Over 200 Canadian car dealers are crying foul after Elon Musk's Tesla claimed tens of millions of dollars worth of rebates mere days before the government shut down a subsidy program in January.As the Toronto Star reported last week, the dealers are now an estimated $6.91 million out of pocket after having to provide rebates to over 2,000 customers hoping to be reimbursed.The Incentives for Zero-Emission Vehicles (iZEV) Program was launched by the federal government department Transport Canada in 2019, and offered up to roughly $3,500 at the point of sale to Canadian EV and plug-in hybrid buyers.But with the resignation of former prime minister Justin Trudeau, the ensuing political chaos led to Transport Canada informing dealerships on January 10 that the program would run out of money well before its original termination date at the end of March, per the Star. (Trudeau's replacement, prime minister Mark Carney, is expected to renew the program.)On the program's final weekend, though, a massive surge of claims from just four Tesla outlets in the country raised alarm bells. A single dealership in Quebec City claimed that it had sold more than 4,000 EVs in a single weekend, asking for over $13 million in public subsidies, according to the newspaper's reporting last week.As experts have since pointed out, there's a good chance the EV maker heavily fudged the numbers. But it remains to be seen whether Tesla actually broke the law or abused a system that was ironically designed to drum up some much-needed demand.The four Tesla-run showrooms claimed a total of 8,653 EV sales in just 72 hours and asked for almost $30 million in rebates."Tesla had a run on the bank," Canadian Automobile Dealers Association spokesperson Huw Williams told the Star. "Somehow, Tesla gamed the system. What we cant figure out is how this could have happened without setting off alarm bells."The number of sales, in particular, appeared extremely suspicious to officials. Many of the showrooms can't physically hold even a fraction of the number of cars they claimed to have sold in less than a day, as the newspaper reports.Sure, the end of the incentive program was expected to result in a spike in the number of sales but this is far and beyond what anybody expected.One possibility is that the dealerships filed the rebates in massive, backdated batches, which would still raise plenty of eyebrows."Tesla didnt sell those cars that weekend," one Transport Canada official told the Star.It's worth noting that Tesla CEO Elon Musk's vitriolic behavior and his close chum president Donald Trump's persistent stigmatizing of Canada and his entirely unprompted trade war targeting the country have sent sales plummeting there. According to the National Post, sales in the country crashed a whopping 70 percent between December 2024 and January 2025.The situation has gotten so desperate for the EV makerthat even Trump put on his best performance as a Tesla car salesman this week, by making a bizarre sales pitch alongside Musk in front of the White House.Meanwhile, Canadian transport minister Anita Anand told the Star that the situation was "unacceptable" and that she has asked the "department that is responsible for administering this program to provide me with detailed and complete information."It remains unclear whether Tesla broke any laws and we'll likely have to wait for Transport Canada to conclude its investigation before we can draw any conclusions but given the glaring sales numbers, it's not a stretch to wonder if something dodgywas afoot.The independent dealers affected by the surge are still waiting to be reimbursed, and Tesla hasn't responded to the Star's requests for comment.More on Tesla: Trump Says It's "Illegal" to Boycott TeslaShare This Article