Car dealers today want reimbursement for EVs sold under old rebate program on new launches
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The reborn federal electric vehicle (EV) rebate program launches today, but some auto dealers in Canada say they’re still thousands of dollars short of previous rebates.
Canadians can now get up to $5,000 in government rebates on the purchase of an EV priced under $50,000. Plug-in hybrids will be eligible for a $2,500 subsidy.
The return of the popular program is being welcomed by car dealerships. But some of them have become cautious as the government’s portal for submitting reimbursement claims will not be launched until April.
“It’s a little concerning,” said Dean Woods, sales manager of a Kia dealership in Grimsby, Ontario. “Obviously what’s happening has raised my horns a little bit higher, and I’ll be on top of every claim, just because I don’t trust the system anymore.”
Woods said his dealership is out of the old program $20,000 after Transport Canada refused to reimburse it for rebates applied to EVs it sold.
The cars were sold in 2024, but the dealership’s office manager did not notice that they had not been reimbursed by the government until a month earlier. Woods wrote to Transport Canada asking for reimbursement, but the federal department refused because the program had ended a year earlier.
Canada’s auto industry is betting the government’s EV rebate revival will help accelerate slowing electric vehicle sales, although some consumers are still concerned about limited range and charging infrastructure.
When Woods pressed Transport Canada further to provide documentation to support the claims, it acknowledged it was an error in the submission form.
“Therefore, you never received confirmation of the claim number for these four submissions and it was never received by the iZEV program,” a Transport Canada official said in a letter to Woods shared with The Canadian Press last month.
“If the program was still active, you could resubmit claims, however, since the program is now closed, resubmission or reimbursement is no longer possible.”
Under both the old and new EV incentive programs, dealerships have to apply the $5,000 rebate directly at the point of purchase, then send a claim to the government for reimbursement.
Hugh Williams, a spokesman for the Canadian Automobile Dealers Association, said the process amounts to dealerships “spending money on behalf of the federal government, which has a huge treasury.”
“Dealers are small, independent businesses, and whenever historical problems have occurred, Transport Canada has not always shown the flexibility to resolve the problem,” he said.
Williams could not say how many other dealerships are still waiting for reimbursement from the federal government.
“We’ve had some dealers bring us cases to look at and submit to Transport Canada, which we’ve done, and after they’ve been rejected we’ve been rejected as well,” he said.
“And we have other people who have talked to us who are unsure whether they will even surrender, they feel they have no hope of getting paid.”
Williams said now that the government has relaunched an incentive program and set aside $2.3 billion for it, Transport Canada should reimburse those still waiting for completion.
“Let’s start this in good faith. Get the people, the dealers – who fronted the money for consumers – paid, and let’s move forward together to bring EVs across the country.”
The first EV rebate program ran between 2019 and 2025. The government stopped it in January 2025 after the funds were exhausted.
In a statement, Transport Canada said it temporarily reopened the rebate program for a month last summer to allow dealerships to submit claims that have not yet been paid.
“All eligible claims for reimbursement that were submitted to Transport Canada – either before the program pause or during the temporary administrative window – have been paid,” said department spokesperson Flavio Nino.
The department did not immediately respond to a follow-up question about cases where there were errors in the submitted forms that were preventing claims from being submitted.
