Tesla sales in Canada under scrutiny, NY Times reports

As in many places around the world, Tesla (TSLA) 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 about $30M worth of government subsidies under a program just before it expired, The New York Times’ Ian Austen reports. 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.”