Tesla Dealers Claimed They Sold 8,653 Cars in 3 Days in Canada. Did They?

Canada|Four Tesla Dealers Said They Sold 8,653 Cars in 3 Days in Canada. Did They?

As in many places around the world, Tesla sales in Canada have been falling for months, an apparent reaction to Elon Musk’s outsize role in the Trump administration and his repeated denigration of Canadian sovereignty.

Yet somehow, four Tesla- owned dealerships reported to the Canadian government that they sold an astonishing 8,653 cars during a single weekend in January — enough to qualify for 43 million Canadian dollars’ (about $30 million) worth of government subsidies under a program just before it expired.

Now the Canadian government wants to know exactly how the electric carmaker managed to move two cars a minute off its lots — a rate that assumes those four dealers had stayed open 24 hours from Jan. 10 to Jan. 12.

Those payments were frozen this month after Mark Carney became Canada’s prime minister and named a new transport minister who ordered officials “to fully examine each claim individually and determine whether all are eligible and valid.” The minister, Chrystia Freeland, said that “no payments will be made until we are confident that the claims are valid.”

The subsidy program has expired, but Ms. Freeland, taking aim at the Trump administration, said that if there was a new one, Teslas would not be eligible “so long as the illegitimate and illegal U.S. tariffs are imposed against Canada.”

Tesla’s gain was a loss for some of its competitors.

The company’s breathtaking flurry of sales claims for some of its dealers in Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec drained funds from the government’s rebate program, bringing it to a close before its scheduled March 31 end date. As a result, the Canadian Automobile Dealers Association estimates, 225 dealers selling other brands were unable to claim about 10 million in Canadian dollars, putting some of them in financial peril.