Canada

Collaborators

You mean Kitchener

No they claimed thousands of sales in one weekend.

Dealerships are commission environments. They don't pay their people until that rebate comes through.

At times they'll hold back one or two sales to apply for the rebate at the beginning of the next month. This happens when a dealership has had a particularly good month and has already hit its quota to get its incentive bonus from Ford/Chrysler/Etc... so they might as well bank them for the next month.

But never in a million years would they hold back $56000 in rebates. Their salesmen would riot.

Source: Slogged in that hellpit of a career for two years before getting out.

That's their claim, yes. I'm skeptical personally, but that's what the investigation is for.

The OP article is paywalled, so I can't read it, but this one expands more on the issue.

For instance, "four Tesla stores claimed roughly 8,600 sales in one weekend from January 10 through 12, just hours after the feds announced the rebate program would be paused when it ran out of money."

Red flag.

"Speaking as a person who once toiled in the dealership environment, this author will say it is not unheard of for the business office to backdate an occasional deal in order to make some sort of quota or qualify for a volume bonus. One or two machines recorded for yesterday instead of today isn’t generally the end of the world.

But the level of alleged chicanery on display at these Tesla stores seems egregious, particularly since it involves massive amounts of money from the public purse."

Very questionable, indeed.

Why would those stores wait to submit those claims, assuming that's the explanation? They risked not getting the rebates at all, and it makes no sense to hold on to thousands of claims like that, regardless.

Then you get this report:

“Keep in mind that Tesla is struggling when it comes to sales in Canada right now,” Carscoops writes. “According to the National Post, deliveries nosedived some 70 percent between December 2024 and January 2025. When the Canadian government announced that it would soon end electric vehicle subsidies, it was expected that Tesla would see a small bump up in sales. However, a giant spike like this is a different ballgame altogether.”

How many red flags do we need?

I hope the findings of the investigation are made available to the public.

Does Tesla have independent dealers in Canada, or is it company owned showrooms like in the US?

If it's the latter like I recall, then that would indicate that Tesla was sitting on them (not random local dealers) and only submitted them at the last moment.