Perth-Wellington MPP Randy Pettapiece hit the nail on the head this week with his statement in the legislature criticizing the on-going boondoggle of the Ontario government’s Drive Clean program.
“We know a wasteful, ineffective and aggravating government program when we see it. That’s exactly what we have in the Drive Clean program,” stated Pettapiece.
We couldn’t agree more.
The program has been fraught with problems since it’s inception in 1999 and has long been criticized for widely varying test results uncovered through media studies which indicate, among other issues, that the same car can often fail a test at one garage and pass at another, without any intervening work being done on the vehicle.
The program is also applied inequitably around the province, with largely rural counties like Wellington and Perth part of the testing area, while drivers of light-duty vehicles in neighbouring Grey and Bruce are spared the aggravation. The government contends this is due to efforts to focus on areas with a large concentration of vehicles, which is ridiculous given that you’re subject to Drive Clean if you live in Kenilworth or Rothsay, but not if your address is in Owen Sound or Kincardine.
All of Northern Ontario is also exempt, even though it doesn’t matter if you’re spewing pollution in Alma or the Arctic in terms of the impact of emissions on global climatic issues.
As Pettapiece also pointed out, new testing procedures introduced in January utilize a vehicle’s own on-board diagnostics computer, rather than a test of tail pipe emissions.
Anyone who has ever spent hundreds of dollars on diagnostic time and unnecessary repairs while a mechanic attempts to discover the true reason their check engine light has come on will recognize the folly of this approach. Quite often, the problem is with the computer sensors themselves, rather than anything actually being wrong with the engine or emissions. Under the new system, even repairs that might improve the emission performance of a vehicle, will force a Drive Clean fail if the engine code has been recently cleared.
In order to reset a vehicle’s computer monitoring system, instructions posted on the Drive Clean website recommend first parking your vehicle for eight hours, followed by a 2.5 minute drive with the air conditioner and rear defroster on, then 10 minutes of highway driving and another 20 minutes on the road in “stop and go traffic” (the latter trickier to find in Clifford than in Cambridge).
So many vehicles are showing up unready to take the tests, the government has created a new category of “readiness conditional pass” for dealers or individuals who are trying to sell vehicles in a timely fashion. In this case, Drive Test operators resort to the traditional tail pipe test, which actually measures the content of a vehicle’s emissions, rather than testing the functionality of its on-board computer system. So why did we change the test in the first place?
While he fails to mention that Drive Clean was both introduced and later expanded to southwestern Ontario by a Conservative government, Pettapiece is correct to point out Ontario’s auditor general specifically warned the Liberals not to implement the new test until the technical problems were resolved.
They ignored the advice and now drivers are paying the price, both literally and figuratively.
