Electric vehicle rebate among staff proposals to speed up Toronto’s target to become a carbon neutral city
Electric vehicle rebate among staff proposals to speed up Toronto’s target to become a carbon neutral city
The city of Toronto has a lot on its plate during an election year: a mayoral race, the biggest ever vote in the city’s history — for the first time ever — for a non-Conservative candidate, and the announcement of a massive new infrastructure fund. So, when the city was invited to host an electric vehicle rebate event, they leapt at the chance.
It was also a chance for the city to do something they had wanted to do for a while: to go into high gear, create a community vehicle rebate program in Toronto for electric vehicles. It was also a chance to try out something they had not done before: a formal, organized way to get electric vehicle rebate money to people right away.
“It’s really timely to put together a program like this,” says Michael Anderman, chair of the Torontos Electric Vehicle Rebate program. “This city needs to change and our plan has had to take into account the fact that we’re not going to change our climate, but we can change our lifestyles.”
Anderman says that in the past, when people tried to use the rebate program, they had to go through a lot of paperwork, fill out a long questionnaire and then get their rebate money from different departments — some of which did not have the resources to distribute money immediately as a result.
“It’s just overwhelming,” says Anderman. “It’s one of those things that was never really in the city’s toolbox. It’s kind of like a catch-22: We always wanted to do something, but did we always want something?”
In 2014, the City of Toronto was awarded a $5 million grant from the California Energy Commission (CEC) to pilot the program, and they have been busy in the last three years perfecting it.
The first big change since 2013 was when Anderman left the rebate program to work on the electric vehicle rebate program. He had been with the rebate since 2010, when he took on the job full time.