Failing the Grade

There is no doubt about it, Ontario’s Drive Clean emissions testing program has taken its fair share of lumps over the five years that it has been in operation. Then, just for good measure, it received a great big whup upside the head from the provincial auditor at the end of November. Or did it?

“Why Drive Clean is beyond repair” read the headline in a Toronto Star comment by Paul Connix, a Montreal-based opponent to emissions inspection programs, though he was not clearly identified as such.

There were other slightly more sober comments on the findings of the auditor, but the best phraseology comes courtesy of the Canadian Press: “Ontario’s Drive Clean program is riddled with fraud.” That phrase was printed in dozens of papers across the country and on-line, and reported verbatim on television and radio. Millions upon millions of people saw, heard, and read the sentiment.

They can be forgiven for thinking that the auditor had found that Ontario’s emissions testing program was without merit, without controls, that the province was asleep at the switch, or all of the above.

What the auditor did discover was that 3,200 Drive Clean certificates had been duplicated more than five times, with one having been duplicated some 400 times. He also found that of those vehicles which had failed the initial test and then been repaired within the repair cost limit structure, nearly half generated worse numbers on the second test than on the first.

As a result of the duplicate certificates, as many as 50,000 vehicles were left on the road with some type of suspect emissions certification. This is not the same as saying that they are all vast polluters, or that there is necessarily fraud at stake in all, as some inspection systems reset when they were rebooted. And there were a number of cases where license offices overrode lockouts on the licensing database to let certificates through. The fact is that most of the computer-related problems that made this possible are already fixed.

Granted, there is probably some fraud in there, with some 137 investigations ongoing by Drive Clean’s investigation branch, and they have asked the Ontario Provincial Police to consider investigating. Regardless of whether the OPP decides to or not, I’ll bet someone is going to want to talk to the source of those 400 duplicate numbers. In any case, the issue is really more about the licensing offices and the individuals manning them than it is about the Drive Clean testing.

Still, with 2.4 million vehicles being tested every year, the total number of questionable certificates equates to two percent, hardly constituting a “riddling” with fraud.

Far more serious than passing vehicles that should have failed, though, is the fact that nearly half the repairs that were done to the failing vehicles made them worse. Honest.

This speaks to a serious issue of technical competency in the bays, the desire to perform the right repairs, integrity of shop management, and attention to detail, as well as some issues surrounding the program’s shortcomings.

While the $450 limit on repairs after failing a test does mean that proper repairs can’t be effected in all cases, it is also true that technicians aren’t being trained to take the time to diagnose problems and repair them properly. And shop owners are driving them too hard to find the quick solution. And yes, some shop owners step over the line into fraud.

It is difficult to know how much of these cases are a result of each of these factors, but it is yet another example of why things must change at the shop level, and not just in Ontario.

Good jobbers with good shops owe it to the market to ensure that they offer the right technician training and that they fight for access to the right information. And you owe it to the legitimate operators and your neighbours to ensure that fraudulent operators are exposed. And you owe it to everyone to fight for inspection programs that encourage proper repairs, not just arbitrary parts replacement.

Anything less makes us all look bad.