery stores and building chargers at 3000 stores is easier than trying to connect 30 000 apartment and condo buildings.
They got going on bus electrification. But I wish they had been way more aggressive on this. It's something that a lot of smaller cities and suburbs can really benefit from. They should have been way more aggressive on funding bus electrification infrastructure and more generous on BEB grants. Instead, they tried to run these complex financing schemes through the infrastructure bank. Those make sense financially. But are way too slow politically.
Finally, not using climate as an excuse to get shovels in the ground on HSR was a major mistake. In every country, they always complain about the cost of HSR. But once built, it becomes a major symbol of progress and a source of pride. Instead they had the same waffling on it as the Wynne Liberals on GO RER.
In the end, their over reliance on the carbon tax and their inability to pursue more visible and tangible climate policy will have contributed to their defeat.
