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Posted October 23
In one of your recent reports, owners of electric cars mentioned the savings they achieve. We all know that gasoline is super taxed by governments. When will governments recover these missing taxes?
Michele Lamarre
Your question is timely: the Government of Quebec and the Metropolitan Community of Montreal (CMM) are looking into the subject.
The CMM, which brings together the 82 cities of the greater Montreal region, believes that there is an “urgency” to impose a kilometer tax to finance public transport. The principle of a kilometer tax: you pay a tax according to the distance traveled by your car. The CMM will soon do a feasibility study of such a tax based on the example of Brussels, our colleague Henri Ouellette-Vézina wrote last week.
For its part, the Department of Transportation is studying six ways to replace the current gasoline tax with other taxes for motorists, wrote The Journal of Montreal recently. Among these options: a kilometer tax, a tax on the purchase or use of polluting vehicles, and a charging tax for electric vehicles.
Don’t expect any changes over the next four years: the Legault government has double-locked the door on new taxes for motorists. “We project ourselves in 15, 20 years by saying: if we have a target of 100% green vehicles in 2035, how are we going to finance our new infrastructures”, said the Minister of Transport François Bonnardel (before the cabinet reshuffle), for explain the exercise of his ministry. It is also an important and essential exercise.
Ecotaxation is very useful. We use it to encourage people to change their behavior and to be greener. It’s a very good thing that taxpayers with a bigger carbon footprint are paying more. But in the long term, when behaviors have changed, we will have to maintain a tax base to fund our public goods and services.
Fuel taxes alone represent $2.1 billion in revenue for the Quebec government in 2021-2022, and approximately $1.1 billion for the federal government (the share for Quebec motorists)1. For Quebec, the fuel tax represents about 2% of its own-source revenue, and 1.5% of its total revenue (including federal transfers).
29.20 cents
In Quebec, fuel taxes represent 29.20 cents per liter (19.2 cents per liter for the provincial, 10 cents per liter for the federal). In some cities (such as Montreal), 3 cents per liter is added to finance public transport, to arrive at a total of 32.20 cents per litre. In addition to this amount, about 5 cents per liter goes to the Carbon Exchange.
If all of Quebec switched to electric cars with the wave of a magic wand tomorrow morning, we would significantly reduce our CO emissions.2 (- 18 million tonnes of CO2 per year). We would thus go from 84 to 66 million tonnes of CO2 per year, while the official target of Quebec is 54 million tons of CO2 in 2030.
On the fiscal level, Quebec would also lose these 2.1 billion in revenues which finance roads, schools, hospitals.
That said, strictly fiscally speaking, the situation is not that urgent for Quebec.
Electric vehicles are 10 times more numerous on our roads than five years ago (13,000 electric vehicles in 2016, 129,300 in 2021). But it remains (unfortunately) a marginal phenomenon: they currently represent 1.8% of the automobile fleet in Quebec. We repeat: only 1.8%. By adding hybrid vehicles, we arrive at 3.0%.
Quebec is therefore not about to lose all the money from its fuel tax.
When that happens, the most logical thing would be to replace the fuel tax with a kilometer tax. In the meantime, to promote the electrification of transport, we can also introduce a lower kilometer tax for electric vehicles.
In the long term, Quebec will have to continue financing the maintenance and construction of roads. “The advantage of a kilometer tax is that it would make it possible to work on reducing travel,” says Professor Pierre-Olivier Pineau, holder of the Chair in Energy Sector Management at HEC Montreal. “We would transfer to other modes of transport such as public transport and active transport. »
A question in closing: do motorists already pay for the roads? Not quite.
In 2017, Quebec motorists paid 4.8 billion per year to the various governments in taxes specific to the automobile (gasoline taxes, driver’s license, tolls). It cost 5.5 billion in Quebec and the cities for the roads, according to the calculations of Jean-Philippe Meloche, professor of urban planning at the University of Montreal and researcher at CIRANO.
To balance the budget, Quebec drew about 800 million from its consolidated fund, financed by all taxpayers.
1: The provincial amount also includes the fuel tax on other means of transportation (eg the plane), but the car accounts for the vast majority of this amount. The federal amount is an estimate based on the provincial amount.