Did beleaguered Tesla defraud Canadians with bogus sales claims?

This week is a big one for Tesla: it is supposed to reveal its global sales performance (or, more accurately, its production and delivery data) for the March quarter on Wednesday, US time. Sales of the cars so closely associated with reichsleiter Musk have been collapsing across global markets since he closely allied himself with Donald Trump. Handily, today is also “liberation day” for Trump, so the company’s performance might be swamped by bigger news about tariffs.

But there’s a looming problem in Canada, which last week permanently banned Tesla from the country’s electric vehicle rebate scheme in retaliation for Trump’s economic assault on the country. Tesla is also now facing fraud allegations, after four of the company’s stores in that country claimed millions of dollars in rebates in just one day in January. Up until Trump’s reelection and Musk becoming the poster child for the regime of the mad king, Tesla deliveries in Canada had boomed, hitting a peak of 46,000 units in 2024.



Each of those sales was eligible for a federal C$5,000 (A$5,600) point-of-sale rebate, in addition to rebates offered by individual provinces. So successful was the federal scheme that it has now been stopped because it exhausted the funds estimated by the government. It will be extended once new money is allocated if the governing Liberals under new leader, Mark Carney, are returned to power in the Canadian election on April 28 — a possibility that seemed absurd just a couple of months ago but which has now become very real due to Canadians’ rage against Trump.

If the scheme is re-funded, Teslas will not be eligible. The Canadian media has reported that the final weekend in January netted the company more than $C43 million in Canadian rebates — over half of the program’s remaining budget. The program was scheduled to operate through mid-March, but with that last blast of Tesla rebate requests, the scheme’s cash reserves were gone.

The Canadian Auto Dealers Association is complaining that this left some 2,300 cars sold by non-Tesla dealers with unreimbursed rebates. “The dealers gave their customers the $5,000 rebate from the point of sale, but the program had run out of money and ended over the course of the weekend when government offices were closed, sticking the dealership collective with about $10 million in broken promises. These dealers, in good faith, gave customers the money for a program that is always refunded.

They shouldn’t be left making a payment on behalf of the government of Canada.” The association reckons Tesla “gamed the system.” According to a report from the Toronto Star , four Tesla locations — Tesla owns all its dealerships, unlike normal car retailers — claimed to have sold 8,653 electric vehicles in the last three days of the rebate, then filed for $C43.

1 million in rebates. Tesla’s Quebec City dealership by itself filed more than 2,500 rebates in a single day and 4,000 over the weekend. Problem is, the dealership can hold only a few hundred cars — and the company needs to have delivered the vehicle to file the rebate.

People are questioning whether Tesla could have actually delivered the cars when it says it did. “There’s no way they delivered or sold that many cars in a weekend. They cleared everyone else out,” one Ontario dealer said.

Canadians joined in a global day of protest aimed at Tesla over the weekend. British Columbia and other provincial governments and the city of Toronto have banned Tesla chargers from their EV charging rebate scheme. Canadian politicians are facing calls to go much further: to essentially ban the company in Canada altogether.

The UK government is mulling a ban on Tesla from benefiting from UK EV rebate schemes. In France, Tesla sales in March fell 36% to their lowest level since 2021. Sales slumped 64% to just 911 in Sweden, where the company has been embroiled in a labour dispute.

In Denmark, registrations totalled 593, down 65.6%, while they fell by 61% to 1,536 in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, far-right militia Proud Boys are showing up at dealerships in the US with their own counter-protest or “Tesla shield”, as they call it.

Perhaps they should just rename it the People’s Car and be done with it. Have something to say about this article? Write to us at [email protected].

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