As part of their provincial budget released earlier this week, the Saskatchewan Government announced that they would be adding a $150 yearly tax to owners of electric vehicles around the province that would contribute to the highway maintenance. The reasoning given is because electric vehicles don't contribute to the provincial fuel tax, but the Saskatchewan Electric Vehicle Association (SEVA) thinks this isn't the right time to add another cost towards owning an electric vehicle.

Mark Kroeker from Estevan is a member of the board for the SEVA, and while there is places in the world that are having success with a minor tax on EVs, he says that the priority right now should be incentivizing people to buy electric vehicles, not the opposite.

"The provincial government keeps saying, California has one of these and it works. Yes, but California has 700,000 EVs on their roads for one, and they have heavily incentivized people to buy EVs there as well, as much as $10,000 off the price of buying a vehicle."

Kroeker isn't upset that the government wants them to pay their dues as part of the tax, and he isn't opposed to the idea outright. Instead of putting the fee outright on just being an owner of an EV, he believes a tweak in how the province collects that money would be better suited.

"I'm not personally against this fee. I have no problem paying it. It's still cheaper to own EV and operate one than paying this with this $150 fee. However, I think the way they implemented it was kind of incorrect. Maybe putting it on the charging stations around the province, that way it's a little more similar to the gas tax that people pay at the pump and you pay per use, not just some flat rate that is randomly decided as fair."

That said, SEVA does look at this move as a step backwards in reducing emissions. In the last time we spoke about EVs, Kroeker stated that using EVs does still contribute to supporting clean oil, gas, and coal power generation as it still uses that energy to power their vehicle, and with provinces such as Alberta even doing more to support EV drivers than Saskatchewan, it's not a good look for the province in comparison.

"This $150 applies to less than 1% of the cars in Saskatchewan. It will represent about $60,000 to the provincial government as we have less than 500 cars in the province. We're the first jurisdiction in Canada to adopt such a law or tax, and when all the other provinces, Alberta, PEI, BC, Ontario, Quebec, just to name a few off top my head, are all introducing incentives to purchase EVs instead of taxing them."